Good coverage of the challenges utilities face in the future thanks to climate change:
Four Storms in Quick Succession Expose the Flaws in New York City’s Electrical System - WNYC
Showing posts with label Sandy. Show all posts
Showing posts with label Sandy. Show all posts
Friday, January 11, 2013
Wednesday, December 12, 2012
Long Power Outages During Storms Like Hurricane Sandy Could Be Prevented
NEW YORK -- When Hurricane Sandy struck the East Coast, it flooded electrical substations and knocked down trees, shutting off power for 8.2 millions customers.
While the electric companies got that number down to 4.45 million as of Thursday, it will be days or even weeks before all the region's residents can turn their lights on. New York's ConEd said Thursday that recovery would take until Nov. 11 for most, but could stretch on until the end of the month.
Does the restoration of the mid-Atlantic power grid have to take so achingly long? While the utility companies argued that they're working as hard as they possibly can, several experts said that America's power infrastructure could be more resilient -- even when tested by a once-in-a-century storm.
"The message from Sandy is that it has to be stronger," said James Hoecker, a lawyer who led the Federal Energy Regulatory Commission under President Bill Clinton. Experts suggested various adjustments, such as underground cables, smart grid technology and tree trimming to make future outages end sooner.
Designing above-ground power lines to cope with more of a beating, and hardening critical infrastructure, could help. On the distribution side, most telephone poles and wires are not designed to withstand the 90-mile-per-hour winds that swept through New Jersey on Monday. That, said Otto Lynch, the energy representative for the American Society of Civil Engineers’ Committee on America’s Infrastructure, is a mistake.
"It is embarrassing to me that streetlights are supposed to be designed to a higher level of standard than distribution lines are," he told HuffPost. For perhaps $100 a pole, he argued, we could prevent a lot of downed electrical poles and powerless neighborhoods.
The transmission network, the part of the grid that moves power across state lines and has been implicated before in outages like the blackout of 2003, appears not to have been seriously tested by the storm because of its higher design standards.
But the grid could use some work, Lynch said. It was first built in the 1880s and many of its components are now more than 100 years old, designed for 50 years of life. If something like Hurricane Katrina, which was a Category 3 storm when it made landfall, had hit the New York-New Jersey area, transmission would certainly have been affected.
The solution? "It's called redundancy," Lynch said. "Basically what we need is more transmission lines." That will only occur if regulators and the public become more willing to allow those lines to be built even when they would not seemingly affect day-to-day electricity provision.
Another proposal: the comparatively unsexy but critical regulations around tree trimming. Downed limbs caused up to 90 percent of power disruptions for some utilities during Hurricane Sandy. Many states in the northeast, like Connecticut, have laws that require utility companies to submit ‘vegetation management’ plans, but these laws do not require tree trimming cycles or line clearance specifications.
A fix to the tree-trimming issue could be better training and assessment standards for determining which trees could pose a problem in a severe storm. A team at the International Society of Arboriculture is in the process of developing a qualification program for tree risk assessment and hopes it will launch next Spring.
Sharon Lilly, ISA’s educational goods and services director, hopes the program will be used by all sectors, including commercial, municipal and utility workers who are tasked with protecting the electric grid. Though programs like this could help improve the ability of utilities to identify potential risks, Lilly acknowledged that the issue will likely linger, if for no other reason than that people like trees. “I don’t think society is ready to remove all the large trees that could possibly strike a wire,” she said.
This summer, after a derecho -- an aggressive thunderstorm -- killed power for more than 1 million residents near Washington, the rallying cry was to move more electrical cables underground. A recent report commissioned by Maryland Gov. Martin O'Malley concluded that "selective undergrounding is an effective way to harden the grid."
The idea is that underground wires are less vulnerable to things like wind and fallen trees. Most opposition to undergrounding, as it's called, comes from cost, which could range from $6 to $20 million a mile. Lilly called it “the ultimate solution" that "the U.S. has been reluctant to invest in."
But almost all cables in downtown Manhattan, which is still dark, are already underground -- so what happened? "When you underground a line and it causes flooding, you get problems," Lynch said. "Undergrounding … is not the perfect solution."
While underground lines are less vulnerable, they can take longer to restore when they do fail (though ConEd said customers with underground service will have power as soon as this weekend).
What would make underground lines more resilient to flooding, said Virginia Tech professor Saifur Rahman, is moving buildings' connections to those cables -- cords, transformers and generators -- above flood level. "The cables are fine, but you connect them into your building's electrical circuit,," Rahman said. "Those connections … can never get wet."
The combination of underground cables with a rooftop connector is what kept Goldman Sachs lit up, Rahman said. Elevating such equipment in existing buildings would be pricey, he said, but fairly cheap in new ones. He said he hopes that the city will tweak its standards to require this practice for all buildings. But that's not quite what he saw happen in New Orleans. "They only moved the generator up in some cases," Rahman said. "This is the complacency we all live with."
One more idea is updating both transmission and distribution networks with so-called "smart grid" technology. The 2009 Recovery Act included some $4 billion for such technology with a wide range of aims: making it easier for solar and wind power generators to bring their product to market, making residential consumers' energy use more efficient, and improving the grid's reliability.
"The grid is in a state of transition and this is, I think, going to accelerate the transition, storms like this," said Peter Fox-Penner, principal of The Brattle Group, an energy consultancy.
