Monday, November 19, 2012
Philly.com
By Llewellyn King
Better stock up on flashlights, batteries,
nonperishable food, and potable water, because there is likely to be an
electrical blackout in your future.
Three weeks after Superstorm Sandy tore up the
Mid-Atlantic coast of the United States, many are still without power. The
question is: Can the electric power system we have deal with the New Weather?
The answer is plainly no.
This is one of those situations in which no one is
to blame and everyone is to blame.
Our electric power system is complex and uneven. Some
of it is state-of-the-art, and some of it dates back a century.
In New England, according to the utility National
Grid, one transformer dates to 1909. Many of the large transformers that are
essential to the operation of the power system are 45 years old and operating
beyond their planned life expectancy.
Wooden poles, which snap in high winds, are still
the standard for residential service here, though Western Europe and
industrialized Asia use steel and steel-reinforced concrete poles. The wooden
pole business even has a lobby and its own trade association. A hundred
thousand wooden poles were rushed to the East Coast after Sandy.
Most people are likely to lose their power from
high winds that snap poles or, more commonly, fell trees. Nick Puga of Bates
White, an economic consulting firm, points out that many residential
communities were built in open farm fields over the past 40 years, and the
first thing new homeowners do is plant trees. Quick-growing, shallow-rooted
varieties have sprung up near power lines.
But even in older residential communities, trees
are a huge problem. People love them - the bigger, the older, the more
spreading, the better. Residents fight with power companies over trimming.
Steve Mitnick, a longtime utility consultant,
believes power companies are woefully unprepared for major weather changes.
Mitnick does not lay the blame wholly on the utilities; the forces that have
shaped electric infrastructure, including regulators, customers, and
politicians, are also to blame.
The pressure, Mitnick says, has been for low rates.
This produced a philosophy that relies more on swift response to outages than
on engineering against weather damage.
The utilities are especially proud of what they
call mutual assistance, under which crews are rushed from other utilities to
those that have outages. For Sandy, maintenance crews sped to the East Coast
with equipment from across the country and Canada. This works when the damage
is limited to downed lines. But when it is bigger, as with recent storms, the
imported crews are often at a loss, not knowing the local infrastructure or the
whereabouts of trunk lines and transformers.
It is dangerous, difficult work that deserves
recognition. But it is an imperfect system when the damage is urban rather than
rural or suburban. There were reports of out-of-state utility workers looking
lost in lower Manhattan.
What I find depressing is that we have come
to accept the storm-related blackout as inevitable. This is part of our sad
acceptance of declining infrastructure, from crowded roads to slow trains to
failing water supplies. Once we had the best of these.
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