February 4, 2004—Charles River Research recently issued a second series of papers by a team of utility industry experts offering recommendations to improve the overall reliability and operational performance of the nation’s transmission grid.
The experts recommend practical steps that, in the near term, could prevent the recurrence of the underlying conditions that made the blackout possible. These steps include the following:
- Reforms must acknowledge that the grid was designed and built for entirely different purposes than it is serving today. Focusing only on immediate causes of service interruptions risks even wider grid failure in the future.
- It is urgently necessary to assess the grid for its vulnerability to the consequences of the installation of a fleet of new power plants. These plants have been located opportunistically near existing transmission lines, gas pipelines and on inexpensive, rural land, distant from the changing load centers that they are intended to serve.
- Reliability standards have proven unready for competitive markets. As standards are being revised and reformed to reflect new conditions, we must understand more thoroughly the factors that affect grid availability and develop performance assessments involving both adequate capacity and availability.
- The grid needs better technology, including real-time information, which will enable operators to ensure reliability by reacting immediately to changing power flows, including loop flows, rather than having to react after outages occur.
- RTOs need to be structured in ways that, organizationally, enable them to provide the means to evaluate availability and performance and encourage investment in the grid.
- RTOs should be configured such that control of facilities that are electrically significant to one another are under the same reliability authority; if this is not possible, then robust agreements for inter- RTO coordination must be in place.
- The problem of reactive power must be broadly examined within the context of operating efficiency in transmission. Building on existing engineering practices, key improvements can be advanced by providing detailed estimates of on-line real and reactive power loads on a regional basis.
- There must be immediate development of a better means for scheduling power, region-to-region. Continuing to employ the contract path model clearly undermines reliability.
- he grid operator should take financial responsibility for reliability and its costs, and operate the network under a framework that rewards superior performance and penalizes sub-par operations.
- It is critical that that the design and operation of the grid reflect the interdependencies between engineering and economic considerations. By the same token, each market participant, seller or buyer should take financial responsibility for the costs its decisions impose on the grid, in terms of stability, ancillary services and reliability.
Policy makers must take engineering and economics into account.
Complete copies of the experts’ reports and credentials are available from Charles River Research Corporation.
