John Spears
Toronto Star
August 16, 2003

Ontario’s electricity system has been studied, analyzed, reformed, tweaked and overhauled for a decade.

Somehow, we’ve still ended up with the biggest blackout in the province’s history.

While no one is happy with the massive blackout, even critics of the province’s power policies acknowledge that it may not be too surprising for a system as complex as the power grid to fail once every 40 years – the last major catastrophe was in 1965.

And while the latest blackout was evidently triggered by failures in the U.S. which cascaded into Canada, the wires that imported the current problems are the same wires that brought electricity into Ontario and kept the province’s lights on last summer and winter when the province was short of electricity.

U.S. officials still haven’t pinpointed the initial failure that started the domino effect all over northeastern North America, affecting 50 million people.

But Bruce Campbell of the Independent Electricity Market Operator (IMO), which runs Ontario’s power system, says the failure created what engineers call a "sink."

The initial breakdown, which may have been in Ohio, suddenly left a large area of big power users without power, but still trying to draw electricity over the wires.

"When that happens, it just sucks power from anywhere it can," Campbell said. "It’s like a tidal wave in reverse."

As vast amounts of power try to surge through the system they overload circuits, which fail in their turn, creating an even bigger "sink" that destabilizes the system even further.

And it all happens in seconds – less than 10 seconds, according to Michehl Gent of the Northeastern Electric Reliability Council, which oversees power flows in the northeastern quadrant of the continent

Why isn’t there some sort of mechanism in place to isolate major problems before they expand exponentially?

That’s the question no one could answer yesterday. And since a similar event happened in 1965, blacking out eastern North America, questions will be asked as to why safeguards put in place following that failure somehow failed to prevent this one.

One complicating factor this time, which wasn’t present in 1965, is the huge reliance on nuclear generators, which now supply close to 40 per cent of Ontario’s power, and large proportions of power in the U.S.

Nuclear generators are not nimble operators.

When the power system collapsed, the nuclear generators had nowhere to send their power. Massive circuit breakers disconnected them from the power grid with a bang audible for kilometres. Steam used to drive now-idle turbines had to be released in clouds.

But the nuclear reaction continued to the heart of the plants, producing heat with no outlet.

Throttling back the reaction in a nuclear plant is not easy, and strict safety rules must be followed. Bruce Power managed to ease back three of their four reactors to about half-power, releasing the heat produced into Lake Huron’s cooling waters.

But at Pickering and Darlington, the process wasn’t as smooth. Operators were forced to completely shut down all Pickering’s reactors, and three of four at Darlington, to prevent overheating. While one Darlington reactor was back up yesterday, Pickering remained out.

It will likely be the middle of next week before all the nuclear units are back in service.

Losing the units underlines the power shortage in Ontario.

Little more than a year ago, in June, 2002, then-energy minister Chris Stockwell assured Ontarians: "We have an adequate supply of power."

Yesterday, with the nukes out and the system hampered as it struggled to re-establish itself, the province was short thousands of megawatts of power, which meant the IMO had to ration the pain through rolling blackouts.

In the U.S., Gent, who heads the North American Electric Reliability Council, faced the music. "I am personally embarrassed and upset that this happened," he said. "My job is to see that this doesn’t happen, and you can say I’ve failed at my job."

Ontario residents might be as puzzled as Gent as to what went wrong, after all the brainpower that’s been put to work on the system.

It was almost 10 years ago, with the old Ontario Hydro drowning in red ink, that the province brought in Maurice Strong to start overhauling the system.

A panel led by Donald Macdonald was subsequently set up to draft a plan for a new system, and it duly recommended, in 1996, a market-based electricity system.

Mike Harris’ Tories began the work of privatizing and pushing the system toward more market-based systems in 1998. A power market opened in 2002, only to have Premier Ernie Eves slam the brakes on power reform last November.

In the meantime, Ontario’s power system had become increasingly interwoven with that of neighbours such as New York, Michigan and Quebec – a trend that’s evolved since1965.

Why couldn’t all this effort, all this thought, design a system that wouldn’t suffer a disastrous breakdown?

No one has answers yet, since no one’s exactly sure what triggered the failure, but most observers were refraining from finger-pointing.

"It’s unrealistic to expect perfection," said Tom Adams of Energy Probe in an interview.

A more puzzling question is why fail-safe mechanisms aren’t built in to stop big failures from growing into catastrophic ones, Adams said.

Some jurisdictions did escape the worst of the damage. New England’s power system operator, for example, was able to isolate its area from the cascading failure more effectively than most, sparing thousands of customers from blackouts. Were they luckier, or smarter than other system operators? No one knows, yet.

But some experts were cautioning that isolation isn’t necessarily the best solution. Ontario was importing close to 15 per cent of its power last summer and winter because it didn’t have enough of its own, points out Adams. "The suggestion that we disconnect our power system from our neighbours’ would have brought us to blackout sooner," he said.

Jan Carr, an industry consultant, noted that failures can occur as easily in small, isolated power systems as they can in a big, interconnected one. The interconnected systems can draw on their neighbours in tough times; the flipside is occasionally they all go down together.

Carr points out that Quebec is a largely self-contained system, with enormous supplies of its own. But when the ice storm wreaked havoc on its power system, Quebec found it could have used more interconnections with neighbours.

Ontario’s electricity system has been studied, analyzed, reformed, tweaked and overhauled for a decade.