Sometimes we shoot the messenger for the bad message. Ilya Roytelman, a distinguished researcher with many contributions in the field, said that "the best students are not going into power engineering". Now, what's wrong with that statement? If it's not totally and absolutely correct, it's partially correct, it has an element of truth. Certainly in Roytelman's experience, as he is an academic. And, I can say, in my own experience also. When I graduated in 1974, the brightest students went into digital electronics and Bio-med. In any event, if there is a problem it will not be solved by those who are offended but by those who can face the truth and deal with it.
On the other hand, many bright people have gone into the various fields of electric power and the quality of technical research in our field is the best testamemt to that. Many "average" students have developed into formidable experts when faced by the enormous complexity of the electricity supply systems.
Now, on the subject of the Spectrum paper that I posted above. I really don't know why some have come down on it so hard. Is it because it says that:
"...Long before power had been restored to businesses and residences from New York City to Cleveland, Detroit, and Toronto, politicians and commentators on both sides of the border were pointing fingers..."
"...For more than five years, NERC has sought and failed to get legislative authority to make its rules mandatory..."
"...as growth in demand for electricity has outstripped additions to transmission capacity by a factor of two, the grid itself has come to be ever more thinly stretched..."
..."We all knew something like this was coming along," a leader in a 1999 DOE study of the transmission grid told IEEE Spectrum, on condition of anonymity. "We were all just waiting for the big one."...
"...The temptation, at first blush, may be to put the blame squarely on FirstEnergy, the Ohio utility whose operators and managers seem to have been sleeping at the switch. Could this be a mere case of one poorly run company bringing down an entire system—of one rotten apple corrupting the whole barrel?..."
..."Reporters for The Wall Street Journal, The New York Times, and ABC-TV's "Nightline" news analysis show promptly uncovered a pattern of chronic difficulties FirstEnergy had had with regulators. These included penalties for violation of health, safety, and environmental rules, a requirement by auditors that it restate its profits over the last few years, and the cost of replacing electricity from the shut-down Davis-Besse plant, which ran into hundreds of millions of dollars. The company also is saddled with billions of dollars in debt, much of it associated with its acquisition in 2001 of the utility GPU Inc. (Morristown, N.J.), the former owner and operator of the Three Mile Island nuclear plant that suffered a near meltdown in 1979..."
"...Even if the tripped lines and FirstEnergy’s failure to detect and report them prove to be the exclusive initiating cause of the 2003 blackout, it still will be necessary to account for the failure of local and neighboring control authorities to prevent the cascading outages that ensued. As events unfolded, observers were struck at how unevenly various regulating organizations performed..."
"...Long before most states had even begun to set up ISOs, however, it was becoming apparent to federal regulators that the supposedly independent organizations were held hostage by local utilities and other special interests. What’s more, ISOs lacked adequate authority to get transmission lines built and transmission services properly priced..."
"...Six months ago, NERC singled out the Middle West as the one part of the country at risk of a devastating grid breakdown, and put local utilities and regulators that they had to be on high alert this summer. Evidently the message did not get through. Why is that?..."
..."The market forces that caused this," the report went on to say, "pervade all of North America. Similar effects should be expected in other regions as well," including the eastern interconnection, where the same kind of migration of technical support from utilities to emergent ISOs, with attendant loss of memory, was apparent....
"...William Hogan of Harvard University’s John F. Kennedy School of Government (Cambridge, Mass.) noted that the Senate Commerce Committee had recently voted to bar FERC from implementing RTO market designs based on the PJM Interconnect model. But, he wrote hopefully, "the blackout should change the game."...
I can go on and on but I'll end up reprinting the whole article. Open your eyes and read it once again (or more than once if necessary).
