In the News
Heat wave puts nation's power grid under scrutinyCNN
By Jonathan Schienberg
July 20, 2006
NEW YORK (CNN) -- A smothering nationwide heat wave, which caused major power failures and affected transportation centers in New York and California, has also called into question the reliability of the nation's power grid system.
Officials from the Federal Energy Regulatory Commission, an independent agency that regulates the interstate transmission of electricity, attributed power failures that caused disruptions at major airports like Los Angeles International and LaGuardia to a record level of demand for electricity but also to a "chronically underinvested transmission system" that weakens the nations power grid.
"Electricity usage has been creeping up at least two percent per year over the last 30 years due to our love of new technologies," said Bryan Lee, spokesman from the Federal Energy Regulatory Commission. "But the nation's power grid has not been expanded to meet the electricity demands that new technology requires."
Comparing the nation's power grid system to the structure of the nation's highways before President Eisenhower introduced the idea of an interstate highway system, Lee said that there was a strong need to invest in the construction of a high voltage interstate power system.
"We can effectively move power from Oregon to Maine within the current system, but there are so many inefficiencies, Lee said.
"We need to build up the electricity grid so we have a more fluid system that enables the free movement of energy from Oregon to Maine without bottlenecks creating shortages and price spikes the marketplace."
Energy industry representatives said that the recent heat wave led to record levels of energy use across the country, bringing many areas dangerously close a wide spread power outage disasters. "We just squeaked by this time," Lee noted.
In the case of the power failures in New York, the New York Independent System Operator, which is responsible for the operations and transmission of the state's power grid, said that while record levels of power usage were recorded, the grid was not the problem.
"We had enough bulk power supply to meet the high load demand," said NYISO spokesman Ken Klapp. "The power failures in New York City resulted in the distribution phase of the process which Con Edison is responsible for." Klapp said that a strategy utilized to temper exceedingly high levels of demand is called "Demand Response," a method that encourages large businesses in the city that consume a lot of electricity -- such as Macy's and Morgan Stanley -- to reduce the use of non-essential electricity. This in turn allows unused energy to be redistributed back into the market.
"We used Demand Response yesterday from Poughkeepsie down through areas of Long Island to help us to significantly reduce the load demand to prevent power outages," Klapp said.
Reena Russell, chief officer of ConsumerPowerline, a New York based company that works with NYISO to implement the Demand Response strategy, described New York City's power issues as a microcosm of the nation's power grid problems.
"It is not a lack of power issue in this City, but rather a transmission issue," Russell said. " it is harder to build an effective transmission infrastructure in urban areas."
ConsumerPowerline has been helping the City to address power shortages through Demand Response which Russell claims is a faster, cheaper, and cleaner way to provide more energy, ultimately through conservation.
"The national power grid system definitely needs to be built up so that there is better connectivity and regions can share energy," Russell said. "But Demand Response is the perfect compliment that will always enable the system to be much more efficient in times of energy crises."