Smart meters on the customers' side of the distribution network will help utilities determine when and to what extent people are going without power. When outages occur, electricity providers' control center maps are automatically updated.
Making the grid smarter could also open up what some environmentalists see as a holy grail of energy transformation, distributed power -- which means every house could have a solar panel on top. Fox-Penner said that could lessen the impact of distribution failures during severe weather events.
"No one thinks about the power grid as long as the lights turn on when you flip the switch, and that happens well over 99 percent of the time," said Fox-Penner. "But when it goes down, people start asking whether there's any better way to do it."
Utility pole shortage delays Sandy power restoration
By Jennifer Merritt of Reuters
Despite delivery of up to 1,500 of the specially-treated poles per day, some suppliers say they can't keep pace.
When some Westchester County, N.Y., residents called utility Consolidated Edison on Friday to find out why it was taking so long to restore power, they were told that it wasn't for lack of manpower or equipment.
It was poles ... utility poles.
Despite the caravans of power trucks in neighborhoods across the New York City area, a shortage of the specially-treated wooden poles used to string overhead power transmission lines and hold up transformers may be slowing the recovery.
Specialty pole suppliers like Cox Industries and Bridgewell Resources LLC are producing and trucking as many as 1,500 poles a day to customers in the Northeast since Hurricane Sandy slammed into the New Jersey coastline on Monday, flooding entire towns and leaving millions of homes in the dark. More than 3.5 million people remained without power as of Friday afternoon.
But in some cases, suppliers say they cannot keep up. Class 1 and 2 utility poles, which are the largest in diameter and among the most commonly-used in the Northeast, sold out fast and the orders are still coming, said Chris Slonaker, an East Coast sales manager for Bridgewell, which is based in Tigard, Oregon.
"The stock that was available at the time of the storm is all gone, and we are trying to replenish it," said Slonaker, whose company supplies power poles to Consolidated Edison Inc, Public Service Enterprise Group Inc, Verizon Communications Inc and several rural electric cooperatives.
ConEd, which still had about 500,000 customers without power as of Friday afternoon, would not immediately comment on why its customer service personnel had told some homeowners that utility pole supplies were a challenge. A spokeswoman said the biggest obstacles to restoring power to customers with overhead lines was impassable roads and thousands of downed power lines.
REPLENISHING STOCK
To complicate matters, because of high demand, stockpiles of the southern pine trees used to make the poles are in short supply at plants Bridgewell buys from. Trees are arriving at plants daily and several thousand poles are under construction now, Slonaker said.
They should be ready to ship to the Northeast by the middle of next week for a 900-mile trip that takes two to three days - which could mean another week - or more - without electricity and heat even as a cold snap settles into the area.
Most of the dozen or so plants Bridgewell buys utility poles from have been operating 24-hours a day since the storm. They usually operate only 8-hours a day during normal weather and 16-hours a day after most big weather events. Typically, Bridgewell ships 50 truckloads, each with about 30 poles, each day for one or two days after a storm. But Hurricane Sandy has led to an influx of orders far larger.
"Orders have continued at this pace," every day since Sandy struck on Monday, Slonaker said.
And even after producing the poles, Bridgewell is finding there are more orders than there were trucks. Hundreds of flatbed trucks that would normally deliver plywood and other supplies are being outfitted with wooden stakes so they can haul the 35-to-50-foot utility poles.
TOO FEW TRUCKS, BLOCKED ROADS
Orangeburg, South Carolina-based Cox Industries is sending upwards of 1,200 poles per day to warehouses in Hainesport, New Jersey and Hicksville, New York on Long Island from its production factories in the southeast, said Don Surrency, a sales manager at the company.
Surrency said Cox has not had trouble keeping up with orders to PSE&G, Long Island Power Authority (LIPA) or Verizon and is sending about 40 trucks per day, each loaded with 25 to 30 poles. But getting them to the right place hasn't been easy.
"There are other obstacles you don't typically see in storms," said Surrency.
Among them: The dense population, blocked or difficult to pass roadways - sometimes because of cars that have simply run out of gas, he said.
Truck drivers have, so far, not encountered the fuel shortages many residents in New York and New Jersey have experienced, Surrency and Slonaker said.
John Margaritis, a spokesman for PSE&G, the biggest power provider in New Jersey, said that supply of utility poles has not been an issue. The utility in hard-hit New Jersey still had 692,000 customers without power as of Friday afternoon.
LIPA did not return calls and emails for comment on Friday.
Before the storm, most of the utilities Bridgewell deals with had already ordered extra supplies of poles. But Slonaker says those ran out quickly.
"They were prepared, but this was bigger than expected," he said. "It's hard to prepare for this."
Can Hurricane Sandy Shed Light on Curbing Power Outages?
For National Geographic News
Published November 2, 2012
As Hurricane Sandy churned north and west over the Atlantic Ocean on its inexorable collision course with the U.S. East Coast, miles-long convoys of bucket trucks, aka cherry pickers, were already rumbling over interstate highways toward the anticipated strike zone, from as far away as Alabama and Texas.
It was well understood that the superstorm's harm would reach far beyond whatever wreckage it left in its path. Sandy's impact would spread far, wide, and quickly through the electric power grid—a vital lifeline that underpins every aspect of modern life, but one that is easily severed by falling trees and saltwater. Even before the storm hit, East Coast utilities summoned bucket trucks and work crews from the South and West, so they would be on hand to help repair downed power lines.
