Fair use for educational/research purposes only

Friday, February 02, 2001, 12:00 a.m. Pacific

It starts with a snowflake, and powers the Northwest

by Eric Sorensen Seattle Times science reporter Harley Soltes / The Seattle Times Water-supply specialist Scott Pattee measures snow depth north of Concrete, Whatcom County. MOUNT BAKER NATIONAL RECREATION AREA - Scott Pattee stood 3,400 feet above sea level in a Whatcom County mountain meadow, Ground Zero for the Northwest's snow drought. He jammed 7-1/2 feet of polished aluminum tubing into the snow and pulled out a 50-inch explanation of the West's power crunch.

A portable scale showed the tube contained the equivalent of 18 inches of water. That's half of what usually falls by this time of year, and about the lowest in the region.

"Right now we should be accumulating a lot of snow," said Pattee, a water-supply specialist for the U.S. Department of Agriculture's snow-survey program, as flakes straggled from the sky.

To run a 100-watt light bulb for a second, you need about 100 million snowflakes. And that is only the beginning of the technologically marvelous, yet surprisingly vulnerable, process that runs millions of lights, computers and stereos every day.

Electricity producers have the luxury of operating in a captive market: Everyone needs what they are selling. Payment is, for the most part, guaranteed.

The downside is that electricity fundamentally depends on nature, whether it comes from snow, the sun, coal or natural gas.

Then, once it is produced, it moves at the speed of light, making it a real-time commodity that must be sold instantaneously. And tracking its flow is largely a matter of educated guesswork.

"Essentially, power follows the laws of physics," said Lloyd Reed, director of Puget Sound Energy's power-supply operations. The Bellevue-based utility provides electricity to 920,000 customers in the region.

"It follows the path of least resistance. When a Puget customer turns on a TV, it may come from many different sources. It may not even come from Puget. It may come from Colorado, California, Canada."

The not-so-simple route of an electron, in this case an electron powered by a melted snowflake run through the Puget Sound Energy system, shows just how complicated the course can be.

Snow, water and gravity

Melting a snowflake and sending it streamward seem straightforward enough - after all, water flows downhill. But calculating how much snowmelt will come, and when, requires the small army of snow watchers in the federal Cooperative Snow Survey Program.

Using a computerized data-collection network and forecast system, the program juggles the soil's moisture content, ground water, precipitation patterns and storms to estimate how much water might be available for hydropower in the coming weeks and months.

Bob Barnes, a hydrologist for Puget Sound Energy, also factors in measurements from nine snow stations - vertical markers sticking up in the snow and photographed from the air. It's a squirrelly business, said Barnes. There are no reliable models for projecting weather and stream flows three to six months ahead, but the snow is vital to power production."The snow is essentially our third reservoir," Barnes said.

The other two reservoirs are Baker Lake, which empties through the Upper Baker River Hydroelectric Project. The water then flows to the Lake Shannon reservoir, the main water supply for the Lower Baker River Hydroelectric Project.

When it was built in the mid-1920s, Lower Baker was the highest hydroelectric dam in the world. Far larger and more powerful dams have been built since - Grand Coulee Dam is more than 30 times more powerful - but the Lower Baker dam is cheap to run, and it's paid for.

More modern turbines have made modest gains in efficiency, but at their core they all produce power through a simple physical reality: gravity.

Water drops 250 feet into the turbine at Lower Baker, increasing in velocity as it gets squeezed from a 22-foot-wide pipe into a 16-foot-wide penstock. At that point, as much as 4,000 cubic feet of water - enough to fill two backyard swimming pools - are moving by each second. The turbine then spins a 3-foot-thick steel shaft at about three turns a second. It's slow enough to track with the eye and would seem downright torpid if it weren't for all the work it's doing - it has up to six times the horsepower of the Indianapolis 500's 33-car field.

The shaft runs up to a massive magnetic rotor - the two pieces weigh a total of 200 tons. At this point, a more elegant physical reality comes into play: When a conductor such as copper is moved through a magnetic field, its electrons begin to flow.

