1965 Northeastern Blackout

The Northeastern Blackout in 1965 happened on the 9th day of November, 1965 disrupting power to the
northeastern United States and the provinces of Ontario, Canada. An estimated 30 million Americans and
Canadians were affected directly by the blackout encompassing about 80,000 mi2.The states that were
directly affected are Connecticut, Massachusetts, New Hampshire, New Jersey, New York, Rhode island,
Pennsylvania and Vermont in United States and Ontario in Canada. The blackout lasted for almost 13 hours
leaving half of the country in darkness without power.

Main Cause of the Blackout

One advantage and disadvantage of an AC power system is that if something happens at a single point on
the system, it is felt all over the system. The power system of the Canadian province of the Ontario was and
is an integral part of the Eastern Connection. The Ontario System was interconnected with the US portions
of the grid at Niagara Falls and the St. Lawrence Seaway. It is also connected to some parts of Michigan.

Prior to the blackout date some modifications have been made to the protective relays on five of
the 230 kV transmission line that ran from hydro plants on the Canadian side of the Niagara River towards
the Hamilton and Toronto metropolitan areas. The relays were set to trip if high levels of power is to flow
through the transmission lines and protect them from damage. But due to some reason the engineers and
planning operators in the power plant were never advised of the changes done to the relay setting which
lead to the fateful day of 9th November.

At a little after 5:15pm, the power flow on one of the lines in which the relay setting was changed
reached its backup setting and the relay on the transmission line automatically tripped. Since the five lines
were in parallel the initial tripping caused a chain reaction to trip the rest four of the relays rapidly in a
cascade, and they were out of service in less than 2.7s. This reaction disrupted power to most of the Ontario
System by interrupting the only electrical path between them. As a result, the excess power was transferred
to the other lines which made them to overload and the protection system of the power lines tripped their
relays as a protective measure. The only electrical path back into Ontario was across New York up to St.
Lawrence Seaway, where the other connection between Ontario and the Eastern Connection was located.
According to the Kirchhoffs law and estimated 1000MW of power surged into the Buffalo area of the New
York and the north of the St Lawrence River. This immense surge of power into the New York City made
the power system of NYC unstable and the grid began to fall apart. This made the western and northern
parts of the state along with Ontario cut off from the Eastern Interconnection.

The bulk power system breakup occurred in about 10s from the time the first line in Ontario
tripped until the last major transmission line opened, but it took about 10min for the lights to go out in some
parts of the affected areas. As a result of the blackout many areas that had been importing power from the
affected areas, the frequency reduced below 60 Hz and the many of the generators started to trip. Any time,
the generation falls below the connected demand the speed of the generators reduce and trip eventually.

Ironically, the lights never went out in two portions of New York City, Staten Island and the
southwestern corner of Brooklyn remained connected to the Eastern connection through a single
transmission line that spanned the Arthur Kill between Staten Island and New Jersey. Municipal utilities in
Hartford, Connecticut; Braintree, Holyoke, and Taunton, Massachusetts; and Fairport, Greenport, and
Walden, New York had their own power plants, which operators disconnected from the grid and which
were able to sustain local loads,[6] though some areas lost power for at least a few hours. Rockdale, Queens
and Co-op City in The Bronx, New York were also unaffected as they had their own power plants.
 Fig 1: Newspaper articles describing the blackout of 1965

Aftermath and Consequences of the Blackout

New York City was dark by 5:27pm, the restoration of the power took almost 13 hours. Power in western
New York was restored in a few hours, thanks to the independent generating plant at Eastman Kodak
Company in Rochester, New York, which stayed online throughout the blackout. It provided auxiliary
power to restart other generators in the area which, in turn, were used to get all generators in the blackout
area going again. Blame for the blackout should not be attributed to poor planning operations. The initiating
event was the sudden loss of five system elements on the transmission line. Following the blackout,
measures were taken to avoid another similar repetition in the future. Ten councils were created covering
the networks of the North American Interconnected System. Many different studies were conducted for
knowing the exact cause of the blackout and how could it had been avoided. On the night of the blackout it
took only 10s for the system to go unstable, such a time is too rapid for human operator intervention from
the most state of the art control center. This raised the idea of automating the whole power system where
the computers can take the required action without any human intervention. There was a lot of research
going on after the blackout which proposed automating the entire power system would help in preventing
such a disaster to occur in the near future.
 2003 Northeastern Blackout

On August 14, 2003, just after 4 p.m. Eastern Daylight Time (EDT), 1 the North American power grid
Experienced its largest blackout ever. The blackout affected an estimated 50 million people and more
Than 70,000 megawatts (MW) of electrical load in parts of Ohio, Michigan, New York, Pennsylvania,
New Jersey, Connecticut, Massachusetts, Vermont, and the Canadian provinces of Ontario and Qubec.
Although power was successfully restored to most customers within hours, some areas in the United
States did not have power for two days and parts of Ontario experienced rotating blackouts for up to two
Weeks.

