Is Southwest Connecticut Headed for a Power Crisis?
By Mandy Kozar
WASHINGTON, Dec. 15-On August 14, 2003, the power went out in southern Connecticut. It probably won’t be the last time.
It also went out in the rest of the northeastern United States and up into southern Canada. In all, it affected an estimated 40 million people in eight states and 10 million people in Canada.
In the end, officials concluded that overgrown trees near high-voltage power lines caused a generating plant in Cleveland to go off-line. The cascading effect ultimately resulted in the forced shutdown of more than 100 power plants.
The power was out for only about a day or two in most areas, but the cost of the blackout is estimated at $6 billion.
The blackout also brought to light an unflattering picture of the power grid in Southwest Connecticut.
In western Massachusetts and western Vermont power outages totaled about 500 megawatts, but Southwest Connecticut lost about 2,000 megawatts. According to Ken McDonnell, spokesman for the Independent Service Operator for New England (ISO New England), “that was because Southwest Connecticut was and continues to be the weakest part of [the New England] grid.”
Although officials were already aware of the problem, the blackout in 2003 illustrated the insufficient capacity of transmission lines in Southwest Connecticut, McDonnell said..
“It’s an infrastructure problem whose weaknesses were vividly illustrated through outages that started half a continent away,” he said.
Could residents in Southwest Connecticut be facing another energy crisis? The same combination of insufficient transmission lines, steadily increasing energy consumption and outdated generating plants has led the Federal Energy Regulatory Commission to rank Southwest Connecticut as one of the nation’s top reliability risks.
Energy officials are concerned about the increasing demand for power in New England, particularly in Southwest Connecticut, which consumes 50 percent of all power in the state. With winter approaching and natural gas supply shortages looming, in part because of hurricane damage in the Gulf of Mexico, energy officials are expressing anxiety over possible blackouts.
Power demand in New England is growing by 1.5 percent a year, an increase equal to one power plant’s annual output. According to the nonprofit New England Coalition for Reliable Electricity, the demand for electricity will exceed supply sometime between 2008 and 2010.
Beryl Lyons, spokeswoman for Connecticut’s Department of Public Utility Control, pointed out that Southwest Connecticut is operating well below most efficiency standards because of outdated power generation plants.
“When you build something like [a power plant], it has a life expectancy of 30 years, somewhere in that range,” she said. “These things are well past that. They can’t work up to capacity; they are very expensive to operate.”
According to a recent ISO New England report, more than 70 percent of the generating capacity in the Norwalk-Stamford sub-area is more than 40 years old. Although the Southwest Connecticut area has added generating capacity in the past ten years, approximately 40 percent of the plants are more than 30 years old, and approximately half of these are more than 40 years old.
In an attempt to update power plants in New England and prevent an energy crisis, ISO New England recently proposed a controversial new rate plan for the region.
The locational installed capacity plan, generally called LICAP, calls for increased electric rates in area of high demand and low supply. Southwest Connecticut is such an area.
The New England Coalition for Reliable Electricity, which supports the rate plan, recently released a study by CRA International on the plan’s effectiveness and efficiency.
The plan, the study concluded, “is a ‘win-win proposition,’ providing both lower electricity prices and improved system security.”
According to the study, the plan makes sense economically because it replaces old systems with newer and more efficient plants, thus providing cheaper and more efficient energy.
However, the state’s Department of Public Utility Control says the rate plan does not address the real power problem in Southwest Connecticut: aging transmission lines.
” LICAP is purely punitive,” Lyons said. “You’re not going to induce anybody to build [a power plant] in Southwest Connecticut if they don’t have a transmission line to put it on.”
The Connecticut Siting Council, a state agency, noted in a 2003 statement that the transmission grid serving Southwest Connecticut fails to meet the reliability standards of the North American Electric Reliability Council, the Northeast Power Coordinating Council and the New England Power Pool.