The rotor spins inside a locomotive-loud generator housing of coils, or wound wire, pushing that current into the hinterlands.

"Those coils are what are hooked to your house," said Leonard Simpson, the dam's resident operator.

At full capacity, the Lower Baker plant can power about 70,000 homes. But first its power has to get to Sedro-Woolley in Skagit County, the closest onramp to the Western power grid.

To move efficiently over long distances, power has to be prepped.

Power lost

One in every 20 watts sent across the vast reaches of the West gets lost in the form of heat and, to a far lesser extent, radio waves and even sound. Using a top-quality conductor such as silver can cut the loss, but transmission lines made of stranded aluminum and steel cost far less, justifying the modest decrease in power.

Engineers minimize the loss by increasing voltage (the pressure put on the electrons) and lowering the current or amperage (the movement of electrons). And because power is the product of voltage and current, engineers can transmit the same amount of energy at the lower, more efficient amperage.

At Lower Baker, this is done with transformers that step up the voltage from 13,800 volts to 115,000 - the voltage for most of Puget Sound Energy's transmission system.

The process will later be reversed at substations and, finally, the pole-top transformers on residential streets.

Now the power is ready to go to Sedro-Woolley, where it hits an intertie - one of a system of connections at which electricity from different utilities can merge onto the Western power grid that stretches from British Columbia to Mexico. Now Lower Baker's power is part of a pulsing network capable of carrying as much as 140,000 megawatts from about 900 plants.

Power planned

But the power cannot simply be dropped onto the grid. It needs a place to go - immediately - and producers must delicately match supply with demand. They have to know customers are going to be there to take electrons off the grid.

"It's very rare that every hour you're exactly matched, and then you go home for the day," said Reed, Puget Sound Energy's power-supply director. Much of the utility's power is planned out a day or two earlier, when Reed's group weighs the company's generation ability against what customers might need. The utility buys two-thirds of its power, with traders buying power for the next month, the next day or, in Max Staple's case, the next hour.

Staple is a real-time energy trader. He tries to buy low, which on one recent day meant $275 to $290 a megawatt hour, and sell high, which on that same day meant $350 a megawatt hour. He tries to maintain a poker voice on the phone.

In his spare time, he day-trades from home.

His job is twofold: to make sure there's enough power, and to get it at the best price.

Staple's trading pit is the 14th floor of One Bellevue Center. On a clear day, he gets a fantastic view east to the rocky snowpack on the Cascades. Most of the time, he looks at eight computer screens tracking power and prices.

He's been doing this for 20 years for various utilities. This year, with spot prices fluctuating wildly and spot supplies critical during California's rolling blackouts, "there are times I can't answer the phone fast enough," he said.

On a slow day, he'll trade 100 megawatts in an hour. Other days, he can handle as much as 1,500 megawatts in an hour. That's more than 20 times the output of Lower Baker, or a quintillion snowflakes.

Power moved

The physical movement of high-voltage power across the Puget Sound Energy system falls to people working out of a vast basement control room in Redmond. For security reasons, only employees with coded key cards can enter.

"If you want to shut down the Northwest, this is a good place to start," said Dennis Christopherson, a senior power dispatcher.

Twenty-four hours a day, seven days a week, at least two people like Christopherson sit watching a massive curved wall on which Puget Sound Energy's north-south grid is positioned on its side. To the left is Portal Way, a substation one mile south of the Canadian border; to the right is Centralia, Lewis County.

Green, black and orange lines representing up to 500,000-volt lines, crisscross the wall. Coursing through them are 2,800 megawatts - or the equivalent of 40 Lower Baker dams.

It bears repeating: The power coursing through this system has to have a place to go. By the same token, if someone needs power, it has to be there at that moment.

"You make it in real time," said Jerry Rust, director of the North west Power Pool, which coordinates power operations across the region.

"And then you have to transport it in real time and then you have to use it in real time."

It's a little after 2 on a weekday afternoon, and the slow midday hours are giving way to the peak demand period, 5 to 9 p.m. Customers are turning lights on and off. Elevators are going up and down.

Predictable pattern

"In the next hour or so, it's going to start picking up gradually," Christopherson said.

