The Brattleboro Reformer
August 16, 2004
DONNA MOXLEY Southern Vermont Bureau
VERNON — The Vermont Yankee nuclear plant, spared along with most of the state from Thursday’s massive blackout, was feeding energy to power-starved New York on Friday.
Yankee was mostly unaffected by the outage gripping much of the country the past two days, thanks to the company that operates the New England power grid.
That same nonprofit company on Friday helped deliver Yankee power to New York state.
Yankee general manager Kevin Bronson said Friday that his plant can thank safeguards implemented by ISO New England, which directs power on the grid, for the outage’s minimal impact here.
Circuit breakers on the massive power grid worked to isolate New England’s power delivery system as soon as they detected the faults moving eastward on the larger grid, he said.
“As we saw, the breakers designed to protect New England worked,” Bronson said in a press conference Friday. Some nuclear power plants in the Northeast automatically shut down when numerous breakers blocked circuits and the widespread outage occurred. Bronson said that response is a planned reaction when a power plant is generating energy that has nowhere to go. Because the New England grid was isolated, he said, its nuclear power plants didn’t experience shutdowns.
“All we saw was a voltage spike,” he said.
The press conference, according to plant spokesman Robert Williams, was called because Yankee had received a number of phone calls questioning the status of the plant since Thursday’s blackout.
Although there was a brief flicker of power, and a number of alarms went off, Yankee officials said, there was little to do after the outage except to shut down the alarms, double-check that everything was OK, and stand ready for another problem if it occurred.
If the plant had lost power, Bronson said, there was a back-up plan to operate the plant using hydroelectric power generated by a reserve pond behind a Vernon dam.
“Had we needed to, we could have divorced ourselves from the grid,” he said.
Senior management was on-site overnight, Bronson said, and all of the nuclear plant’s staff has been on-call since the outage.
Bronson said the plant was operating at 100 percent capacity before and after Thursday’s brief dimming of power, and, on Friday, ISO New England was able to redirect some of the Yankee-generated power to Albany and the ISO New York grid via Pittsfield, Mass.
“Our focus throughout last night was to keep power going through Vermont, so we could be in a position to help,” Bronson said.
Power delivered to the New England grid by the Vermont Yankee plant, which lays claim to about 35 percent of Vermont’s power supply, can be exported out of state based on ISO New England’s assessment of the reserve power that would remain available in the grid.
Bronson said those investigating the failure of a system in New York and the Midwest will be looking to ISO New England’s system to learn what made it work as it should have when others failed catastrophically.
“The system was designed not to let that kind of widespread outage happen,” Bronson said.
Vermont Yankee has been reliably supplying power in the Northeast for over 30 years. In addition to supplying Vermont with power during the blackout, the plant was able to support its neighbors by routing electricity to New York. During the outage Vermont Yankee’s automated and electronic systems were fully functioning, keeping the plant safe, secure, and reliable.