"It is virtually impossible to protect the system from a storm like Sandy," said Clark Gellings, a fellow at the industry's Electric Power Research Institute. Instead, he said, the industry focuses on a more achievable goal: "Can we do a better job at putting it all back together?"
By one measure, they did: Bucket-truck brigades enabled utilities to rapidly restore electricity to a large share of the 8.5 million homes and businesses in 16 states that lost power at the height of the storm.
Yet as of Friday morning, there were still nearly 3 million customers in New Jersey and New York without power, and 700,000 more in 11 states from Massachusetts to Virginia and as far west as Michigan. New Yorkers were crowding Manhattan coffee shops to cop electric charges for their cell phones. New Jerseyites queued with red canisters outside gas stations to get fuel for their home generators—but gas was short too, in part because there was no electricity to power the pumps . Consolidated Edison, the New York utility that was dealing with the largest disruption in its history, was hoping to get the lights back on in Lower Manhattan by Saturday. That was a revised goal, after New York Governor Andrew Cuomo declared Con Ed's original timetable of two weeks "unacceptable."
On Thursday, as the U.S. Air Force began airlifting more utility trucks from California to New York, others too were questioning whether the bucket-brigade strategy was good enough. Many energy industry experts were viewing Sandy as a wake-up call: proof of the need for massive investment to make the electric power grid more resilient against such a disaster. Massoud Amin, director of the Technological Leadership Institute at the University of Minnesota and a pioneer in grid research, notes that the East Coast power infrastructure is among the oldest in the nation. "That aging infrastructure is a marvel of 20th-century engineering," he said. "The question is how do we upgrade it for the 21st century?"
Large Blessings, Small Margins
The electric system could count some successes in the wake of Sandy. Thirty-four nuclear power plants—one-third of the U.S. total—lay in the massive hurricane's path, and there were no meltdowns or other disasters. The hurricane's landfall at Atlantic City was just 40 miles south of the nation's oldest nuclear power plant, Oyster Creek Generating Station; although the plant was offline for refueling, loss of power and flooding was a concern because of the need to keep the radioactive nuclear fuel from overheating. Oyster Creek shares the same design as Japan's Fukushima Daiichi plant, which suffered a catastrophic meltdown after the earthquake and tsunami in March 2011.
At Oyster Creek that didn't happen. The plant declared an "alert" for 36 hours when winds and heavy rains generated tides 6.8 feet above mean sea level at its water intake on the Forked River. But the water never rose high enough to impact the operation of plant equipment. When the electricity from the New Jersey grid went out, two locomotive-sized backup diesel generators started automatically and continued to power the crucial pumps that circulate cooling fluid through the reactor and the pool where spent fuel rods are stored. Cooling systems also continued to function at all three other nuclear reactors that experienced shutdowns—Indian Point and Nine Mile Point in New York, and Salem in New Jersey.
"This isn't the first time our plants have been through conditions like this," said Tom Kauffman of the Nuclear Energy Institute, an industry group. "We practice regularly and are continuously prepared."
Earlier this year, however, the U.S. Nuclear Regulatory Commission ordered the industry to reassess both its flooding and seismic risks, in light of the Fukushima accident. David Lochbaum, director of the nuclear safety project for the Union of Concerned Scientists, said Sandy underscores the wisdom of that decision.
"The Fukushima plant wasn't of appreciably lower quality or poorly constructed compared to the U.S. plants," Lochbaum said. "It was given a much more severe challenge. None of our reactors would have survived that either." If the water had risen another 21 inches at Oyster Creek, the plant's service pumps might have been submerged, according to NRC spokesman Neil Sheehan. That would have increased the risk of a loss-of-coolant disaster, although the plant had a back-up pump and the option of hosing the spent fuel with fire suppression system. In any case, it would be days until the cooling water would have been lost through evaporation.
Winds Versus Floods
In New York too, Hurricane Sandy drove home the point that the old benchmarks of risk might no longer apply. In one of the most dramatic videos captured the night the storm hit, a fireball burst over Manhattan's East Village when saltwater surged into one of Con Ed's substations. (Watch video below:)New York had never seen floodwaters higher than the 11-foot storm surge triggered by a hurricane in 1821. Con Ed had designed underground equipment at its voltage switching station to withstand a storm surge of 12.5 feet. But Sandy's waters reached 14 feet, flooding all of Lower Manhattan—and blowing up the substation. "Water and electricity don't mix, especially if you put salt in the water," said Gellings of EPRI.
Con Ed operates the world's largest underground electric distribution system, serving more than 3.3 million customers in New York City and neighboring Westchester County; more than 86 percent of its system is buried, including 94,000 miles of electric cables. Yet Sandy knocked out service to more than 900,000 of its customers.
Often, after storms that down overhead lines and cause widespread blackouts, public criticism of electric power companies centers around their resistance to making the investment in burying lines and other infrastructure to keep it safe from the wind. The damage that Sandy did to Con Ed proves that burying the systems is no fail-safe. To restore service, the utility is now pumping massive amounts of water out of the facilities, cleaning seawater from components, and drying, repairing, replacing, and inspecting equipment.