A squiggly line on a piece of rolling graph paper charts megawatts above or below supply. Christopherson wants the needle to track at zero, but it can go up or down by as much 50 megawatts.

The automatic fix kicks in.

A one-megawatt change or "error" sends a signal through an automatic generation-control system that adjusts the amount of power being produced. On this day, extra power comes from Rocky Reach Dam, whose power Puget Sound Energy buys from the Chelan County Public Utility District.

"People are getting off work now," Christopherson said. "Kids are getting home."

http://seattletimes.nwsource.com/cgi-bin/WebObjects/SeattleTimes.woa/wa/gotoArticle?zsection_id=268448406&text_only=0&slug=electron02m0&document_id=134264678

-- Martin Thompson (mthom1927@aol.com), February 02, 2001

Answers

<<< "If you want to shut down the Northwest, this is a good place to start," said Dennis Christopherson, a senior power dispatcher. >>>

Indeed.

In late 1999, there were several episodes reported of possible attacks on the power infrastructure out West and also one in the Southeast U.S.

It has occurred to me, thinking about how close to collapse the power supply is out West right now, that any idiots who want to cause chaos might try repeating the failed attempts we heard about around Rollover 2000. It wouldn’t take much to cause a major blackout, I would imagine, if someone were clever enough to strike the transmission bottlenecks or control centers on a day when the system is stretched especially thin.

On the other hand, any malefactors still hoping for blackouts might just be waiting to see how events play out without violent action... at this rate, the western region of North America may collapse all on its own!

From my personal archives, several articles that I am sure can also be found (somewhere) in the Archives here:

[I couldn’t immediately find in my files the story about the guy in British Columbia who wanted to blow up the Alaska pipeline with the goal of profiting from speculation in the petroleum markets, but that odd tale surely belongs here too!]

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Power Line Sabotaged in Oregon

Associated Press, Friday, Dec. 31, 1999

BEND, Ore. –– A large tower holding a line that carries electricity from the Pacific Northwest to California was toppled in an act of sabotage, officials said today.

Bonneville Power Administration spokesman Perry Gruber said a computer re-routed power less than one second after the high-voltage line dropped at 8:53 p.m. Thursday. No customers lost power.

"We've had towers collapse before, but never as the result of malicious mischief like this," Gruber said.

David Szady, special agent in charge of the FBI's Portland office, said there was "no evidence or intelligence that this was Y2K- or millennial-related."

Gruber refused to say how the tower – which he said is between 80 and 200 feet tall – was taken down. The FBI said the tower was brought down without the use of explosives, but declined to give further details. Authorities had no suspects.

The BPA's transmission grid covers 300,000 square miles of Oregon, Washington, Idaho and western Montana.

The BPA's intertie system, including the line that was damaged, enables Northwest utilities to buy and sell power from British Columbia to the Mexican border. Other connections link it to the Missouri Valley grid.

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Sabotage of Oregon power line was an isolated act, officials say

BEND, Ore. (December 31, 1999 5:55 p.m. EST

http://www.nandotimes.com)

The toppling of an 80-foot power line tower appears to have been an isolated case of criminal mischief - and not organized Y2K sabotage, authorities said Friday.

The tower held the main high-voltage lines that carry electricity from the Pacific Northwest to the Southwest.

A computer rerouted power to alternative lines less than one second after the line fell Thursday night, Bonneville Power Administration spokesman Perry Gruber. No customers lost power, and a small fire was quickly extinguished.

Neither Gruber nor the FBI would say how the tower was brought down, except to say that no explosives were used. The owner of a nearby store said he understood someone had unbolted support cables holding the tower in place.

"The report we got from the Oregon Department of Transportation person at the scene was that some drunks simply unbolted the two bolts that bolted it to the ground and it fell over," store owner Steve Dalesky said.

[Based on...seeing the drunks? Known local redneck suspects? Or just wishful thinking? This makes no sense to me at all... I think someone was really trying to bring down the grid, they just weren’t very thorough. --Andre]

Crews were working to right the tower and energize the damaged line on Friday.

