Über die Autorin bzw. den Autor

Robert Galvin is former Chairman and CEO of Motorola, Inc., where he pioneered the concept of “Six-Sigma Quality” and helped revolutionize telecommunications technology with government officials, regulators, and companies. He currently heads the Galvin Electricity Initiative, which supports “Perfect Power” innovations.

Kurt Yeager is former President and CEO of the Electric Power Research Institute, the electric power industry's leading think tank, which conducts research in the United States and forty countries.

Jay Stuller is the author of seven books and nearly a thousand articles. He has worked in public affairs and communications at Chevron Corporation.

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The Book That Will Revolutionize and Electrify Our Energy Crisis

From Robert Galvin, Motorola's visionary leader and legendary former CEO, and Kurt Yeager, former CEO of the Electric Power Research Institute, comes a powerful wake-up call for the entire energy industry. A must-read for investors, entrepreneurs, homeowners, and environmentalists, Perfect Power offers bold new solutions, investments, and job opportunities that address the biggest energy problems we face today, including how to

• Meet the rising demands for more electricity
• Create “Perfect Power” that will withstand hurricanes, blackouts, terrorism, and technical malfunctions
• Implement clean, “green” alternatives by tapping the smart microgrid revolution
• Live “off the grid” and become energy self-sufficient
• Identify and invest in exciting new companies and technologies

“Reinventing our nation’s electric supply system is at the heart of solving our climate change and energy security problems. This book underscores the urgency of modernizing our grid and our business models to meet this challenge for our future generations.”
—James E. Rogers, Chairman, President, and Chief Executive Officer, Duke Energy

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PERFECT POWER

The McGraw-Hill Companies, Inc.

Contents

Chapter One

While largely unrecognized by the public and government officials, North America's aging, inefficient, and dangerously unreliable electrical infrastructure is crumbling. In an era of precise digital power demands and serious environmental concerns, this system is also needlessly wasteful, bleeding energy throughout the creation, delivery, and use of that electricity. In short, our electric power infrastructure is as incompatible with the future as horse trails were to automobiles. If not urgently renewed and literally reinvented, North America's electrical grid is rapidly approaching a crisis point for which we are already paying an exorbitant price. The future is now.

Abroad, swelling, and searing layer of atmospheric heat settled upon North America during the third week of July 2006, the stuff of an epic inquisition, a test of the continent's electrical grid and the will of its people. As the leading edge of the Digital Age met the Dark Ages, the damage stretched from coast to coast.

In temperatures exceeding 100 degrees F., New Yorkers desperate to cool off turned up air-conditioners and fans, putting an almost unprecedented load upon Consolidated Edison's electrical generation, transmission, and delivery systems. Under the strain, even heavy-duty circuits began to fail. At LaGuardia Airport, a power outage that shut down security screening in the morning grounded hundreds of outgoing passengers, and another nighttime blackout left travelers literally fumbling about in the pitch black restrooms of the main terminal.

A large portion of the borough of Queens went dark and remained so for nearly six days, through a series of electrical failures that left Consolidated Edison engineers flummoxed for an explanation. In other parts of the city, additional power outages brought subway trains to a halt. According to news reports, heavily sweating New Yorkers sat in the dark, whimpering.

Meanwhile on the West Coast, more than 5,000 Pacific Gas and Electric customers in Marin County were left in the dark overnight when, according to one early report, an owl "mis-landed" on a 60,000-volt transmission line near the coastal town of Bolinas. Crews later determined that an old lightening strike on a utility pole had caused it to eventually fall. And while relatively few people were directly inconvenienced by the blackout, the entire south-central portion of the county faced an indirect threat when the failure took down a key water plant for 14 hours, a period during which water levels in the 130 holding tanks in the district's 147-square-mile service area precipitously dropped. Consumers were asked to curtail their water use for at least 24 hours as water district crews scrambled to get this electricity-dependent service back online.

From the Midwest, the Associated Press reported that nearly 700 laboratory mice and rats died when a power failure at Ohio State University cut off air-conditioning to six buildings at the school's medical campus. Temperatures in the labs rose from 80 degrees to as high as 105 degrees Fahrenheit. Even worse, about 20 projects involving critical research into epilepsy, multiple sclerosis, cancer, and cardiovascular disease were affected, including studies that researchers had been working on for years.

In the high desert of southern California, near the city of Palmdale, sits the Federal Aviation Administration's Los Angeles Air Route Traffic Control Center, a facility from which controllers manage flights on long-distance routes at 38,000 feet or higher, covering parts of Arizona, Nevada, Utah, and much of the Golden State. At 5:30 p.m. on July 18, the Center's electrical supply went dead, shutting down radar and communications. For some 90 minutes—until an emergency generator that was supposed to automatically start finally kicked on—the Los Angeles International Airport (LAX), the world's fifth-busiest passenger complex, was, as an airport spokesperson explained, "pretty much shut down."

Less than a week later, the 18th consecutive day of triple-digit heat continued in California, triggering still more power outages that eventually swept through downtown Los Angeles. The most acute problem occurred at the prestigious Garland Building on Wilshire Ave., a data center designed to maintain operations even in an 8.3 magnitude earthquake. The Garland facility provides housing for some of the leading Web hosting and home page companies, including Media Temple and the ubiquitous MySpace.com. But when the main incoming electrical power failed and the backup system couldn't keep the chillers cold, the servers went down, producing what could have been the most agonizing 24-hour disconnection in the history of Teenage America.

As the shock from the Great Heat Wave of 2006 finally subsided, something weird and dissonant happened in the world of electricity. In late July, a consortium that includes all of the nation's regional electrical grid operators—known as independent system operators, or ISOs, entities that coordinate electrical transmission between utilities and across state lines—issued a press release, noting that each operator handled record electricity demands and "met the challenge of record temperatures without incident."

Huh?

Utility executives and industry representatives appeared on National Public Radio, praising their overall reliability. And herein we find the catch: System data appear to conflict with human events.

Indeed, the Electric Reliability Council of Texas, which serves about 85 percent of the load in that state, did reliably produce more electricity than it had in the past, meeting a peak demand of 62,396 megawatts on July 17, exceeding the previous peak of 60,274 megawatts during the previous August. The New York Independent System Operator, which serves 20 million people, met a record peak load of 32,624 megawatts, without enacting emergency procedures, breaking a record of 32,075 in July of 2005.

Moreover, the California Independent System Operator also handled a new record demand of 50,270 megawatts, up nearly 5,000 megawatts from the previous year's record peak, and a level that was not expected to be reached for another five years. "We plan operations for extreme scenarios and for a 1-in-10-year heat wave, but this was a 1-in-50-year heat storm," said California ISO President and CEO Yakout Mansour, in a press release. "Power plant operators responded to the challenge well ahead of the season and prepared their plants to withstand difficult conditions." The California ISO system, added the press release, held up throughout the heat wave.

In other words, virtually all of the nation's power outages during the summer of 2006 were localized—a fact that brings little comfort to the grounded airline passengers in the western United States, the people of Queens, and the many other cities that suffered blackouts. Apparently, anything less than a total power system collapse, such as California and the West Coast from British Columbia to Baja experienced in 1996, is considered a victory by the ISO. What didn't happen, and it's why utility operators were sounding a sigh of relief, was a reprise of the cascading and cataclysmic outage of August, 14, 2003, which blacked out more than 50 million people within...