Though saltwater can be as damaging as wind, it may in the long run be easier to protect against. "You can make watertight compartments for the stuff that's underground," said Jeffrey Dagle, chief electrical engineer at the U.S. Department of Energy's Pacific Northwest National Laboratory. "It's all a matter of money." To make such investments, utilities in the United States would need to gain approval from state regulators whose job is to keep unnecessary costs from being passed along to customers. But Sandy might change the perception of what's necessary. "The process of managing risk is informed by past events," said Dagle. "If something has never happened before, it's hard to convince regulators to fund a project to prevent it from happening. If Con Ed went to the regulators next week, it might be a different story."
Smart as Well as Tough
But many industry observers stress the electric power system needs more than stronger defenses—it needs to be smarter. "Smart meters," touted for their ability to help consumers monitor and curb their energy use, also allow utilities to pinpoint accurately where outages occur and respond quickly.
"Many people don't realize this, but not too long ago, the only way a utility knew there was an outage was if a customer called," said Gary Racliffe of ABB, a major supplier of smart-grid equipment to utilities in North America and elsewhere. An industry survey done last May found that one third of U.S. households, 36 million in all, have had smart meters installed. Unfortunately none were in the service areas of the major New York or New Jersey utilities. Smart meters are expected to be in half of all American homes by 2015.
But utilities will probably invest even more heavily in the coming years on smart systems to automate and modernize the distribution of electricity. One example is "self-healing" systems that can automatically detect a fault on the grid—say, when a tree falls on a power line—interrupt and isolate that fault within milliseconds, then reroute the power to an adjacent feeder line. While homes adjacent to the downed tree might have no power until the crew comes to remove it, most of the customers on the line have their power restored within minutes.
Amin argues that the U.S. power industry, in partnership with the government, should be making an investment of about $30 billion a year over the next 20 years to upgrade distribution systems. (Con Ed has been using $136 million in federal stimulus money for that purpose.) Not only would new technology make power systems more resilient to storms, but it also would make them more efficient and more able to integrate energy from renewable sources such as the wind and the sun. Smart-grid technology, Amin estimates, could reduce the costs of outages by about $49 billion per year, and by reducing energy use, save customers $20.4 billion a year. "The costs of upgrading are far below the benefits we get," he said.
Like everyone else, Amin marveled at the reports of far-flung utility crews headed to the East Coast to help respond to Hurricane Sandy. "My hat goes off to them," he said. "But we can lessen the stress on them if we deploy a public-private partnership to make a smarter, stronger, more resilient grid and infrastructure. Not only can we do this, I am convinced we must do this. Secure and reliable operation of these networks is fundamental to national and international economy, security, and quality of life."
Tuesday, December 11, 2012
3 utilities face $24.8m in fines for faulty response to Tropical Storm Irene and Halloween snowstorm
The state of Massachusetts has issued an unprecedented $24.8 million in fines against three utilities for their inadequate response to the power outages that plunged hundreds of thousands of people in the dark after Tropical Storm Irene and the Halloween snowstorm last year.
The state Department of Public Utilities said the money would be returned to customers of the utilities. National Grid has been ordered to pay $18.725 million; NStar has been ordered to pay $4.075 million; and Western Massachusetts Electric Company has been assessed $2 million.
The fines were the first ever levied by the DPU against utilities for their storm responses. NStar immediately said it would appeal the fine to the state Supreme Judicial Court.
“Regulated utilities must be accountable to the residents they serve. After conducting a thorough investigation, the Department of Public Utilities has done just that,” Governor Deval Patrick said in a statement.
“I trust this will encourage the utilities to refocus their efforts on preparation for and response to weather events in the future,’’ the governor said.
Werner Schweiger, president of NStar Electric, said, “We strongly disagree with the department and are disappointed that they have dismissed the tireless effort put forth by our employees to respond to customers after these historic storms.”
“The amount of devastation our system sustained last fall cannot be understated – with an estimated 80 percent of our overhead circuits damaged after Irene alone. We were essentially rebuilding the electric system as we restored power, and the penalties assessed today are simply not in line with the realities of getting the job done,” he said.
In a statement, National Grid said it had not yet decided whether to appeal the fine.
“We will need some time to evaluate the order fully to consider our options going forward,” the company said.
The company said it had made many changes to its emergency plans that were put into practice during superstorm Sandy and last month’s nor’easter.
Regulators said their findings were based on 16 public hearings, 13 evidentiary hearings, and more than 1,200 exhibits. They concluded that the utilities failed in their public safety duties during their response to local public safety officials regarding downed wires.
“As the number of serious weather events has risen dramatically in Massachusetts, it’s crucial for ratepayers to have electric service that is both safe and reliable,’’ Energy and Environmental Affairs Secretary Rick Sullivan said in a statement.
The DPU found “systematic failures’’ in the National Grid response to the two storms, and ordered that the company hire an outside firm to review its practices and recommend new ways to respond to major storms.
National Grid “left local public safety officials standing by downed wires for as long as several days, had a seriously inadequate response for priority facilities like nursing homes and sewage treatment plants, and secured too few crews, too late,’’ officials said.
During Tropical Storm Irene, about half of NStar’s customers lost power, and the utility “performed reasonably under the circumstances,” the DPU concluded. But the department also found that the “company took far too long to respond to priority calls from public safety officials regarding downed wires and did a poor job of communicating with customers.’’
During the Halloween storm, the DPU said, NStar called customers to report their power had been restored, when, in fact, people were still in the dark.
