By Mike Boyer
Enquirer staff writer

Cliff Zorb and other Cinergy employees take a helicopter ride to check power lines. Last year's blackout started with a transmission line touching a tree. The Enquirer/GLENN HARTONG

It's a sunny, unusually cool August morning, perfect for a helicopter ride over Southwest Ohio.

But Cinergy Corp. managers Cliff Zorb and Dan Frazier aren't looking at the scenery. They're focusing on strands of wire and the metal transmission towers holding them 80 feet off the ground.

Utilities are paying more attention to removing vegetation intruding on their transmission rights-of-way these days. It's one of the electric industry's reactions to the worst blackout in U.S. and Canadian history, which disrupted service to 50 million people - including parts of northern Ohio - for up to four days last August, and cost as much as $10 billion.

"We can't say with 100 percent certainty there won't be another blackout,'' said Alan Schriber, chairman of the Public Utilities Commission of Ohio and a member of a joint U.S.-Canadian taskforce that looked at the blackout's causes and developed a list of 46 recommendations to prevent another one.

But Schriber, a Wyoming resident, added, "I can say with a high degree of certainty, we've lowered the probability of it happening again. A lot of things have happened since last year.''

The task force cited a power line sagging into a tree in Akron-based First Energy Corp.'s service area as one of the initial triggers of the blackout.

SOURCE TO HOME

Electricity is generated and distributed in five steps: • Generators - Force, such as falling water or expanding steam, is converted to electric charge, which is carried through wires. In the U.S. electrical system, there are more than 6,000 power generating units energized with coal, oil, gas, falling water, wind or nuclear fission. • Regional power grid - Electric power is poured from the generation stations into a regional web of linked, long-distance power lines. A grid failure in northern Ohio triggered the Aug. 14, 2003 blackout. • Managers and markets - Electric companies manage their parts of the grid and buy and sell power. • Delivery - High-voltage power is switched into the lines that supply a city's electricity, and a series of transformers lowers it to a usable voltage. • Consumers - Wires carry the power into homes. Source: Edison Institute, Cambridge Energy Research Assn., O range County Register

Cinergy and its 1.5 million electric customers were isolated from the massive failure.

It conducts twice-annual visual inspections of its 7,500 miles of electric transmission lines across its 25,000 square-mile service area in Ohio, Kentucky and Indiana.

Flying along 69,000-volt and larger transmission lines that can stretch for miles, Zorb sits in back of a twin-engine, company-owned Bell 427 helicopter, scanning the towers and lines for problems. Frazier, a certified arborist, sits up front, next to pilot Roger Johnson, and checks the right-of-way for vegetation that could pose a threat to keeping the circuit in service.

If they see something that doesn't look right skimming along at better than 60 mph just a few dozen yards from the power line, they ask Johnson to circle back for a closer look, making note of the problem for work crews.

Frazier says when high voltage power lines get hot, they can sag as much as eight to 10 feet between transmission towers. And a fast-growing species, such as a silver maple tree, in the right-of-way can trigger a failure.

Cinergy didn't have to change its vegetation removal practices, because they were audited by regulators and passed with flying colors, Frazier said.

Voluntary compliance

One thing that hasn't happened since the blackout is the adoption of the task force's main recommendation: Making the present voluntary system of rules assuring the reliability of the nation's electric transmission grid mandatory.

The task force recommended giving the North American Electric Reliability Council, which oversees the system, real enforcement power and the ability to levy penalties for violations.

Electric power can't be stored, so utilities constantly have to balance supply with demand. But if operators or automatic circuit breakers fail to isolate problems, entire grids can be shut down - as happened last Aug. 14.

The nation's more than 200,000 miles of transmission lines are owned by individual utilities, but managed by a network of 14 regional transmission authorities overseen by the industry-supported council based in Princeton, N.J.

Making the reliability standards mandatory "would require congressional action, and Congress hasn't acted. That's the big thing that hasn't happened,'' said Bob Burns, senior research specialist at the National Regulatory Research Institute, a utility industry think tank at Ohio State University in Columbus.

The reason for the delay? The mandatory standards are part of the much broader federal energy bill, which is bogged down in election-year politics in Washington.

Others are watching

Schriber, the PUCO chairman, says the increasing interdependence of the nation's power grid is creating its own enforcement mechanism in the meantime.

"What's changed dramatically over the years is peer pressure (among the utilities),'' he said.

"This used to be a good old buddy system with all these utilities,'' he said. "But today, if you screw up and you take your neighbor down, he's not going to be real happy.''

University of Cincinnati professor G. Ivan Maldonado, a nuclear engineer and member of the blackout taskforce, thinks if nothing else the blackout raised people's awareness of the potential problems.

"Without doing anything, or making any changes, the mere fact the blackout happened has put everybody in a position where they can make a difference, a lot more sensitive to the potential,'' he said.

Beyond peer pressure, the national reliability council required both First Energy and the Carmel, Ind.-based Midwest Independent Transmission System Operator, which monitors transmission reliability in all or parts of 15 Midwest states and one Canadian province, to improve computer systems and communications.

In a recent audit, Burns said the council concluded the regional grid operator - which covers northern and southwest Ohio, most of Kentucky and the southern half of Indiana - was in full compliance and First Energy had complied with all but a few minor recommendations.

Schriber said one of the problems at First Energy was that part of its computer system was down because of a glitch and the utility's system operators weren't aware of the problems, which developed in a matter of seconds.

Data-sharing problem fixed

At the regional grid center, one problem was that a sophisticated computer program called a state estimator - which collects data every few seconds from across its system and calculates what to do if part of the system fails - didn't have all the data it needed.

For example, a power line that runs from the J.M. Stuart generating plant on the Ohio River in Aberdeen, Brown County (about 60 miles southeast of Cincinnati) to Dayton Power & Light Co. is overseen by another regional transmission organization serving central Ohio, Pennsylvania, New Jersey, Maryland and all or parts of seven other states. It's located in Valley Forge, Pa.

A year ago, the Stuart transmission line was out of service, but the Carmel center didn't have that information in its computer model, said Schriber. Since then the Carmel and Valley Forge centers have worked out an agreement to improve information flow.

If all else fails, be prepared

In the wake of last year's blackout, some companies have developed disaster plans.

For example, at Kroger Co., which had 90 stores in northeast Ohio and Michigan without power in the blackout, its Great Lakes division put together a 50-page blackout plan within a day after the crisis.

The plan covers things such as where to find backup generators and Dumpsters to dispose of spoiled food, a spokesman said.

But Dave Brown, vice president for NUS Consulting, a New Jersey firm that helps companies control utility costs, said most businesses haven't rushed out to buy backup generators or additional business interruption insurance since the blackout.

"Are we better prepared? It's hard to say,'' he said. "We've had a cooler summer (lessening the blackout possibility). But people understand there is problem out there.''

Cinergy has announced no improvements to its transmission and distribution systems specifically because of the blackout, although it is always investing in its system. The company's Cincinnati Gas & Electric subsidiary has agreed to defer seeking an increase in distribution rates until 2006.

In the long run, Brown and other utility experts say, the nation needs to invest more in its electricity system to prevent future blackouts.

The transmission grid was initially built when each utility was a self-contained entity, generating and distributing power only within a defined area. In today's deregulated power markets, electricity produced in the Ohio Valley is being used to power homes and businesses hundreds of miles away.

"We have one of the finest electric transmission grids in the world,'' he said. "But it's being used in way that it wasn't designed for.''

E-mail mboyer@enquirer.com