Ontario not to blame for blackout, official says

TORONTO -- Huge electricity surges running on transmission lines between New York and Michigan and through Ontario collapsed the province's power system just three minutes after signs of trouble appeared on Aug. 14, Canadian officials said Friday.

The Canadian officials, providing the first detailed account of the massive blackout that darkened a swath of Canada and eight states, offered no explanation for what caused the surges, but said the problems originated on the U.S. side of the border.

"Categorically, this incident did not start in Ontario," said Dave Goulding, chief executive officer of the Independent Electricity Market Operator that regulates the province's power supply. "We were not made aware of conditions elsewhere that would cause us to believe that such a disturbance would take place."

Goulding said transmission lines, generators and transformers in Ontario all worked as expected. Generating stations at Niagara Falls and Cornwall remained operational, providing a foundation for restoring power in the days after the blackout, he said.

The United States and Canada are conducting a joint investigation of the blackout, the largest in North American history, affecting 50 million people. Investigators are focusing on the failure of a power plant and three transmission lines owned by FirstEnergy Corp. in Ohio as the likely starting point for the cascading outages.

Questions remain about why Midwest utility officials weren't able to isolate the outage, and why it was able to spread so far across linked power transmission lines.

Aug. 14 began normally, with Ontario's power demand reaching 24,050 megawatts at 4:06 p.m. -- about five minutes before the blackout struck here and peaked across North America, Goulding told a news conference. Ontario was importing 140 megawatts of electricity from Manitoba, 584 from Quebec, 1,090 from New York and 490 from Michigan, he said. A megawatt can power anywhere from 500 to 1,000 households.

Problems first became evident three minutes later, said Kim Warren, the provincial agency's manager of controller operations. With no warning, a 700-megawatt surge came from New York, which Warren described as unusual but manageable.

Subsequent surges of 270 megawatts from Ontario to Michigan, and 1,790 megawatts from New York into Ontario, continued for more than a minute, increasing slightly as the power flowed westward on the grid, according to Warren.

Then surges of 2,000-to-4,000 megawatts bounced back and forth between New York and Michigan, with Ontario in the middle, Warren and Goulding said, as the power ran a course along a transmission line known as the Lake Erie Loop. The load collapsed Ontario's system at 4:11 p.m., leaving only 1,200 megawatts available, they said.

On the night of the blackout, U.S. and Canada officials immediately pointed fingers across the border, blaming utilities in the other country for the cascading outages.

Later, when it seemed apparent the blackout started on the U.S. side, Premier Ernie Eves of Ontario complained that American power managers did not notify their Canadian counterparts about the grid problems, as required under protocols developed after a 1965 blackout across much of the same region.

Many individual utility companies in the eight states affected said they, too, had little or no indication of problems in the system before their own facilities shut down.

Mideast power managers have said they were busy dealing with the Ohio power and transmission problems and did not see signs of a blackout coming until too late.