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."

http://www.huffingtonpost.com/2012/11/01/power-outages-sandy_n_2060236.html

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."

http://news.msn.com/us/utility-pole-shortage-delays-sandy-power-restoration

Can Hurricane Sandy Shed Light on Curbing Power Outages?

Marianne Lavelle

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." 

http://news.nationalgeographic.com/news/energy/2012/11/121102-hurricane-sandy-power-outages/

3 utilities face $24.8m in fines for faulty response to Tropical Storm Irene and Halloween snowstorm

By Peter Schworm and John R. Ellement, Boston Globe

12/11/2012

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.

http://www.boston.com/metrodesk/2012/12/11/three-utilities-facing-million-fines-for-faulty-response-tropical-storm-irene-and-halloween-snowstorm/SwiaTiLjeXKrO6XvXrmocJ/story.html

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

Steve Hargreaves 

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.

http://money.cnn.com/2012/11/07/news/economy/power-grid-sandy/index.html

Hurricane Power Outages After Sandy Not Extraordinary, According To Report Analyzing Katrina, Past Storms

By JONATHAN FAHEY 11/16/12 

AP

NEW YORK -- As the number of nights without power stretched on for thousands left in the dark after Superstorm Sandy, patience understandably turned to anger and outrage.

But an Associated Press analysis of outage times from other big hurricanes and tropical storms suggests that, on the whole, the response to Sandy by utility companies, especially in hardest-hit New York and New Jersey, was typical – or even a little faster than elsewhere after other huge storms.

The AP, with the assistance of Ventyx, a software company that helps utilities manage their grids, used U.S. Energy Department data to determine how many days it took to restore 95 percent of the peak number of customers left without power after major hurricanes since 2004, including Ivan, Katrina, Rita, Wilma, Ike and Irene.

After Sandy, New York utilities restored power to at least 95 percent of customers 13 days after the peak number of outages was reported. New Jersey reached that same level in 11 days and West Virginia in 10 days.

Hurricanes Katrina, Rita and Wilma in 2005 and Ike in 2008 all resulted in longer outages for customers in Louisiana, Texas, Mississippi and Florida.

The longest stretch to 95 percent restoration since 2004 was Louisiana after Hurricane Katrina, where local utilities had power restored to only three-quarters of their customers after 23 days before Hurricane Rita hit and caused additional outages.

Rita left Texas customers in the dark for 16 days; Katrina knocked out power to Mississippi customers for 15 days; Wilma and Ike knocked Florida and Texas out for 14 days each before power was restored to 95 percent of those who lost it, according to the federal data.

New York and New Jersey recovered far faster after last year's Hurricane Irene. It took seven days for New York to restore 95 percent of customers and six days for New Jersey. But the number of outages in each state was less than half than from Sandy.

The restoration target of 95 percent allowed the AP to compare responses to the largest number of recent storms using Energy Department data, and is considered by industry experts to provide a meaningful picture of the speed with which utilities restored service to the vast majority of customers.

A week or two without power is, without question, a difficult and frustrating hardship. There's the spoiled food in the fridge and the dark nights. There's the fire danger from relying on candles. No electricity also can mean no heat. In tall apartment buildings, it means no elevator service, a serious problem for the infirm or elderly who can't navigate stairs. For those who rely on mobile phones for communication, it means no way to charge phones – and therefore no way to communicate with loved ones or emergency services.

Michael Redpath of Toms River, N.J. was without power for 15 days before getting it back this week. He and his wife stayed in their home for the first week after Sandy because their friends also had lost power. As some power in the region was restored, and Redpath's wife got sick from too many nights in the cold, they started staying over with friends.

"It's just so disorienting to be without power, to be out of your house and to not know what's going on," he says.

Determining the quality of a utility's restoration efforts after an outage is difficult to do, experts say. That's because every storm generates a unique cocktail of mayhem that differs from location to location.

Just because New York and New Jersey utilities restored power in a range that is normal by historical standards does not prove that all of the utilities in the region performed equally well, or that they performed better or worse than their peers responding to outages in other states, or that there isn't plenty of room for improvement.

Frustrated residents, business owners and state and local officials lashed out at their electric utilities. Gov. Andrew Cuomo of New York formed a commission to investigate the responses of utilities in his state, and the operations chief of one utility, the Long Island Power Authority, resigned.

Cuomo called LIPA "beyond repair" and also expressed frustration with the performance of Consolidated Edison, the electric utility for New York City and Westchester County to the north.

Also, a positive general performance doesn't create any goodwill for those still suffering.

