September 15, 2006

National pastime

During every summer hot enough to break peak demand records, the rhetoric heats up as well, with calls to rid the U.S. bulk-power system of bottlenecks. As the eternal optimist, I see large transmission projects showing signs of life and grid reliability improving. But not everyone is happy about that. Let me explain.

 

If you thought temperatures were a bit higher than normal earlier this year, you were right. According to the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration, the first six months of 2006 were the warmest in the U.S. since 1895, the year recordkeeping began. Over a three-day period in mid-July, seven regional grid operators broke records for peak demand set a year ago (see Global Monitor). Demand peaks continue to rise more quickly than capacity can be added or customers can be convinced to conserve. For many regions, the only two cost-effective ways to close the gap are to remove transmission constraints or bring in power from the few oversupplied regions that still exist.

Mind the gap

With summer outages now as distinctively American as baseball, Washington has found it politically expedient to take up the call for reliability. The Energy Policy Act of 2005 (EPAct) contained provisions that promise to ease congestion on the patchwork U.S. transmission and distribution system and thereby improve service to ratepayers. One called for the creation of an electric reliability organization (ERO) to develop and enforce mandatory reliability rules for the bulk-power system (see feature story) under the aegis of the Federal Energy Regulatory Commission (FERC). Few were surprised when FERC installed the North American Electric Reliability Council (NERC) as the nation's first ERO this July; after all, NERC has been promulgating voluntary reliability standards for almost 40 years.

In the information age, interrupted electricity service isn't merely an inconvenience; it's a threat to national economic security, which is why the ERO enjoys universal support. I'm sure NERC's experienced engineers realize that "small ball"—improving transmission control centers, upgrading operator training requirements, and giving grid operators better planning tools—is a better strategy for beefing up reliability than "managing for the three-run homer," as Earl Weaver did with the Baltimore Orioles during the 1970s and 1980s. I expect grid reliability will slowly increase over time once all the independent system operators and regional transmission organizations are using the same game plan.

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