James McCarten
The Canadian Press
January 2, 2004

TORONTO (CP) – Blackout 2003 was a study in contradictions: a moment of empowerment sparked by the absence of power, a blanket of darkness that trained a spotlight on the best in human nature.

It came at 4:11 p.m. on a steamy August afternoon – a massive power outage that energized unsuspecting residents of Ontario and much of the northeastern United States even as it robbed them of electricity.

In the middle of chaotic downtown intersections, Good Samaritans appeared to pry helpless commuters free from a rush hour paralysed by lifeless traffic lights and frozen electric streetcars.

Cash was king again; without electricity, computers, credit cards and other essential accessories of life in the 21st century became nothing more than encumbrances. Gasoline was gold.

Downtown bars, restaurants and convenience stores offered comfort to anxious customers while hotels threw open their doors to those unwilling to brave the worst traffic jams in recent memory.

And as the sun vanished behind office towers, darkening parks blazed with candlelight beneath a canopy of stars never before seen from the heart of Canada’s most populous city.

"There is a real deep level of decency out there, and it was evident," said Tom Adams, director of Energy Probe, Canada’s leading power watchdog.

"There was a very good feeling that arose out of it in a lot of ways. People did help each other out, and we need to pat ourselves on our back for that."

It was the largest blackout in North American history, leaving some 50 million people across eight U.S. states and much of Ontario without power for anywhere from several hours to nearly a week.

The affected area included major U.S. cities such as New York and Cleveland and cost an estimated $6 billion US in lost business.

In Ontario, then-premier Ernie Eves declared a state of emergency, sent home non-essential government workers, urged the public to forgo air conditioning and asked industrial users to halve their usage.

As the outage persisted, tempers flared while long lines of cars snaked out of gas stations – most pumps stopped working without electricity – and Ontario hospitals cancelled scheduled appointments and surgeries.

Canadian businesses lost nearly 19 million lost work hours, Statistics Canada reported, while the Canadian economy, nearly half of which is rooted in Ontario, contracted sharply in August.

And it all began when three high-voltage transmission lines in Ohio were knocked out by untrimmed tree limbs, a report by Canadian and U.S. authorities confirmed last month.

FirstEnergy Corp. in Akron, Ohio, failed to take notice or inform neighbouring utilities about the problem because their control room alarm system and monitoring equipment weren’t working properly, the report said.

There were also problems at the Midwest Independent System Operator, which co-ordinates power transmission in the region but failed to deal with the problem before it got out of control.

"This blackout was largely preventable," U.S. Energy Secretary Spencer Abraham said in releasing the report last month.

"However, the report also tells that once the problem grew to a certain magnitude, nothing could have been done to prevent it from cascading out of control."

Mandatory reliability standards for the power grid exist in Canada but have long been voluntary in the U.S.; authorities say the blackout likely wouldn’t have occurred were American utilities held to Canadian standards.

"There needs to be consequences for people who do not follow the rules," Abraham said.

Natural Resources Minister Herb Dhaliwal has said Canada is investigating the possibility of buttressing its own east-west power system for "greater flexibility in times of trouble."

Ontario’s nuclear power plants all disconnected from the grid safely at the time of the blackout to ensure there was no health threat to workers or the public, Dhaliwal added.

But for Adams, Blackout 2003 exposed a fragile, aging and outdated power infrastructure on both sides of the Canada-U.S. border – especially chilling in an era of terrorism.

"The power grid is a weapon in the hands of those who would harm us," Adams said.

"Imagine what could be done by a malicious actor intent on causing harm. I think this should be a wakeup call. Our power grid is very fragile and it’s fragile not just to mechanical accidents like Aug. 14."

Despite official reassurances that the Canadian grid is robust, Adams said the time is now to examine a more decentralized system with more redundancies to avoid similar cascades of catastrophe in the future.

"A grid that’s more modular, more redundancy, that’s less reliant on any single big trunk lines," one modelled after the much more reliable Internet or phone networks, is what’s needed, he said.

"Here’s what our power grid can do, the kind of belly flop it can perform, when it’s not pushed," Adams said.

"We need to be planning a power grid for the future that’s more resilient. We can’t have our whole capability as a society hanging from such a fine thread."

Being linked with the U.S. grid is a benefit that saves industrial consumers a lot of money, said David Goldsmith, president of the Association of Major Power Consumers of Ontario.

"I don’t think we want to throw the baby out with the bath water and rebuild the entire system, or build huge amounts of redundancies in there," Goldsmith said.

"It’s a good thing to be interconnected."

But the Ontario government’s blanket request that companies cut their consumption by 50 per cent was impossible for many manufacturers to meet, since they either run at full capacity or not at all.

"In a gross sense, it was not unreasonable, but on a plant-by-plant basis, or a customer-by-customer basis, it was hugely impractical," Goldsmith said. Playing politics at a time of crisis didn’t help either, he added.

"Anyone who didn’t respond was threatened with the government coming in and going to the press and saying, ‘so and so ran on the backs of the residents.’ They made it very, very unpleasant behind the scenes."

Eves, fresh from an aborted attempt to introduce competition to the province’s power grid and a hasty rate freeze six months later when the cost of power soared, was indeed fired up by the blackout after being initially slow off the mark.

His frequent briefings and level-headed, soporific style emanated from battery-powered radios across the province, soothing jangled nerves and lending his approval ratings a badly needed jolt.

Internal reviews of his performance were so strong that he called an election just weeks later, only to be trounced by the opposition Liberals under leader Dalton McGuinty.

But Adams said he has his doubts about whether voters were really listening to Eves when he urged people to cut their power consumption in the days after the lights came back on.

"It was coming from a premier who had no credibility on electricity issues," he said. "People didn’t take him very seriously."

It remains unclear just how much of a dent residential users made during the power shortage, or indeed whether they made much of an effort at all. Their consumption rates didn’t change all that much.

But numbers can be deceiving, said Terry Young, spokesman for the province’s Independent Market Operator, which governs Ontario’s electricity market.

With so many people staying home from work, the fact that consumption remained flat means that a great many people were indeed cutting back, Young said.

"We did see a lot of savings from residents; we did see people cutting back on their air conditioning, and we saw a lot of people not using electricity during peak hours," he said.

Eves asked residents to avoid running major appliances like dishwashers and clothes dryers until after peak hours, and that’s exactly what happened, Young added.

"The way that businesses, industries and residents responded was truly remarkable."

For Adams, Step One towards a more resilient power grid would be to mothball the province’s notoriously slow and unreliable nuclear power facilities in favour of more gas-fired and hydroelectric power.

Ontario’s existing gas and hydro plants were instrumental in getting the province back up and running because they can go from full stop to full power in a matter of minutes, he said.

To offset the often high cost of natural gas, countries like Denmark use co-generation, harnessing the waste heat that’s produced when burning fuel to spin electrical turbines.

"If you go to Copenhagen and take a shower, the heat that’s coming to warm up your toes is coming from places like the Carlsberg brewery," Adams said.

"At Carlsberg, they generate power, beer and warm showers all at the same time."