Sam Kusack, who owns an architectural metal fabrication shop in Red Hook, Brooklyn, was still without power Thursday, 17 days after going dark. Red Hook is in an isolated section of Brooklyn, and Con Edison only began laying new underground wires near his shop this week.

Workers told him power would be back by Friday, but, Kusack said, the utility had called him several times in the early days of the crisis to say his power would soon be restored. Those calls stopped long ago, and Kusack has continued to rely on a generator that gobbles expensive diesel fuel.

"It was a big storm, but it's been a while," he said. "It's tough to run a company on a generator, with no power. I have 25 employees, and a payroll to meet."

The fact that it has taken utilities roughly the same amount of time to restore the vast majority of customers as after similar-sized storms suggests that restoring power after an enormous weather event is simply a long, difficult process.

"The work is no magic, it's hard, grueling work," says Arshad Mansoor of the Electric Power Research Institute, an industry-funded technology research group.

Sandy's most prominent feature was its enormous footprint and record number of outages. All told, Sandy caused 8.5 million power outages across 21 states, the highest outage total ever.

The Edison Electric Institute, an industry group, estimates 67,000 workers from utilities and other firms in several states worked to restore power, but they faced a huge volume of work. For example, New Jersey's biggest utility, Public Service Electric & Gas, had to cut down 41,000 trees, replace 2,500 poles and install 1,000 new transformers. At its peak, 77 percent of PSE&G'S 2.2 million customers lost power.

Sandy also dumped 2-to-3 feet of snow in West Virginia, knocking power out to a quarter of that state's customers. And efforts to restore power along coastal properties were complicated by a storm surge that flooded dozens of substations on Long Island, in New York City and in New Jersey. For example, a storm surge and subsequent explosion at a substation on the East Side of Manhattan plunged the lower third of that borough into darkness.

Equipment in all of those substations had to be cleaned or replaced before the substations could be re-energized. Only then could utilities see if the lines between each substation and the thousands of customers each one serves also had to be repaired.

Utilities first fix problems that affect the largest number of customers, then work their way down to smaller problems affecting handfuls of customers. With Sandy and other big storms there are also thousands of customers who cannot get power because their homes are damaged and it is not possible or safe for the utility to restore power.

This restoration approach is reasonable, experts say, but it leads to intense frustration when those last few in the dark see their neighbors back to normal. Customers are generally understanding for two days without power, utility officials say. Then they are not.

Those last few homes and businesses, such as Kusack's firm, are often the hardest to restore; on many occasions, the days turn into weeks. After Con Edison restored power to nearly all of its customers 10 days after the storm, it said it was facing 3,600 restoration jobs in Westchester County that involved 11 or fewer customers each. LIPA said midday Thursday that 2,942 customers were still without power, not including those in flooded areas who cannot receive power until their own equipment is repaired and certified.

This is all part of a utility's job, of course. Delivering power reliably is the single most important task for an electric utility. Without question, some do a better job of planning, managing logistics and communication with customers and local officials than others.

"Not every utility is the same, not every utility is in the same state of readiness," says David Wright, president of the National Association of Regulatory Utility Commissioners.

EPRI's Mansoor said one indication that planning in the region affected by Sandy was good is that utilities did not run low on workers, poles, transformers, or other supplies. "Crews were available, spare parts were available," he said. "That was not an issue in this recovery."

New Jersey Gov. Chris Christie has defended the response of the utilities in his state, and perhaps for good reason. Sixty-five percent of New Jersey utility customers lost power, 2.6 million homes and businesses. Compared with other big storms, New Jersey's utilities restored power to most customers in the shortest amount of time for a state with such a high percentage of outages.

A common complaint from residents throughout the region: The lack of accurate communication about when power would be restored.

Redpath, who is served by Jersey Central Power & Light, said he understands that the restoration job was enormous and would have understood if it took utilities three or four weeks to restore power. But for an entire week he was told almost daily that power would be restored the next day. He said he just happened to discover the power had finally been restored when he noticed the lights were on his neighbor's porch while driving by.

"I think (JCP&L) did a phenomenal job of marshaling resources, and the people on the ground did a phenomenal job," he said. "The problem was a combination of misinformation and no information. We would have managed differently if we knew what to expect."

http://www.huffingtonpost.com/2012/11/16/hurricane-power-outages-after-sandy_n_2146393.html

New York Is Lagging as Seas and Risks Rise, Critics Warn

September 10, 2012

By MIREYA NAVARRO

NY Times

With a 520-mile-long coast lined largely by teeming roads and fragile infrastructure, New York City is gingerly facing up to the intertwined threats posed by rising seas and ever-more-severe storm flooding.

