FirstEnergy Blamed for Blackout in Report

The nation’s worst blackout should have been contained by operators at Ohio’s FirstEnergy Corp., a three-month U.S. and Canadian investigation concluded on Wednesday. The investigators also faulted Midwest regional monitors.

In their report, they said the company’s operators were inadequately trained and computer problems in its Akron, Ohio, control room kept them from recognizing immediately that problems on three lines were causing the Midwest grid to become unstable.

“This blackout was largely preventable,” said Energy Secretary Spencer Abraham at a news conference as he and his Canadian counterpart, Herb Dahliwal, released a 134-page report on the blackout, which left 50 million people in eight states and Canada in the dark last August.

The report also faulted Midwest grid monitors who should have been able to observe the failure of three FirstEnergy, high-voltage lines in northern Ohio.

The monitors also should have helped the utility company respond to the problem and head off the rapid cascade of outages that engulfed a region from eastern Michigan to New York city in seven minutes, the report said. More than 263 power plants went down.

It said the regional group, working out of a control center in Indiana, lacked the tools and capability to monitor the grid and analyze what was happening in the hour before the blackout hit full force at 4:06 p.m. EDT on Aug. 14.

It was the worst blackout in the nation’s history, costing at least $6 billion in economic and other losses.

The task force said there was no indication of tampering and that computer viruses weren’t involved. Investigators early on dismissed the notion of a terrorism link.

But the report found that FirstEnergy, the nation’s fourth largest utility holding company with 4.3 million customers, had violated four industry grid reliability standards. It also said that MISO, the regional grid monitor, had violated several rules in connection with the blackout.

The industry largely regulates itself when it comes to grid reliability with no penalty for rule violations.

Because of this, “there are limits in terms of the federal level punishment available,” Abraham said.

Ohio Gov. Bob Taft said he has ordered the state Public Utilities Commission to direct FirstEnergy to improve its grid management programs and to “correct these shortcomings at the earliest possible date.”

Among the faults found at FirstEnergy was a simple failure to keep trees trimmed around the power lines, which were singled out as the initial failures that eventually produced the cascading power breakdown.

The failure caused more electricity to flow into other transmission lines, overloading them. The system became unstable as the power and demand for it deteriorated, said the report.

FirstEnergy “failed to ensure the security of its transmission system,” the task force said.

FirstEnergy officials said the report largely ignored troublesome conditions elsewhere on the Midwest power grid, including a heavy flow of power through the region into Canada.

“We remain convinced that the outage cannot be explained by events on any one utility system. We believe the interim report does not adequately address the underlying causes of the outage,” said First Energy president Anthony J. Alexander in a statement.

As to analyzing and responding to its own line problems, company spokesman Ralph DiNicola said operators didn’t have some information because they were experiencing computer problems. He blamed a “computer software flaw” that he said first appeared on the day of the blackout.

The report concluded that from the time the computer failed “to when they began to recognize their situations, (FirstEnergy) operators did not understand how much of their system was being lost,” and misinterpreted the events in a way that did not reflect the system’s true condition.

According to industry rules, operators must take quick action to balance supply and demand for power. In this case, this was not done, said the task force.

The blackout prompted new calls for upgrading the nation’s high-voltage electric transmission systems and for giving the government power to enforce reliability standards.

Congress is expected this week to complete a massive energy bill that includes, for the first time, federal reliability rules for companies to follow to safeguard the grid system.

Without mandatory reliability requirements and penalties, “many of the problems discovered by investigators are certain to be repeated time and time again,” said Rep. Billy Tauzin, R-La., chairman of the House Energy and Commerce Committee.

FirstEnergy’s violations included not reacting to a power line failure within 30 minutes as required, a failure to notify nearby systems of the problems, and a failure to analyze what was going on, the report said. It also didn’t adequately train operators, investigators said.

MISO, the multistate grid operator, did not notify other regions about the potential problems, didn’t ensure that it had adequate tools to analyze system problems or adequate grid monitoring capability, according to the report.