Main Cause of the Blackout

The main cause of the blackout was found out to be a software bug in the alarm system of the First Energy
Corporation. A lack of alarm left the operators unaware of the potential overloading in the transmission
lines which then lead to a cascading effect and the whole system fell apart in just a few seconds.

At 13:31, the FE Eastlake 5 generating unit tripped offline due to an exciter failure while the operator
was making some adjustments. Shortly after 14:14 the alarm and the logging system in the First Energy
failed and was not restored until and after the blackout. The loss of this alarm is the main cause for the
blackout to happen. Unknown to the operators the alarm system failure eventually lead to the failure of
several other energy systems leading to inability of the operators to have any situational awareness of the
oncoming problem.

Between 15:05 and 15:42, three of the FE 345 kV transmission lines supplying the Cleveland Akron
area tripped and locked out because the lines contacted overgrown trees nearby due to sag conditions. No
alarms were received in the FE control center because of the alarm systems failure and the operators were
totally unware of the impending danger and the events that are taking place. The loss of two more 345kV
power lines shifted the power flow onto the underlying network of 138kV power lines. These lines were
not designed to carry such a huge load and they quickly became overloaded. Concurrently, the voltages
began to degrade in Akron area. As a result of these increased loading and decaying voltages, sixteen of the
138kV lines tripped in a period of 30 minutes which can be described as the cascading failure of the 138
kV systems in Ohio. Several of these line trips were due to the sagging of the lines onto the nearby
vegetation due to the huge overload current present in the transmission lines, which eventually lead to a
complete disruption of power in the northeastern power system.

By around 15:46 when the FE, MISO and neighboring systems began to realize that the FE system
was in serious jeopardy, the only practical action was to quickly drop the load on the power lines. Analysis
states that at least 1500 to 2000MW of the load has to be dropped in order to prevent the blackout, but no
such thing happened and the FE operators still lacked the awareness of the events taking place in their
system because of the computer systems failure.

Investigation

A joint Federal Task Force was formed by the governments of Canada and US to investigate into the cause
of the blackout. The investigation included aspects such as why the alarm failed in the first place which
caused a race condition in the software and also the future precautions to be taken in order to prevent such
a blackout to happen in the near future.
 Fig 2: Satellite Image showing before and after Blackout

Aftermath and Conclusion

The 2003 blackout was more widespread than the previous 1965 blackout and affected many people on a
large scale. Many of the basic facilities such as water, transport and several other industries were widely
effected. The NERC(North American Electrical Reliability Corporation) submitted a detailed report about
the blackout which included the causes and the steps if taken could have prevented such a widespread
blackout. In its Investigation it stated that many entities violated the policies of NERC which directly
contributed to the cascading situation in the blackout. It also stated that the operators adopted different
interpretations of functions, and capabilities needed to operate a reliable power system. It also identified
the deficiencies in studies regarding poor vegetation management, operator training practices and lack of
tools that allow operators to visualize the system conditions.

The governments of USA and Canada have decided to work together in order to prevent such a
condition from happening again in the future.
Question 1:
A) Need for Regulation of Electricity Market:
As the demand for electricity grew, it lead to the development of larger and larger distribution
networks which lead to the regulation in electricity market.
The generated electricity can be shared among a large section of people as compared to few
people when the system is not regulated.
Reliability of the electric system can be improved by the regulation.

B) Advantages and Flaws in Deregulated Electricity Market:

Advantages:
Customers can have various options on where and from whom to buy the electricity.
Price of electricity per unit decreases.
There will be no monopoly in the market.
Reliability and quality of power is maintained.

Flaws:
The deregulation laws and rules are manipulated and used for the benefit of some
people at the expense of many.
The system cannot be interconnected, so if there is power loss in one location, the
power cannot be transferred from different location.
There will be no organization to govern and control the electricity prices.

C) Reasons for Western Energy Crisis of 2000-2001:

There is no key factor which caused the crisis in 2001 but it can be termed as a combination of the
following:
Weather: It was hot and dry. There was very low hydroelectric energy supply and also the
demand went up because of the drought fueled fires knocking down the transmission lines on
their way.
Capacity: In 1993 to 1999 the demand in California grew up to 15% which contributed to the
crisis.
Flawed Market Design: Utilities reduce their exposure to energy supply fluctuations through a
number of strategies, but in the year 2000 the utilities were forced to invest on riskier spot
markets in order to meet the demands.
Corporate Malfeasance: The deregulation rules were manipulated by most of the companies in
order to increase their profits which lead the crisis.
Failed Oversight: California and FERC were operating under an inconsistent and wrong set of
assumptions which were not studied thoroughly before implementing them which led to the
crisis.
D) States in which Electricity Market is deregulated:
Connecticut
Delaware
Illinois
Maine
Maryland
Massachusetts
Michigan
Montana
New Hampshire
New Jersey
New York
Ohio
Oregon
Pennsylvania
Rhode Island
Texas
District of Columbia