Brittle Power- PARTS 1-3 (+Notes) - Natural Capitalism Solutions

52Brittle Powermost of the imports arrive through a narrow corridor from the north, wherepower is available at relatively low cost and can be delivered overland withoutexpensive underwater cables. This clustering of lines increases vulnerabilityto storms and sabotage.There are some interconnections in other directions, but in July 1977, onekey link was inoperable. Its phase-regulating transformer, after causing earlierlocal power failures, had failed beyond repair ten months earlier (it eventuallytook over a year to replace). 5 Three generating plants on the Con Edsystem were also down for repair. The Indian Point Two nuclear plant (eighthundred seventy-three megawatts of electrical capacity) had a failed pumpseal. Two fossil plants were also out of action: Bowling Point Number Two(six hundred one megawatts), with a boiler problem, and Astoria Number Six(seven hundred seventy-five megawatts), with a turbine failure. Within theCon Ed area, therefore, only three thousand nine hundred megawatts wasbeing generated to serve a load of six thousand one hundred megawatts. Therest was being imported through six interties. It is the successive failure ofthese transmission systems, and their interaction with local generators, thatled to the system failure. There was plenty of generating capacity available inthe “pool” of adjacent utilities with which Con Ed was interconnected, butevents developed in such a way that by the late evening of 13 July 1977, therewas no way to deliver that power to the city.Perhaps the best description of the failure sequence is by Philip Boffey inScience magazine:The trouble began … when lightning struck a[n imperfectly grounded transmission-line]tower in northern Westchester County and short-circuited two …[high-voltage] lines.... [P]rotective relays … triggered circuit breakers to open atboth ends of the affected lines, thus isolating the problem from the rest of thesystem. This is exactly what the circuit breakers are supposed to do. However,they are also supposed to reclose automatically once the fault dissipates, and thisthey failed to do. One transmission line failed because of a loose locking nut[which released air pressure from a circuit breaker] 6 ...; the other because a reclosingcircuit had been disconnected and not yet replaced....Two other facilities also tripped out of service.... A nuclear reactor [IndianPoint Three] shut down automatically when the circuit breaker that opened tocontain the lightning fault also [by a design fault] deprived the reactor of any outletfor its power.... [Another high-voltage line]—a major tie across the Hudson—tripped out because a protective timing device was designed improperly.... Thus,in one stroke of misfortune, Con Ed lost three major transmission lines and itsmost heavily loaded generator. Even so, Con Ed regained its equilibrium byimporting more power on the remaining tie lines and by increasing its own generationsomewhat [but did not restore a safety margin].... Then lightning struck