So far, Mayor Michael R. Bloomberg has commissioned exhaustive research on the challenge of climate change. His administration is expanding wetlands to accommodate surging tides, installing green roofs to absorb rainwater and prodding property owners to move boilers out of flood-prone basements.

But even as city officials earn high marks for environmental awareness, critics say New York is moving too slowly to address the potential for flooding that could paralyze transportation, cripple the low-lying financial district and temporarily drive hundreds of thousands of people from their homes.

Only a year ago, they point out, the city shut down the subway system and ordered the evacuation of 370,000 people as Hurricane Irene barreled up the Atlantic coast. Ultimately, the hurricane weakened to a tropical storm and spared the city, but it exposed how New York is years away from — and billions of dollars short of — armoring itself.

“They lack a sense of urgency about this,” said Douglas Hill, an engineer with the Storm Surge Research Group at Stony Brook University, on Long Island.

Instead of “planning to be flooded,” as he put it, city, state and federal agencies should be investing in protection like sea gates that could close during a storm and block a surge from Long Island Sound and the Atlantic Ocean into the East River and New York Harbor.

Others express concern for areas like the South Bronx and Sunset Park in Brooklyn, which have large industrial waterfronts with chemical-manufacturing plants, oil-storage sites and garbage-transfer stations. Unless hazardous materials are safeguarded with storm surges in mind, some local groups warn, residents could one day be wading through toxic water.

“A lot of attention is devoted to Lower Manhattan, but you forget that you have real industries on the waterfront” elsewhere in the city, said Eddie Bautista, executive director of the New York City Environmental Justice Alliance, which represents low-income residents of industrial areas. “We’re behind in consciousness-building and disaster planning.”

Other cities are also tackling these issues, at their own pace.

New shoreline development around San Francisco Bay must now be designed to cope with the anticipated higher sea levels under new regional regulations imposed last fall. In Chicago, new bike lanes and parking spaces are made of permeable pavement that allows rainwater to filter through it. Charlotte, N.C., and Cedar Falls, Iowa, are restricting development in flood plains. Maryland is pressing shoreline property owners to plant marshland instead of building retaining walls.

Officials in New York caution that adapting a city of eight million people to climate change is infinitely more complicated and that the costs must be weighed against the relative risks of flooding. The last time a hurricane made landfall directly in New York City was more than a century ago.

Many decisions also require federal assistance, like updated flood maps from the Federal Emergency Management Agency that incorporate sea level rise, and agreement from dozens of public agencies and private partners that own transportation, energy, telecommunications and other infrastructure.

“It’s a million small changes that need to happen,” said Adam Freed, until August the deputy director of the city’s Office of Long-Term Planning and Sustainability. “Everything you do has to be a calculation of the risks and benefits and costs you face.”

And in any case, Mr. Freed said, “you can’t make a climate-proof city.”

So city officials are pursuing a so-called resilience strategy that calls for strengthening the city’s ability to weather the effects of serious flooding and recover from it.

Flooding Threat Grows

Unlike New Orleans, New York City is above sea level. Yet the city is second only to New Orleans in the number of people living less than four feet above high tide — nearly 200,000 New Yorkers, according to the research group Climate Central.

The waters on the city’s doorstep have been rising roughly an inch a decade over the last century as oceans have warmed and expanded. But according to scientists advising the city, that rate is accelerating, because of environmental factors, and levels could rise two feet higher than today’s by midcentury. More frequent flooding is expected to become an uncomfortable reality.

With higher seas, a common storm could prove as damaging as the rare big storm or hurricane is today, scientists say. Were sea levels to rise four feet by the 2080s, for example, 34 percent of the city’s streets could lie in the flood-risk zone, compared with just 11 percent now, a 2011 study commissioned by the state said.

New York has added bike lanes, required large buildings to track and reduce their energy use, banned the dirtiest home heating oils, and taken other steps to reduce the emissions that contribute to global warming. But with shoreline development that ranges from public beaches to towering high rises — and a complex mix of rivers, estuaries, bays and ocean — the city needs to size up the various risks posed by rising seas before plunging ahead with vast capital projects or strict regulations, city officials argue.

Yet the city’s plan for waterfront development dismisses any notion of retreat from the shoreline. Curbing development or buying up property in flood plains, as some smaller cities have done, is too impractical here, city officials say, especially because the city anticipates another million residents over the next two decades.

Rather, the city and its partners are incorporating flood-protection measures into projects as they go along.

Consolidated Edison, the utility that supplies electricity to most of the city, estimates that adaptations like installing submersible switches and moving high-voltage transformers above ground level would cost at least $250 million. Lacking the means, it is making gradual adjustments, with about $24 million spent in flood zones since 2007.

