Power company 'had problems hours before blackout'

The Ohio power company under the spotlight following the biggest blackout in America’s history has said there were problems, including strange voltage fluctuations, in the Midwest power grid hours before its transmission lines failed.

“What happened ... is much more complex than a few tripped power lines in our system,” said Todd Schneider, a spokesman for FirstEnergy Corporation, which hit back after being targeted by investigators.

He said that some of the unusual power conditions occurred ”as early as noon” – more than three hours before FirstEnergy’s high-voltage lines, which have been the focus of investigators, failed.

In a statement last night, Michehl Gent, head of the North American Electric Reliability Council, an industry group investigating Thursday’s massive power cuts, acknowledged that “events that occurred on one utility’s system may have been affected by events on utility systems elsewhere” in the power grid.

“Although we may have identified the area where the cascading outages began,” Gent said, referring to the lines in Ohio that failed, “any attempt on our part to identify the cause of the outages at this point would be speculative and premature.”

FirstEnergy, America’s fourth-largest investor-owned utility company with 4.3 million customers in Ohio, Pennsylvania and New Jersey, has been at the centre of the blackout investigation for three days.

NERC said that as of last night all the electric transmission systems that had been affected by the blackout were again operating reliably, except for a link between Michigan and Ontario, Canada that remained out “due to operational security reasons”. It did not elaborate, but said the line was expected to return to service soon. Twenty-one power generating plants remained down, about a fifth of those that had been shut down by the blackout, NERC said.

Meanwhile, Canadian officials complained that they were not notified promptly when problems began to emerge in the eastern grid interconnection ahead of the blackout. Such notification is required under a 1965 agreement and it ”did not happen this past Thursday”, said Ontario premier Ernie Eves in Toronto.

Government investigators joined industry teams yesterday in the search for clues into what triggered the blackout that wiped out power to all or parts of eight states from Michigan to New York City.

Energy Secretary Spencer Abraham promised to move as quickly as possible to get answers and address whatever problem was found, but said so far there was no indication who might be responsible.

Administration officials acknowledge that the mystery surrounding the start of the blackout may not be easily unravelled.

The NERC investigation has focused on the likelihood of a combination of mechanical glitches and human failures as it tries to piece together second-by-second events during the hours before the widespread blackout, concentrating on power lines in northern Ohio.

NERC, which was created after another major blackout in 1965 to monitor the power grid and set voluntary reliability standards, said the problem appeared to have cascaded after the breakdown in the three high-voltage lines south of Cleveland in the area serviced by utilities owned by FirstEnergy.

FirstEnergy admitted that an alarm that should have flashed a red warning on computer monitors when power was being lost, did not sound in its central control room.

That “certainly contributed to it,” said Gent, appearing on ABC’s This Week. But he said the alarm did not fail at other locations where technicians were supposed to monitor the lines.

“We have to dig into this to see why the alarm wasn’t noticed by somebody else” in addition to why the alarm was not working at the FirstEnergy control centre.

Later, appearing on CNN, Gent said when the third line ”tripped” – or lost power – “that should have separated the local system ... and the rest of the grid should have remained intact”.