FBI Agent Gordon Compton said the FBI had no suspects. The tower was in a remote area with no homes, and no one has claimed responsibility. "There has been no evidence or intelligence that this was Y2K- or millennial-related," said David Szady, special agent in charge of the FBI's Portland office. "The cause has been determined and has been reported as an act of malicious mischief."

The Bonneville Power Administration's transmission grid covers 300,000 square miles of Oregon, Washington, Idaho and western Montana. Its intertie system, including the line that was damaged, enables Northwest utilities to buy and sell power up and down the West Coast. Other connections link it to the Missouri Valley grid.

The BPA made its command center in Vancouver, Wash., off-limits to all but a few energy operation specialists Friday because of security concerns. Operators there monitor substations and transmission lines in eight states.

The BPA fired up extra reserve generators Friday to counter any transmission failures and had already reduced power shipments on the intertie line to make sure there was plenty of power for the Pacific Northwest. "I'm looking forward to the new year arriving and this date to be over," BPA spokesman Joe O'Rourke said.

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Reward offered in Y2K tower tipping

PORTLAND, Ore., 7 Jan. 2000 (UPI) -- The Bonneville Power Authority is offering a reward of up to $10,000 for information leading to a conviction in the toppling of a support tower on a major electricity transmission line in Oregon on the night before New Year's Eve.

The downing of the tower for the 1 million volt DC line running from Oregon to the Los Angeles area didn't cause any power outages, but it did come at a time when the United States was on alert for both Y2K power outages and acts terrorism or sabotage linked to the arrival of the year 2000.

Investigators, including the FBI, determined that the two-legged tower fell over after someone loosened the supporting guy wires, and decided that the culprits were likely local vandals rather than terrorists. The BPA said, however, it was anxious to see those responsible brought to justice.

"The tower sustained minimal damage and the line itself was not permanently damaged,'' Mike Berg, a BPA security specialist, said in a release Friday. `Nevertheless, significant costs were incurred in responding to this emergency.

"This is the first time in over 20 years that someone has deliberately disabled one of our towers," Berg said. "It was obviously an attempt to cause mayhem on the Northwest power system and that is why we are taking this criminal act so seriously and offering a $10,000 reward."

The incident occurred the night of Dec. 30 near where the transmission line crosses U.S. Highway 20, about 37 miles southeast of Bend, Oregon.

The BPA said tips could be phoned in to the FBI, Oregon State Police or the Deschutes County Sheriff. Answers

If you have ever looked at one of those towers close up, you will realise that the 'vandals' had to have some serious tools and skills. Those cables are an inch thick at least. No mere teenage prank here.

-- Forrest Covington (theforrest@mindspring.com), January 08, 2000.

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Militia Leader Arrested in Nuclear Plot

Richard Zitrin, APBnews.com, 9 December 1999

http://dailynews.yahoo.com/h/ao/19991209/cr/19991209019.html

A militia leader is in jail for plotting to blow up a Florida nuclear power plant and black out Atlanta by destroying electrical facilities, federal authorities said today.

Donald Beauregard, 31, of St. Petersburg, planned to carry out the attacks by stealing explosives and weapons from National Guard armories in central Florida, according to the U.S. Attorney's Office here. Beauregard was arrested Wednesday after he was indicted by a federal grand jury on conspiracy and weapons charges.

Anticipating Armageddon

His arrest, along with the arrests last week of two California militia members accused of plotting to blow up a propane installation, could be part of the FBI's effort to minimize the threat of violence from anti-government groups around the end of the millennium, said a spokesman for a prominent watchdog group.

"There is a real millennial frenzy out there right now on the radical right," Mark Potok of the Alabama-based Southern Poverty Law Center told APBnews.com today. "Many believe we are in the run-up to the battle of Armageddon. There are others who believe the Y2K computer bug is going to bring about the crash of Western civilization ... and they see this as an opening to make the revolution they've all been pining for for years."

Potok said the timing of the bust indicates the plot might have been planned for New Year's.

"The FBI may be essentially rolling up people they fear are about to unleash violence around Dec. 31," Potok said.

