The same day South Florida was paralyzed by a massive and still-mysterious power outage following a fire in an electrical substation, Texas narrowly avoided rolling blackouts after a sudden drop in wind in the western part of the state, where wind turbines are concentrated.

It's interesting to compare the immediate news coverage of the two events. The South Florida outage occurred in the service area of Florida Power & Light, which generates most of its power via fossil fuels (natural gas, coal and oil) and the rest via nuclear, and it led to the emergency shutdown of the Turkey Point nuclear power plant. So unusual is it for such a minor event to cause a blackout affecting as many as 2.5 million people that the Federal Energy Regulatory Commission is considering conducting its own investigation. Yet nowhere in the initial news coverage did we read that the blackout indicates the precarious nature of a traditional centralized power system dependent on fossil fuel-burning and nuclear plants.

Compare that with the report about the Texas near-incident that appeared in the Forth Worth Star-Telegram, which included this comment:

"This is a warning to all those who think that renewable energy is the sole answer [to the state's power needs]," said Geoffrey Gay, an attorney representing Fort Worth and other North Texas municipalities in utility issues. "We can't put all our eggs in one basket when it comes to any form of generation. We need to consider the cost and the reliability issues, in addition to the environmental impact."

In the same story, a spokesperson for the American Wind Energy Association pointed out that the solution is to locate turbines in different places, since the wind is generally blowing somewhere. But we find it interesting that news coverage of an averted blackout triggered by temporary problems with wind generation would raise questions about the reliability of all renewable energy, whereas coverage of an actual blackout in a system based on fossil fuel and nuclear energy didn't immediately raise similar reliability concerns.

Labels: blackouts, energy policy, Florida, texas, turkey point, wind energy

A major power outage across South Florida today brought normal life screeching to a halt, as traffic signals, schools, homes, and workplaces went dark around 1 p.m. At the peak of the outage, about 700,000 customers were left without power.

Throughout much of the afternoon, Florida Power & Light had a statement on the main page of its Web site saying it did not know the cause of the outage. But a company spokesperson assured the Miami Herald that the "failure is in no way a safety issue."

The problem reportedly began in an FPL substation in West Miami-Dade County and then spread through the transmission system, leading to an automatic shutdown of both nuclear reactors at FPL's Turkey Point power plant as well as three fossil-fuel-burning units. But that explanation raised questions for some, according to the paper:

Many experts ... remained puzzled. Normally, a problem at a single substation should not cause an outage of the magnitude that dominoed through the state Tuesday.

The Nuclear Regulatory Commission released a statement this afternoon saying the Turkey Point reactors shut down in response to an "undervoltage" caused when two power distribution lines failed following the substation malfunction. The reactor shutdown -- a safety measure to protect plant equipment from abnormal power line voltages -- is expected to last from 12 to 24 hours.

The NRC says it's monitoring the situation.

Labels: blackouts, Florida, miami, NRC, nuclear power, turkey point