Tropical Storm Irene did not hit Western Massachusetts, so the DPU focused on Western Massachusetts Electric Company’s response to the Halloween snowstorm. The DPU said WMECO was given credit for having “managed the storm well.’’
But WMECO, like the other utilities, did not respond fast enough to public safety officials when they reported downed power lines, the DPU found.
“The DPU understands that there will be many thousands of outages in bad storms like Tropical Storm Irene and the October snowstorm. These will not be the last severe storms we see, and the public cannot expect that the utilities can prevent outages in events of this magnitude,” Ann Berwick, chair of the DPU, said in a statement.
“On the other hand,” she added, “public safety will remain our absolutely highest priority, and we will not tolerate inadequate responses to local public safety officials. Additionally, in this day and age, we expect competent communications with towns and customers alike.”
Massachusetts Attorney General Martha Coakley said the fines sent a clear message that “customers deserve better.” Coakley’s office had recommended record penalties against the utilities and that the money be returned to customers.
Tuesday, December 04, 2012
After Hurricane, Some Begin To Question Wisdom of Rockaway Pipeline Project
Monday, December 03, 2012 | by Sarah Crean
Gotham Gazette
NEW YORK — Now that the construction of a new chain of natural gas pipelines running from the Rockaway peninsula to Brooklyn has been delayed following Superstorm Sandy, residents and elected officials are beginning to question whether the project is safe to build at all.
The exceedingly complex project would be constructed in separate phases — under the regulation of federal, state and local authorities — adjacent to coastal communities that were among the hardest hit during the storm.
U.S. Rep. Yvette Clarke, who represents central Brooklyn, told Gotham Gazette in an emailed statement that the destruction caused by Sandy had raised concerns among residents who live near the proposed gas pipeline project.
"Our need for independent energy cannot precede the safety of our community and environment," she said.
State Sen. Joseph Addabbo, whose new district includes the Rockaways, said he would organize a town hall meeting where residents could ask their questions about the project.
"Doing this simultaneously with Sandy becomes a daunting task," he said of the project. "People are trying to get their lives back."
He added that residents have come to him with some hard questions about the project. “This is a major endeavor," he continued. "What is the protection from a gas leak? What are the precautions? What is the time frame?”
National Grid spokeswoman Karen Young told Gotham Gazette that the storm had not affected phase one of the project — the utility’s plans to construct two gas pipelines underneath Jamaica Bay’s Rockaway Inlet. She added that they were "still meeting with all of the officials and agencies to determine the best time.”
A Nov. 21 project report filed with the Federal Energy Regulatory Commission by Oklahoma-based Williams Companies, which is also constructing sections of the pipeline, stated: “Construction originally planned for December 2012 is currently scheduled to begin in February 2013.”
Williams spokesman Chris Stockton said on Friday: “We’re still moving forward with our project. The hurricane has not changed our plans, nor has it changed the need for this project and the gas for the city." But, referring to the fact that Williams’ portion of the project had not yet received the necessary approvals, he added that there was "still a long way to go.”
Asked whether additional precautions needed to be taken during pipeline construction, Young said: “We had a robust plan in place, and the measures that we are planning to implement are above and beyond industry standards”.
She added that the pipeline had been designed to withstand flooding, would be buried underneath the seabed of Jamaica Bay and regularly monitored and inspected, especially during severe weather events.
Young stated that National Grid felt it had designed a "very safe” pipeline. She noted that the pipeline would have isolation valves that could be activated remotely in the event of an emergency.
The Rockaway pipeline is a key part of the energy initiatives outlined in PlaNYC, Mayor Bloomberg’s far-reaching sustainability plan.
The mayor’s office did not respond to questions regarding whether construction or ongoing maintenance of the Rockaway pipeline would need to be re-thought in light of the area’s vulnerability to future catastrophic storms.
SANDY'S ENVIRONMENTAL IMPACT
A full month after Sandy made landfall, the profound impact of the storm on both the residents and natural environment of the Rockaways is grimly evident.
Major arteries in the Rockaways were jammed with emergency and utility trucks on Saturday, and construction on damaged homes was visible throughout. In Breezy Point, the community closest to where pipeline construction will begin shortly, it was possible to see homes that had been torn off their foundations, and a car that had been incinerated almost beyond recognition by the fires that engulfed the area.
Much of the construction on the pipeline will take place in Gateway National Recreation Area, a 26,000-acre National Park, which includes ocean-facing Jacob Riis Park and the Jamaica Bay Wildlife Refuge. The Bay’s wildlife refuge is the only such refuge in the National Park System, according to the New York Harbor Conservancy.
Other sections of the park — which will eventually be adjacent to pipeline construction — are now serving as sites for hurricane clean-up and reconstruction efforts.
“The Bay has taken a big hit,” said Dan Mundy, vice-president of Jamaica Bay Eco-Watchers. He added that “tremendous amounts” of fuel oil and debris had entered Jamaica Bay as a result of the storm, and that two freshwater ponds had breached “in a very dramatic fashion." Mundy explained that tides had flushed out much of the oil, but he added that the post-storm period was a “critical time for mitigation”.
Just across the Bay, the scope of the tragedy of the storm is visible in the parking lots of Jacob Riis Park, which have been turned into a massive dumping ground for the remains of destroyed homes and other refuse. From the dumping ground, one can see the fences and other beach infrastructure torn apart by the reported 14-foot coastal storm surge that entered the area on the night of Oct. 29.