'Hard-lined militia group'

Beauregard formerly was the leader of the Southeastern States Alliance (SSA), a coalition of militia groups from seven Southern states ranging from Florida to Kentucky to Virginia, Potok said. The SSA was formed in 1997 to create a unified command structure, he said.

"The SSA is a relatively hard-lined militia group," Potok said. "A lot of groups are very concerned to show they're not racist, not white-supremacist and so on." Potok said the SSA has a strong "Christian Identity" element in it, referring to the religious doctrine of some anti-government white supremacists. "That's about as hard-line as you can get," Potok said. "It reflects something that's going on in militias. They're becoming harder-edged and there's more and more Christian Identity influence being seen."

Potok said a major player in the militia movement, Rick Ainsworth of Alabama, asked Beauregard last year to step down as SSA leader, which he did. Potok said he does not know why Ainsworth made the request.

Beauregard remained at the head of his local militia, the 111th Regiment Militia of Pinellas County, which formerly was the 77th Regiment, Potok said.

Investigation began in 1995

The arrest Wednesday came following an investigation that began in February 1995 and culminated with the indictment on Dec. 2, according to court papers. Over that time, Beauregard conspired with other militia members on a plan to steal weapons and explosives from the National Guard and U.S. Army Reserve, and then to destroy energy facilities, the indictment says. He also is accused of participating in combat, firearms, and explosives training; planning to kill a militia member he believed to be an informant; and committing weapons violations, according to the indictment. In March 1996, Beauregard distributed a memorandum, "Project (Worst Nightmare)," to other militia commands that described plans to shut down federal operations, disrupt federal communications, and detain key federal leaders, the indictment said.

Three months later, Beauregard allegedly had a "target map" pinpointing electrical, utility, and police offices in Pinellas County.

Coordinated attack planned

The court papers say that at an SSA meeting in North Carolina in November 1997, Beauregard discussed breaking into National Guard armories in central Florida to steal weapons to destroy the Florida Power nuclear plant in Crystal River. He allegedly directed SSA members to develop plans to attack government facilities in each of their states.

A month later, Beauregard discussed carrying out simultaneous attacks on St. Petersburg and Atlanta power facilities, according to the indictment. A "scout" allegedly told him that destroying three key towers serving Atlanta would black out the area.

In March 1998, Beauregard called off plans to steal firearms and explosives from the National Guard Armory in Haines City, Fla., because of the arrest of some militia members in Michigan, the indictment said.

Two months ago, he tried to buy blasting caps in Kentucky, according to court papers, which also cite him for possessing at various times a can of nitromethane, a key ingredient in explosives; grenades, pipe bombs, and having access to a 20 mm cannon and a .50 caliber automatic machine gun.

Held without bond

Beauregard is charged with conspiring to damage government property and destroy energy facilities, and supporting terrorism. He also is charged with four firearms crimes. He is being held in federal custody without bond, said Monte Richardson, spokesman for the U.S. Attorney's Office here. Beauregard does not have an attorney, said Craig Alldredge, the federal public defender who represented him Wednesday at the suspect's bond hearing in federal court. Alldredge said he knows little about Beauregard, except that he has no criminal record.

Richardson said he could not comment on the possibility of further arrests. "The investigation is ongoing; that's all we can say," he said.

Beauregard faces up to 55 years in prison, according to the U.S. Attorney's Office.

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Odd portrait painted of bomb-plot suspect

Brandon Bailey, San Jose Mercury News, 11 December 1999

Kevin Patterson, the man suspected of plotting to blow up a Sacramento area propane plant, lived in a world where right-wing militia members talk about overthrowing the government and survivalists boast of storing several months' supplies against the threat of Y2K chaos.

The 42-year-old handyman told friends he used pre-paid phone cards so no one could trace his calls, while avoiding supermarket discount clubs because ``they put your name in a satanic data base.''

And over the past year, he and an associate carried on cryptic conversations about baking, cookies and sugar -- code words that allegedly referred to making and procuring explosives and guns.

