Researchers to study summer power failures

After a rash of power failures this summer caused headaches for millions of customers in some of the nation’s major cities, two UW–Madison engineers at the Power Systems Research Engineering Center have joined a national effort to shed light on blackouts.

Electrical and computer engineering professors Fernando Alvarado and Christopher DeMarco are part of the PSERC team selected by the U.S. Department of Energy to investigate failures in those regions.

The goal is to discover any common threads in those outages that can help inform a national effort for blackout prevention. The 15-member team was assembled by Energy Secretary Bill Richardson after the summer’s high-profile blackouts raised worries. Alvarado is working with leaders of utilities and regulatory agencies in New Orleans, while DeMarco is studying the Chicago failures.

“There are many issues regarding electrical power that are national in character,” says DeMarco. “This is an industry where a lot of the hardware has been taken for granted for a decade or more. And with a recently deregulated industry, there are many more energy players in the market and more impetus to share power over longer distances.”

The end result may be new and under-appreciated stresses on the nation’s power grid, which increase the risk of failures during peak-use times like last summer’s heat wave. DeMarco says the team’s goal is to provide enough information for DOE to make national recommendations to prevent another wave of future blackouts.

Alvarado says the study teams should have their reports complete by November and a final report will be submitted to DOE in early December. Alvarado is part of the smaller group that will write the final report. In addition to probing the blackouts, Alvarado says his study team identified several near-misses that could have caused trouble in New Orleans. They are investigating many areas of concern, including the age of the system, operating protocols, the impact of deregulation, emergency guidelines and inadequacies in the system design. Alvarado says they need to separate the larger system issues from local problems and plain bad luck.

PSERC is a six-university consortium headquartered at Cornell University. The UW–Madison effort, directed by electrical and computer engineer Robert Lasseter, specializes in studying the interface between the energy market and the physical systems that support it.