Power watchdog 'embarrassed'

2003-08-15 20:44

Washington - The head of the body that is supposed to guarantee massive blackouts do not take place in North America said on Friday he was "personally embarrassed" and would have answers about the cause "soon."

North American Electric Reliability Council (NERC) chief executive officer Michael Gent told a press conference he could not answer the questions about how a massive outage had paralyzed much of the northern United States and the Canadian province of Ontario.

"I'm embarrassed that I can't. And I'm dedicated to finding out."

"We at NERC are dedicated to making sure this doesn't happen again. I am personally embarrassed," Gent said in Princeton, New Jersey.

"My job is to make sure this doesn't happen, and you could say I failed in my job, so that's why I'm upset."

Gent pledged to launch an investigation that he said should include NERC-selected experts, representatives of the Energy Department and Homeland Security.

"We are going to put one of our staff people in charge of the investigation ... we are going to have preliminary answers soon," he pledged, without setting a target date.

Overall about 15 million paying customers lost power, Gent said, noting "we have no reason to believe the hot weather played any role in that. ... We don't think it was a demand surge."

He added in regard to a possible cause: "speculation is running rampant and most of it isn't even informed speculation." He ruled out reports of problems at two plants in New York state. New York officials have said the origin of the collapse was in Canada, which Canadian power authorities have denied.

Gent said the first irregular event recorded on Thursday was in the US midwest but stressed that a conclusion cannot be drawn from that prior to a full investigation.

And asked about the Lake Erie loop, a distribution route in the Great Lakes region, Gent acknowledged: "That's the center of focus ... the path around Lake Erie and Lake Ontario ... has always been a big big problem. That'll turn out to be an issue here."

"The whole loop had this oscillating power phenomenon," Gent said.

He also said terrorism looked "fairly easy to rule out.

And "as far as cyberintrusion goes, we have logs and it's virtually impossible to get into a system in terms of not leaving some evidence," he said noting one could cover one's identity but not where one had been.

"We are vigilant. We are fairly confident in ruling out terrorism at this time," Gent said, but added that the investigation would cover all bases.

NERC is a non-profit "voluntary" corporation whose members are 10 Regional Reliability Councils. Members include investor-owned utilities; federal power agencies; rural electric cooperatives; state, municipal and provincial utilities; independent power producers; power marketers; and end-use customers.

- AFP