Some steps taken by city agencies have already subtly altered the city’s looks. At Brooklyn Bridge Park, a buffer between the East River and neighborhoods like Dumbo, porous riprap rock and a soft edge of salt-resistant grass have been laid in to help absorb the punch of a storm surge. Sidewalk bioswales, or vegetative tree pits that can fill up with rainwater to reduce storm water and sewage overflows and also minimize flooding, are popping up around the city.

Over all, the city is hoping to funnel more than $2 billion of public and private money to such environmental projects over the next 18 years, officials say.

“It’s a series of small interventions that cumulatively, over time, will take us to a more natural system” to deal with climate change, said Carter H. Strickland, the city’s environmental commissioner.

Planning experts say it is hard to muster public support for projects with uncertain or distant benefits.

“There’s a lot of concern about angering developers,” said Ben Chou, a water-policy analyst at the Natural Resources Defense Council.

New York planners have proposed requiring developers to assess the climate-change risks faced by new buildings so they can consider protection like retractable watertight gates for windows. But no such requirements have been imposed so far.

While some new buildings are being elevated or going above current required flood protections — like a new recycling plant on a Brooklyn pier and the Port Authority’s transit hub at the World Trade Center site — most new construction is not being adapted to future flood risks yet, industry representatives said.

Some experts argue that the encounter with Hurricane Irene last year and a flash flood in 2007 underscored the dangers of deferring aggressive solutions.

Klaus H. Jacob, a research scientist at Columbia University’s Earth Institute, said the storm surge from Irene came, on average, just one foot short of paralyzing transportation into and out of Manhattan.

If the surge had been just that much higher, subway tunnels would have flooded, segments of the Franklin D. Roosevelt Drive and roads along the Hudson River would have turned into rivers, and sections of the commuter rail system would have been impassable or bereft of power, he said.

The most vulnerable systems, like the subway tunnels under the Harlem and East Rivers, would have been unusable for nearly a month, or longer, at an economic loss of about $55 billion, said Dr. Jacob, an adviser to the city on climate change and an author of the 2011 state study that laid out the flooding prospects.

“We’ve been extremely lucky,” he said. “I’m disappointed that the political process hasn’t recognized that we’re playing Russian roulette.”

With more rain and higher seas, some envision more turmoil — like mile after mile of apartment buildings without working elevators, lights or potable water.

“That’s a key vulnerability,” said Rafael Pelli, a Manhattan architect who serves on a climate-change committee that advises the Department of City Planning. “If you have to relocate 10,000 people, how do you do that?”

Barriers to Block Tides

Some New Yorkers argue that the answer lies not in evacuation, but in prevention, like armoring city waterways with the latest high-tech barriers. Others are not so sure.

At a recent meeting of Manhattan community board leaders in Harlem, Robert Trentlyon, a resident of Chelsea, argued for sea gates.

A 2004 study by Mr. Hill and the Storm Surge Research Group at Stony Brook recommended installing movable barriers at the upper end of the East River, near the Throgs Neck Bridge; under the Verrazano-Narrows Bridge; and at the mouth of the Arthur Kill, between Staten Island and New Jersey. During hurricanes and northeasters, closing the barriers would block a huge tide from flooding Manhattan and parts of the Bronx, Brooklyn, Queens, Staten Island and New Jersey, they said.

City officials say that sea barriers are among the options being studied, but others say such gates could interfere with aquatic ecosystems and with the flushing out of pollutants, and may eventually fail as sea levels keep rising.

And then there is the cost. Installing barriers for New York could reach nearly $10 billion.

There is more agreement on how to protect the subway system. Several studies have advised the Metropolitan Transportation Authority to move quickly to increase pumping capacity at stations, raise entrances and design floodgates to block water from entering.

In 2009, a commission warned that global warming posed “a new and potentially dire challenge for which the M.T.A. system is largely unprepared.”

Five years ago, a summer-morning deluge brought about 3 1/2 inches of rain in two hours and paralyzed the system for hours, stranding 2.5 million riders.

That prompted the transit agency to spend $34 million on improvements like raising some ventilation grates nine inches above sidewalks and building steps that head upward, before descending, at flood-prone stations. All the money came from the agency’s capital budget, which also pays for subway cars and buses.

“This is a vicious circle of the worst kind,” Projjal Dutta, the transportation agency’s director of sustainability, said of the financial effect. “You’re cutting public transportation, which cuts down greenhouse gases, to harden against climate change.”

http://www.nytimes.com/2012/09/11/nyregion/new-york-faces-rising-seas-and-slow-city-action.html?_r=1&hp