TVA to Assist With Blackout Investigations
Aug. 28, 2003
CHATTANOOGA, Tenn. – The Tennessee Valley Authority is providing several transmission technical experts to national committees and teams investigating the blackout that affected the northeastern United States and southern Ontario.
TVA Executive Vice President of Transmission/Power Supply Terry Boston will serve on an eight-member U.S.-Canadian steering group that will oversee the North American Electric Reliability Council’s investigative teams.
The teams, comprised of transmission experts from across the United States and Canada, are examining the sequence of events that led to the largest outage in North American history. Boston has more than 30 years’ experience in the transmission business and serves in an executive capacity on several national reliability boards and committees.
“TVA is fortunate to have a wealth of technical expertise, and we are pleased to make key engineering staff available to assist the national effort to understand the blackout and prevent a recurrence,” said TVA Chairman Glenn McCullough Jr. “As investigations move forward, the blackout will serve as a potent reminder of just how important transmission system reliability is to discussions about restructuring the nation’s electric utility industry.”
In addition to Boston, three other TVA employees have been assigned to investigative teams.
- Tim Ponsetti, general manager for transmission policy, has already reported to the New York Independent System Operator, where he is serving as an observer for an internal investigation of the blackout.
- Jim Whitehead, manager of the transmission planning department, will provide technical expertise to the Department of Energy in Washington, D. C.
- Gary Bullock, chief systems engineer in TVA’s Electric System Operations, is providing technical expertise to the NERC command center in Princeton, N.J. This team will evaluate data from utilities to validate what happened and the response by utilities.
Besides providing assistance at the national level,
Boston is also sponsoring two internal TVA teams that
have been established
to
review
lessons learned
from the blackout that can be applied at TVA.
“Because of the interconnected nature of the electric grid, it is extremely difficult to be totally protected from events that happen elsewhere on the system,” said Boston. “Our goal is to ensure that we’ve done everything humanly possible to prevent a cascading outage from originating on — or spreading through — the TVA system.”
TVA is the nation’s largest public power provider and is completely self-financed. Through 17,000 miles of transmission lines, TVA provides power to large industries and 158 power distributors that serve 8.3 million consumers in seven southeastern states.
Media Contact:
Myra Ireland, Chattanooga (423-751-7153) or TVA News Bureau, Knoxville (865-632-6000)