Because of its vulnerable position, areas around the Rockaway peninsula are now considered possible locations for storm barriers.
A key section of the Rockaway pipeline, to be constructed by Williams, will run directly underneath Jacob Riis Park, delivering gas from an off-shore pipeline to National Grid’s new mains underneath Jamaica Bay. The 10,000-mile Transco natural gas pipeline, which runs parallel to the Rockaway coast, is managed by Williams.
In a later phase of construction, National Grid will connect its cross-Bay lines to customers in Brooklyn and Queens, via a new gas meter and regulating station to be housed within a historic hangar at Floyd Bennett Field, and by eventually linking with an existing gas main on Flatbush Avenue.
The 60,000-square-foot meter station will be constructed by Williams. Parking lots behind the hangars at Floyd Bennett Field are currently a massive staging area for FEMA, the Red Cross, construction companies and scores of fuel tanker trucks.
The National Grid portion of the Rockaway pipeline project has been approved by the city and did not require a public review process or full-scale environmental review. Williams’ off-shore pipeline and meter station proposal, however, is still working its way through a federal environmental review process.
Chris Stockton said that Williams planned to submit a final proposal to the Federal Energy Regulatory Commission by late 2012 or early 2013. He said that based on the company’s experience with previous applications to FERC, the agency’s review of the proposal could take another eight months.
President Obama signed legislation Nov. 27 bringing the Rockaway pipeline project one step closer to reality. The New York City Natural Gas Enhancement Act authorizes the National Park Service to permit the pipeline and related infrastructure within the boundaries of Gateway National Recreation Area.
In a statement on the signing, Mayor Bloomberg said: “Given the destruction of Hurricane Sandy, this law could not come at a more critical time for New York City. This pipeline will help us build a stable, clean-energy future for New Yorkers and will ensure the reliability of the City’s future energy needs.” The mayor specifically thanked the bill’s sponsors, Sen. Charles Schumer and Congressmen Michael Grimm of Brooklyn and Staten Island, and Gregory Meeks of Queens.
ENVIRONMENTAL CONCERNS
The Rockaway pipeline project has spurred protests from some local residents and environmental groups, who have raised questions about possible impacts to coastal marine life, and whether a gas pipeline is an appropriate use for an urban park. The city’s commitment to natural gas — a fossil fuel — as an ongoing energy source has also proved controversial.
“This bill puts a pipeline under a popular beach and introduces private industrial use of a federal park, and it does so with no public input,” said Karen Orlando, a local resident and Floyd Bennett Garden Association member.
Local groups like Jamaica Bay Eco-Watchers are watching the federal review process closely, and believe that they may be able to impact decisions that are yet to be made. They also say that the Rockaway Pipeline speaks to public policy questions relevant to the entire city.
Mundy argued that if the Williams section of the pipeline project is to go forward, there must be a commitment to off-set some of the ecological damage that he said he believes will inevitably be inflicted by construction of a 2.79-mile pipeline on the ocean floor.
Another federal agency has raised questions similar to Mundy’s. In October, the Army Corps of Engineers wrote to FERC, requesting that Williams provide more specifics on the ocean floor trenching and dredging techniques it will use, and how the aquatic ecosystem off the Rockaways could be affected.
Stockton said that questions on the project raised by the Army Corps and other agencies would be addressed in the company’s final proposal to FERC.
Mundy said he believes that any possible damage to the ocean floor habitat should be offset by a focus on restoring Jamaica Bay’s saltwater marshes.
Marshes throughout the city have attracted new attention because they can help to blunt the impact of coastal storm surges. “The wetlands will be a big topic of discussion,” said Mundy. He added that not only are they a form of “soft infrastructure”, but they also help to absorb carbon from the atmosphere.
At the same time, Orlando argued that the placement of what she describes as “industrial infrastructure” within Floyd Bennett Field, “a couple hundred of feet from a community garden used by four to five-hundred members and their families” has broader implications for both private use of public space and government transparency.
She said the city "couldn’t do that in Prospect Park or Central Park.”
Saturday, December 01, 2012
Hurricane Sandy: how utilities are planning for power outages
Hurricane Sandy's wide wind field could affect much of the East Coast, and utility companies are preparing for power outages. One pioneering program could help. But what about drones?
With utility companies analyzing potential storm tracks for hurricane Sandy and deciding just how many utility crews to request to prepare for fallen power lines, Seth Guikema could be their best friend.
He is part of a pioneering attempt to help power companies allocate their men and equipment accurately by predicting how many people will be without power and where most outages will occur.
With forecasters predicting hurricane Sandy's landfall anywhere from Delaware to Massachusetts, his job is tough. But it is one part of the effort to improve upon power companies' widely criticized response to hurricane Irene last year, when hundreds of thousands of customers along the East Coast went without power for days. Some utilities are even talking about using drone aircraft to diagnose problem areas more quickly.
"We're seeing a lot better coordination this time between government and private utilities," says Mark Merritt, president of Witt Associates, a public safety and crisis management consulting firm in Washington. "There's a lot of effort going on right now to understand what the needs are and where."
Getting power back fast after an outage is a balancing act. Utilities managers who get it right have just enough men and trucks to do the job quickly, but not so many that they waste money. Get it wrong, and you feel the wrath of consumers.
Using a computer model, Dr. Guikema and his team at Johns Hopkins University in Baltimore are trying to help improve this decisionmaking process. Knowing how many people will lose power and where depends a lot on the quality of the data available. But Sandy is making that difficult.
