Power outages, growing threat of blackouts signal national infrastructure problem

Tuesday, July 25, 2006

Invisible and reliable, electric power goes unnoticed until the lights, air conditioning and other modern comforts and necessities won’t come on and daily life is disrupted.

Outages in St. Louis and Queens, New York, and public pleas by California utility managers to customers to conserve and help avert grid meltdowns are omens that Americans should get used to the idea of future discomfort, said an Oklahoma State University professor.

According to Dr. Rama Ramakumar, PSO/Albrecht Naeter Professor of electrical engineering at OSU, consumers should prepare for less reliable supply every summer when rising temperatures drive demand to new heights beyond the load capacity of the country’s aging electric power infrastructure. Or, we can prepare for an increase in electric bills, which is the likely source of revenue that will be required to replace old transformers, transmission cables, and other components and modernize grids.

The New York Times reported on July 25 that equipment failure forced the utility Consolidated Edison to choose between shutting down its grid, causing a major blackout that might have been fixed quickly, or keeping power flowing during repairs and risking additional system damage. Managers opted for the latter, and when more supply cables failed, a blackout began for eight days as technicians struggled to restore service.

To see how aging infrastructure compounds disaster, Oklahomans need only to recall the ice storm of January 2002, when almost 250,000 homes and businesses lost power, some for more than 22 days. Texas repair crews sent to the state to help restore hundreds of miles of downed power lines said thousands of the snapped poles should have been replaced years earlier, having stood in place long past their recommended use.

Ramakumar, director of OSU’s Engineering Energy Laboratory, said electric power system reliability will not improve until problems with the aging infrastructure are seriously addressed. He says nearly 50% of some grid systems have been in place for 50 years and others for 100 years. The growth of regional power markets following industry deregulation has led to uneasy cooperation between electric utility providers who, while willing to share the infrastructure, are less willing to share in grid maintenance and modernization.

OSU’s School of Electrical and Computer Engineering has been a national leader in power engineering since its energy research program was established in 1960. Power engineering is no longer as high-profile an emphasis as semiconductor fabrication, optics/lasers, telecommunications, or nanotechnology, but it remains just as vital to the nation’s well-being. Disruption costs are inestimable; power outages limit productivity and threaten national security and lives. While many universities have eliminated or downsized energy/power engineering teaching and research programs, nearly one-third of the workforce may need to be replaced in the next five years.

Since its inception 31 years ago, OSU’s Engineering Energy Lab has generated seven U.S. patents, 19 doctoral dissertations, one textbook, an endowed professorship and more than 300 publications. Its programs have attracted to OSU more than $3 million in external funding from agencies such as the National Science Foundation, the Department of Energy, the United Nations and the U.S. Air Force. The lab has enjoyed 31 years of continuous industry support from local and regional electric utilities, including OG&E, PSO/CSW/AEP and OMPA.