Experts blame power giant for US blackout

America’s worst blackout should have been contained by operators at Ohio’s FirstEnergy firm, a three-month US and Canadian investigation has concluded.

The investigators also criticised Midwest regional monitors over the power cuts in August.

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

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

The report said Midwest grid monitors 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 centre in Indiana, lacked the tools and capability to monitor the grid and analyse what was happening in the hour before the blackout hit full force at 4.06pm (9.06pm Irish time) on August 14.

It was the worst blackout in America’s history, costing at least $6bn (€5m) in economic and other losses.

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 broken 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 governor Bob Taft said he has ordered the state Public Utilities Commission to direct FirstEnergy to improve its grid management programmes 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 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,” First Energy president Anthony Alexander said in a statement.

On analysing and responding to its own line problems, company spokesman Ralph DiNicola said operators did not have some information because they were experiencing computer problems.