New York and New Jersey should direct their gripes at the right targets: Don’t blame the utilities — think Solyndra.
Utilities do what policymakers and regulators tell them to do, which in recent years has been to spend money and time on making electric grids greener, rather than harder to break and easier to restore.
A tougher, more resilient grid doesn’t come cheap. Burying half of ConEd’s overhead lines would cost about $15 billion. If you spent that money instead on solar and wind generation, you could power maybe 10 percent of New York — but still be vulnerable to the next storm’s impact on the local distribution system.
The local network is the key. Sandy took out very little of the region’s generating capacity — not enough to compromise bulk power delivery. The long-distance transmission network weathered the storm remarkably well. The blackouts were caused largely by local distribution failures: wires knocked down, substations flooded — damage to the tiered nodes that mediate between distant power plants and the last mile of the local network.
Now, money is being spent on “upgrading” local distribution — but not hardening it. ConEd got about $200 million in federal “smart grid” funding. But this is focused on things like energy efficiency and charging electric cars, not ways to make the city’s distribution system more resilient or easier to restore.
Nationwide, about $4 billion of federal stimulus money combined with another $6 billion from ratepayers went for “smart grid” funding. Most of that went to install smart residential meters.
In other words, it was wasted: These devices will soon be overtaken by cheap or free apps built into customers’ gadgets. But environmentalists and regulators love the meters because they can be used to manipulate prices to promote use of wind and solar.
Meanwhile, the rest of the Energy Department’s $90 billion in stimulus funds went overwhelmingly for green projects, from solar and wind farms to weatherizing and electric cars.
A better use of money? Design a waterproof substation.
The substation that exploded in the East Village near 13th Street was built to survive a 12 1/2-foot surge; Sandy’s surge was 14 feet. Elsewhere, ConEd preemptively shut down substations to avoid water damage.
You can’t blame utility engineers and executives. Utilities get Solyndra-quality guidance and oversight from Washington and local regulatory commissions. Only politicians and citizens can push utilities into developing a high-reliability system.
Power engineers know how to build super-high reliability. Most of the data centers in the greater New York area, each of which uses about as much power as a typical neighborhood, survived Sandy; roughly the same techniques could protect consumers’ power grid.
Tell them to do it, and utilities would radically harden substations, bury more cables and replace older ones (at least one-fourth of ConEd’s cables are at least 50 years old). And they’d deploy more cables to create a denser mesh of connections, leaving fewer customers dependent on a single substation or cable.
They would also build in more intelligence where it’s really needed — not on customers’ premises, but in substations and throughout the network. And they’d deploy more controls for rerouting power to bypass faults.
None of this is trivial. But it is doable.
At peak hours, New York consumes electric energy at a rate equivalent to about one oil supertanker a day. The electricity infrastructure in a great city anchors everything from water and sewer systems to elevators and cellphones. Apps and Internet tools that ordinary citizens need to coordinate emergency responses and recovery also need significant flows of dependable electric power.
Yet many policymakers are focused on what is, at best, an irrelevant drive toward technologies that are more expensive and less reliable than the much-reviled conventional sources.
Promoters of these technologies will now attempt to persuade us that we don’t need to build a harder grid, because wider use of green technologies will miraculously avert the next big storm. People who want to keep their businesses and homes lit should bet instead on more cables and upgraded substations surrounded by higher concrete walls.
Mark P. Mills and Peter W. Huber are Manhattan Institute senior fellows.