"There's still a lot of uncertainty in the forecast tracks, so that makes it challenging in a case like this one," says Guikema, an assistant professor of geography and environmental engineering at Johns Hopkins' Whiting School of Engineering. "We take a track and then estimate the level of gusting winds and wind impact across the area and the damage it will cause – as well as the fraction of the people within each census track that will lose power."
The storm has grown daily with tropical-storm force winds extending 275 miles from the center, report researchers at the University of Miami. But that is expected to grow quickly with a "large wind field" impacting much of the East Coast.
Data from power companies can also help make forecasts more accurate, Guikema says. So far, one company has shared its data with his team.
"For our predictions to be useful there has to be enough lead time to call up the crews and materials," he says. "We aim to deliver data three to five days in advance. Right now, though, we're at the outer edge of the forecast, so there's still a lot of uncertainty."
For now, the team is running its model on the multiple tracks and refining that as the tracks converge. With hurricane Irene last August, the track was clear far sooner. The model suggested that utilities in the Maryland region were likely to need far more personnel than they initially planned – and it was proven correct. One utility, he says, announced before Irene arrived that it had a couple hundred crews to handle an expected 100,000 outages. But thousands of crews were eventually needed to handle about 630,000 outages.
Connecticut utilities, which also ran into problems after Irene, are reportedly among those calling up the 5,000 power company personnel requested for the Boston-Connecticut area. Other utilities, including those in Maryland and Washington, are ramping up personnel, too.
But drones? That's not a done deal, Mr. Merritt adds.
"There's a lot of sensitivity about drones," he says. "So it may not happen. But it would probably get the power back on faster."
Bloomberg defends ConEd against Hurricane Sandy criticisms
Critics said the utility should have had better protections against storm damage, but the mayor said he didn’t want to second guess the utility.
BY TINA MOORE / NEW YORK DAILY NEWS
FRIDAY, NOVEMBER 30, 2012,
Plenty of New Yorkers are grumbling about ConEd in the wake of rampant power outages that lasted long after Hurricane Sandy, but Mayor Bloomberg isn’t one of them.
He said Friday it’s best utility in America.
"I keep saying this and everybody wants to shoot me for it,” Hizzoner said Friday on his weekly radio show, “but they have done a very good job. And they did not have a lot of damage.”
ConEd was slammed by the storm that overwhelmed its key equipment including a crucial substation on the East River in Manhattan. Critics said the utility should have had better protections but Bloomberg said it’s hard to judge.
“They built a wall around their high-voltage thing — 12 feet. It never comes even remotely close to that. They had 14 feet of water,” he said. “It's easy to second guess. If they'd built it 15 feet and we had 16 feet ...”
The mayor has been a staunch champion of the utility for years, infuriating Queens residents when he rushed to ConEd’s defense during the 2006 Queens blackout.
“If you look at the national statistics, this happens to be virtually the best utility company in the country,” Bloomberg said Friday. “Are they perfect? No. And it's a lot of should have, would have and could have and second guessing but they have done a very good job.”
http://www.nydailynews.com/new-york/bloomberg-defends-coned-sandy-criticisms-article-1.1211026#ixzz2DoD2epMK
Monday, November 19, 2012
Toxic brew of Superstorm Sandy floodwater and fuel oil stinks up Manhattan Beach apt. building
Toxic brew of Superstorm Sandy floodwater and fuel oil stinks up apt. building
BY LORE CROGHAN / NEW YORK DAILY NEWS
SUNDAY, NOVEMBER 18, 2012,
It’s the stinkiest building in Brooklyn,
disgusted tenants charge.
Nauseating fumes from a nasty cocktail of fuel
oil and seawater are making them gag at 301 Oriental Blvd. in Manhattan Beach.
Superstorm Sandy is to blame — and a landlord
who’s maddeningly slow in cleaning up and repairing the apartment house,
several said.
“Every night my head hurts,” said tenant Marissa
Anastasia, 74, whose health is fragile after suffering a brain aneurysm four
years ago. “When I wake up in the morning I can’t breathe.”
The stink that won’t go away is a new twist in
the tales of woe coming from hard-hit Brooklyn waterfront neighborhoods where
thousands struggle with storm damage.
The killer storm flooded the Oriental Blvd.
building’s basement up to the ceiling and sprang leaks in oil stored for the
boiler, leaving behind 8,700 gallons of toxic brew.
Nearly three weeks after the savage storm the
stench lingers in the six-story property because work crews still haven’t
finished cleaning the sludge out of the basement.
Numerous tenants are holed up at 301 Oriental —
among them a wheelchair-bound 90-plus-year-old — despite a letter from the
landlord that warned, “If you choose to stay in the building you are doing so
at your own risk.”
Breathing fumes from spilled heating oil can
cause difficulty in concentrating, dizziness, headaches, increased blood
pressure, nausea and irritated eyes, nose and throat, health experts say.
In addition to the foul odor the 49-unit building
has no electricity and an emergency boiler provides heat and hot water only
briefly in the morning and evening.
Anastasia and her husband don’t have money for a
hotel or family they can stay with and don’t want to impose on friends whose
home they visit at night to watch TV.
“When I get up in the morning I feel dizzy,” said
Alex, 66, a school custodian.
“Our throats are so sore we’re hardly even
talking.”