At least, that's the picture painted by federal authorities, after months of investigation using wiretaps, hidden microphones, a paid informant and a tracking device planted on one of Patterson's cars, in a 58-page affidavit unsealed this week after agents arrested Patterson and Charles Kiles on charges of federal firearms violations. Patterson also allegedly told the federal informant that he had plans to attack the California Aqueduct, a PG&E substation and a group of television transmission towers.

The case is one of several that have surfaced as part of a law enforcement effort to crack down on extremist groups that might be inclined to commit terrorism around the dawning of the new century. Earlier this week, the FBI arrested a southern militia leader on suspicion of plotting to blow up power lines in Florida and nearby states.

``Everyone who watches these groups agrees there is a heightened danger right now, because of the way the millennium date change is seen by the radical right,'' said Mark Potok, an analyst at the non- profit Southern Poverty Law Center.

But whether the Sacramento suspects would have carried out the potentially disastrous attack on the Elk Grove propane plant is unclear. ``Talk is cheap,'' said Dwight Samuel, a Sacramento attorney who is representing Patterson. ``And the last time I looked, we didn't put people in jail for talking.''

Since their arrests Dec. 3, Patterson and Kiles have each denied participating in any terrorist plot. They are facing charges relating only to illegal firearms, although their attorneys say they expect a formal indictment will include allegations of terrorist activity when it is issued later this month.

Both Samuel and attorney Hayes Gable, representing Kiles, criticized the allegations against their clients as vague and based heavily on the word of an unnamed government informant. Authorities acknowledged the informant was working for money and leniency in an unrelated criminal case. But the federal affidavit, prepared by agents of the FBI and the Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco and Firearms, also lists a mountain of incriminating evidence gleaned from electronic surveillance and other sources.

In searching the homes of Patterson and Kiles, agents reported finding more than 50 guns and 50,000 rounds of ammunition, along with 30 pounds of fertilizer that could be used to make a bomb. Authorities also say that Patterson has ties with a number of figures in the world of illicit weapons dealers and right-wing extremists. An undercover detective in Austin told the FBI that Patterson once demonstrated how to make bombs with ammonium nitrate for members of the secessionist group known as the Republic of Texas.

In addition, Patterson had numerous phone conversations with a Reno man about burying supplies in anticipation of a social breakdown resulting from Y2K computer problems. Among other things, they discussed their concern that Army and Air Force units would confiscate citizens' guns and ``corral, handle and transport detainees.''

Patterson lived with his mother in Camino, a small town east of Sacramento. Kiles, 49, recently moved to Placerville. Authorities have characterized the pair as members of the San Joaquin County Militia, a little-known extremist group that a federal prosecutor said is defunct. The government's informant said militia members were bent on committing violent acts that would prompt authorities to declare martial law, sparking a militia uprising to overthrow the federal government.

The group's alleged commander, Donald Rudolph of Citrus Heights, was recently sentenced to 30 months in prison for unauthorized possession of a machine gun.

It was Rudolph and Patterson who first discussed targeting the Suburban Propane storage facility in Elk Grove, just outside Sacramento, according to the federal affidavit. Agents said their informant reported that the idea came up in June 1998, when Rudolph and Patterson were assisting others in a surveillance of the Yellowstone County Jail in Billings, Mont. -- apparently part of a plan, never carried out, to help members of the Montana Freemen break out of custody.

Last month, in conversations that were monitored by federal agents, Patterson allegedly described his plan to manufacture the explosives he would need to blow up the Suburban Propane plant. The plant, which has a capacity of 24 million gallons, stores liquid propane in two 122-foot-tall tanks. According to the FBI, experts at Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory warned that a successful attack on the plant could create a firestorm extending 8 miles or more. A spokesman for Suburban Propane, however, said damage would be confined to a half-mile radius.

But Patterson never set a date for the attacks, authorities acknowledged. At one point, in fact, he allegedly told the federal informant he had decided to postpone his plans until the new year. ``He was waiting,'' the affidavit said, ``to see what happened in California at the end of the millennium.''

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-- Andre Weltman (aweltman@state.pa.us), February 02, 2001.