” To put the problem into layman’s terms, picture it like driving route 95 through your area,” Lyons said. “There aren’t enough lanes on the highway, right? So everything gets congested and you can’t get through. So that means that all of New England can have more than enough power but that transmission lines can’t hold it. So if you don’t build a bigger one, you can’t get it through.”
ISO New England, the New England grid operator, uses a system called loss of load expectation analysis to predict energy reliability. According to the analysis, “the Connecticut, Southwest Connecticut, Norwalk-Stamford and Boston sub-areas are extremely vulnerable to unexpected load increases, unit deactivations or generator-forced outages, including fuel supply interruptions.”
The region has been aware of the situation since at least 2001, and the Siting Council in 2003 approved a transmission line project to update more than 80 miles of transmission lines in Southwest Connecticut.
The Southwest Connecticut Reliability Project comprised two transmission projects: Bethel-Norwalk, already under way, and Middletown-Norwalk, scheduled to start construction next summer.
However, the timeline is a precarious one. Although the Bethel-Norwalk project is scheduled to be finished by next December, if all goes well, the second project is not scheduled to be finished until 2009-a year after ISO New England predicts that energy demand may surpass supply.
” It’s close,” said Frank Poirot, spokesman for Northeast Utilities, the company in charge of the transmission projects, “but we know if the construction schedule is adhered to, in other words if we are able to actually build these projects and meet our construction deadlines, that we will be completing them without a lot of time to spare.”
Meanwhile, Hurricanes Katrina and Rita left their mark on Connecticut’s power situation.
Power plants in Southwest Connecticut, as in much of New England, rely heavily on natural gas for their power supply. New England relies on the Gulf Coast for 25 percent of its natural gas resources. According to ISO New England, hurricane damage in the Gulf region this year s is having an impact on electric supply in New England.
ISO New England is predicting record highs for energy use this winter, even with normal temperatures.
If the region experiences extreme temperatures this winter, power companies may be forced to institute rolling blackouts.
“If it turns very cold for multiple days–let’s say it gets down in the minus 10, minus 20 degree range, anywhere in the region–we expect that we may run short primarily of natural gas for generating electricity ,” ISO New England’s McDonnell said.
This would mean that if the grid operator forecast an imbalance between energy demand and supply, it would have to resort to controlled power outages that would be shared throughout New England.
These rolling blackouts typically would be scheduled for a block or small neighborhood and last 15 minutes to two hours and then move on to the next scheduled customers until the energy deficit is met.
According to ISO New England, blackouts would be the last-case scenario after all other conservation measures are attempted.
“If things deteriorate badly for three or four days as they did in January 2004,” McDonnell said, “that’s when we could experience some real problems.”
Rolling blackouts have never been implemented in New England, and ISO New England has outlined several steps to prevent them, such as a “demand response” program that pays businesses to cut back on energy use in times of very high energy demand.
“That’s not to say that controlled power outages or rolling blackouts are not possible,” McDonnell said, “but if we were to order them in a very worst-case situation, it would be after we’ve exhausted all other steps that are available to us to try to avoid that kind of a situation.”
Despite the precautions, some organizations are convinced that Connecticut needs to look beyond its current sources of energy in order to establish more efficient and reliable power.
The Connecticut Clean Energy Fund, an organization that invests in clean or renewable energy sources such as fuel cell plants, wind energy and solar power, views these alternative fuels as important ways to avoid an energy crisis.
“We hope to be one of the solutions to help alleviate the energy problems that exist in Southwest Connecticut,” said Charlie Moret, the managing director of marketing and communications for the Clean Energy Fund.
The fund has invested in more than 80 alternative energy projects throughout the state and, according to Moret, hopes that the current energy situation will make people aware of renewable energy.
“Everybody knows that energy costs are going to continue to rise, demand for energy continues to exceed how much supply can be put on,” Moret said. “So the faster that people can be educated about our energy issues and the problems we face in the future, the quicker we can get to arrive at some solutions that will be workable.”
###
