Recipe for better teaming on outages

Three parts to this exciting new recipe. Mix together:

1. A large electric utility
2. A DOD service (or other large consumers)
3. Social network service

In this case, a major power outage became an opportunity for teaming, and here the local Navy base gets kudos for lowering demand, something that helped San Diego Gas & Electric restore power to all its customers in very short order.

Twitter facilitated comms in the early phases of the outage, and here, it enabled a high profile attaboy from the utility before an audience of over 18,000 (SDG&E Twitter followers). Hard not to like this.

The Normally Strong Grid's Self Inflicted Wounds

So only a few days ago you saw a post here about grid lessons from Hurricane Irene. Now we're back with another major grid event and I'm not sure what to call it other than the recent Arizona, San Diego and Mexico outage ... SanMexiZona outage perhaps?

Investigations are still being conducted, but what do we know so far? Well, a transmission maintenance issue impacted a substation in Arizona, and then:

• Cascading failure reached into California and Mexico, knocking power out to millions
• And caused 2 nuclear facilities to shut down
• Navy and Marine bases turn to back-up diesel generators and kept non-essential personnel home
• And many other types of trouble you'd expect from a black out in a large US city ensued, driving cost estimates into the hundreds of millions.

It's weird. In some ways the grid is a beast, capable of absorbing the worst insults and continuing operations largely unaffected. It virtually scoffs at earthquakes, raging fires, hurricanes, tornadoes ... and across the Pacific, even Godzilla stomping out of Tokyo Bay once in a while. Sure, some outages occur in the areas where equipment is destroyed. But the grid is usually a master of defense and containment.

But then a little thing happens during routine maintenance and a big chunk of the grid unexpectedly swoons. Amory Lovins and others on the 2008 DoD Science Board (DSB) task force on Energy identified the US grid as brittle and a threat to CONUS military readiness. Here's Lovins in 2010:

The US electrical grid ... is very capital-intensive, complex, technologically unforgiving, usually reliable, but inherently brittle. It is responsible for 98–99 percent of U.S. power failures, and occasionally blacking out large areas within seconds—because the grid requires exact synchrony across subcontinental areas … and can be interrupted by a lightning bolt, rifle bullet, malicious computer program, untrimmed branch, or errant squirrel.

Seems like some of the worst behaviors we see in the grid are avoidable. In addition to the many other benefits we often describe to regulators and general public with the Smart Grid build out, improvements to reliability have got to be high on the list, if not #1.

BTW - Try Googling "Errant Squirrel" - it's simply amazing how active (and errant) these critters have been!

Image credit: KUSI News San Diego

Texas Rolling Black Outs and the Not-Yet-Smart Grid

Analyst Chet Geschickter of Greentech Media wrote a nice piece about the blackouts Texas experienced earlier this month. You might say, hey, weather-induced power outages aren't caused by security problems. To which I would reply, oh yeah? The brittleness of the grid is one of its most significant vulnerabilities ... one that we now have the means to repair, though not necessarily the will to do so in the short term.

So may we continue? Here's Chet:

Rolling blackouts are a last-resort load shed tool ... [but while] demand response provides more orderly demand cascading ... it is limited to a few businesses with discretionary power needs -- like refrigeration compressors in supermarkets. A hefty chunk of the business sector is more sensitive. 

Then he continues ...

The residential market has huge potential for both electricity and natural gas peak curtailment, especially if and when large-scale consumer Home Area Network (HAN) technology adoption occurs.

That's a big "if" ... and maybe even a bigger "when". Now let's turn to an actual official in the thick of this event in Texas, quoted in a piece from the Wall Street Journal:

Many users didn't know their power was coming down, and officials said they should have issued more alerts so customers could prepare."It is something we have never experienced before," said Trip Doggett, the grid operator's chief executive, adding that "dramatically more" plants shut at one time than ever before. 

The good news?

By turning to the use of rolling outages, the grid operator prevented a statewide blackout that could have lasted at least 50 hours, Mr. Doggett said.

The bad news? The detail that that grid operators either couldn't communicate with their customers en masse, or else forgot to. I'd bet on the former. The Smart Grid is, if nothing else, about improving efficiency of operations and customer experience via better communications throughout the system. Ahem (throat clearing sound) ... I said, better communications.

Photo credit: (Texas based) J-5 Electric