Forum clashes on ways to safeguard power grid

- A pair of government agencies snarled at each other recently as a Canada-U.S. task force probing the August blackout held a public forum.

Hydro One, which owns most of Ontario's long-distance transmission lines, and the Independent Electricity Market Operator (IMO) clashed over who should be responsible for ensuring the reliability of Ontario's power system.

Only nine speakers took the floor during a session lasting two hours, including a break.

Dave Barrie, senior vice-president of Hydro One Networks — the main operating arm of Hydro One — told the panel his company operates 97 per cent of Ontario's transmission grid and is best positioned to ensure the over-all reliability of the system.

That may not be the case in a state like New York, where there are close to a dozen transmission companies and an independent system operator is needed to knit them together, Barrie said. But Ontario is different.

"The American model is needed when you have multiple transmission companies. It's not needed when you only have one," he said.

"Our position is there is no need to have a separate, independent system operator," he said in an interview after his presentation. "The transmission company should do that."

That's not how the IMO sees it.

Its brief to the panel stressed the need for an independent agency to police reliability of the electric system.

Bruce Campbell, vice-president of the IMO, said Hydro One's perspective is too narrow.

"The Hydro One approach looks at it from a transmission point of view," he said in an interview. "For reliability, what we say is you have to look at much more than that."

"Reliability is not just a transmission issue. It requires the co-ordination of actions on the generation side, on the transmission side, on the load (customers') side. Everybody has to do their part."

The IMO also runs Ontario's wholesale electricity market and that needs to be part of the mix as well, Campbell said.

Barrie still disagreed. "There is tremendous overlap and duplication between the two of us, because we're both interested in the same thing," he insisted.

John Wilson, an energy consultant and former director of Hydro One, criticized the interim report of the task force for not examining the role that deregulation of electricity markets played in the blackout.

Deregulation pushed electric utilities to neglect proper maintenance of their systems in the pursuit of profit, Wilson said.

"The underlying cause of the blackout is electricity deregulation," he said.

The task force should note that utilities in the U.S. and Ontario have trimmed a total of 200,000 employees from their payrolls, he said, including 40 per cent of the staff of Hydro One.

Jimmy Glotfelty of the U.S. department of energy, said the task force, of which he is a member, will consider the role played by energy market restructuring in the blackout.

"Everything is on the table for consideration," he said in an interview. But he noted the first transmission lines that failed, starting the chain reaction that ended with the blackout, were operating below their rated capacity. That doesn't support the view of private operators overloading systems.

Tom Adams, executive director of Energy Probe, told the task force it should look at a more decentralized power system, with more, smaller power sources linked in a web, the way the Internet links computers.