The fuel fumes at the 1930s-vintage building
aren’t as overpowering as they were the first week after Sandy hit but they’re
still giving Mike Vosburgh frequent migraines.
“There are times I go in solitude and cry,” said
the retired postal service supervisor, 61.
His sister Sue, 57, said the darkness, cold and
stink have made their home feel “like a war zone.”
Tamara Berlyavsky kept the windows open in her
freezing apartment when she and her husband and daughter tried sleeping there.
“It smelled like a gas station,” she said.
After four nights they decided it was too
dangerous to be there and bailed out. Though they’re staying at a friend’s
house now her clothes still reek.
“I was in a meeting and was embarrassed,” the
civil engineer said. “I told people, ‘Don’t smell me.’”
Landlord Tomas Rosenthal of Hampshire Properties
said in a statement that he called in cleanup crews, plumbers and electricians
right after the storm and is “doing his outmost to provide relief and restore
all services as fast as possible.”
http://www.nydailynews.com/new-york/brooklyn/stinkiest-building-brooklyn-tenants-charge-article-1.1203371#ixzz2ChNVkBHw
Preparing the power grid for the next Sandy
CNNMoney
November 7, 2012
NEW YORK (CNNMoney) -- Hurricane Sandy left over eight million people along the East Coast without power. More than a week later, hundreds of thousands are still in the dark.
With a warming planet, it's likely there will be more Sandy-strength storms in the years to come.
At a press conference last week, New York Gov. Andrew Cuomo said the city needs to "not only rebuild, but rebuild stronger and smarter."
So how should the nation prepare?
Weather isn't the only reason to update the grid.
Power outages cost the nation between $80 billion and $180 billion each year, according to research by Massoud Amin, a senior member of Institute for Electrical and Electronics Engineers.
And they're getting worse. The number of major outages has doubled in the last 10 years.
"We're over harvesting the farm," said Amin. "We're trying to extract more and more from the same infrastructure."
Amin's solution is to build a more robust grid by adding more power plants, transmission lines, sensors and computing power -- basically expanding what has become known as the "smart grid."
Smart grid technology would enable the grid to quickly and automatically identify problem areas and isolate them from the grid at large, preventing broader outages, said Amin. It can also quickly locate problems, making repairs easier and faster.
It's not cheap -- he estimates the upgrades could cost in the vicinity of half a trillion dollars spread over a decade or two. But he expects them to save nearly $50 billion a year.
"Our infrastructure is a model of engineering, but for the 20th century," he said. "We need to bring it up to the 21st century."
Amin's plan is part of what the Electric Power Research Institute (EPRI) refers to as hardening -- basically making the existing stuff stronger.
That could include smart grid technology, but it could also include less sophisticated things like building higher water barriers around power substations, spraying sensitive equipment with water resistant coatings, or building telephone polls out of concrete, which can withstand winds twice as strong.
It could also include trimming more trees near power lines, or burying the lines underground -- although that's a pricey proposition and is not well suited to flood or earthquake-prone areas.
EPRI also recommends planning that goes beyond making things stronger.
To speed rebuilding after an outage, it's currently lobbying the Federal Aviation Administration to allow the use of drones to inspect utility lines -- something it says France already does. It's also working on apps that allow citizens to report the exact location of damaged equipment.
Still, outages will persist.
"You can never build a cost effective infrastructure that you can guarantee will stand up to the wrath of mother nature," said Arshad Mansoor, a senior vice president at EPRI.
To better cope when the power goes out, Mansoor recommends consumers prepare themselves with things like crank-powered radios and solar cell phone chargers.
He's also urging car companies to make vehicles that can double as generators. After all, the engine and alternator are already there, so all that would be needed are outlets for a few power strips.
Even better than building infrastructure that can withstand water is keeping the water out to begin with.
For years some have been urging New York City -- and other coastal areas -- to build massive sea barriers that can be quickly closed to keep out a storm surge -- similar to what exists in London, Rotterdam and Providence, R.I.
There's also an idea for a giant inflatable plug that could be stuffed in subway and road tunnels, which often contain power and water infrastructure as well.
Yet others urge caution in putting so much faith in technological fixes which often don't pan out.
"The 20th century is full of ambitious engineering projects that gave us false hope," said Bill Solecki, head of the CUNY Institute for Sustainable Cities at Hunter College.
In the Netherlands, spaces like parks and parking garages are specifically designed to take on water in the event of a flood, diverting it from more crucial areas, said Daniel Yeh, a professor of Civil and Environmental Engineering at the University of South Florida Tampa.
To make buildings without grid power more resilient, Yeh suggested greater deployment of rooftop wind and solar systems, as well as devices that can collect rainwater for drinking or bathing.
For new construction, designers should consider the possibility that buildings might not always have electricity, Yeh said. Too many buildings nowadays are designed with the assumption that air conditioning will always be available. Some don't even have windows that open. Buildings should instead be constructed with an eye toward natural air flow and shading, said Yeh.
Others argue that such measures are a side show to what really has to be done -- limiting the amount of heat-trapping gases entering the atmosphere each year.
"The best way to do this is to grab the bull by the horns and deal with the issue, which is the changing climate in the long run" New York's Democrat Senator Charles Schumer said at a press conference last week.
But even if limiting greenhouse gases is desirable -- a subject for debate -- gathering the political will to do so isn't likely to happen any time soon.
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