Reliability, regions and RTOs

摘要

On August 14, 2003, a cascading failure blacked out significant areas of the U.S. and Canada. This incident was a fundamental failure to maintain system reliability, or "keep the lights on." With the interim report of the outage task force just released, some already apparent lessons are being reaffirmed. In a heavily interconnected system, it is essential to manage reliability on a regional basis―rather than through a large number of disparate, utility-based control areas. Regional transmission organisations (RTOs), independent of individual utilities, are the logical entities to provide this management. The boundaries of these regions must be defined in accordance with the laws of physics, not politics. It is also becoming apparent that transmission under-investment―while remaining a serious problem―was not a direct cause of the blackout, nor was the existence of electricity markets in some of the impacted areas.