After the giant blackout that deprived part of Manhattan of electricity on Saturday, questions remain about the ability of the New York network to avoid large cuts, and elected officials are concerned.
Streets plunged into darkness, monster traffic jams, subway stations without lighting, the images have traveled the world since the incident which struck an area as large as about two Parisian districts, in western Manhattan.
After being very evasive about the causes of the blackout, local company Con Edison, which has a monopoly in New York, said Monday that a failure of a high voltage line was at the root of the problem. .
The energy supplier explained that the mechanisms designed to isolate such a failure had not worked, causing an outage for some 73,000 users, who had power again at the end of the evening.
New York Democratic Mayor Bill de Blasio said he was “troubled” by this explanation while ConEd, whose origins date back to inventor Thomas Edison, had categorically dismissed this scenario at first.
“Our city must never be plunged into darkness like that again,” urged the candidate for the Democratic nomination for the 2020 presidential election. Major cuts remain rare. The last date of 2006 and the famous blackout of 2003 was not the fault of ConEd because it affected the entire northeast of the United States.
But for a city that prides itself on never sleeping, complete darkness doesn’t make a good impression.
“This kind of massive cut is completely avoidable with the right investments in our network,” said Chuck Schumer, Democratic senator from New York State, calling for a full independent investigation.
“It’s not that Con Edison is not investing enough. They are investing too much,” said Francisco de Leon, professor of engineering at New York University. “Its reliability rate is very high.”
After Hurricane Sandy, which hit New York in 2012, ConEd spent $ 1 billion on improving its network, which “avoided hundreds of thousands of outages,” the company said in its latest Annual Report.
– Sandy’s lessons –
“The blackout was limited”, argues Francisco de Leon and affected only “four or five” parts of the network of the 62 in the city. “But it affected a lot of people due to the very high (population) density.”
“It is not necessarily a problem of reliability, but rather of adaptation,” explains Richard Berkley, executive director of the users’ association New York’s Utility Project. “Because if there was a malfunction, the system should have isolated it to one neighborhood” without affecting others. “That was one of Sandy’s lessons.”
Even if the incident on Saturday is not related to insufficient capacity because consumption was rather moderate at the time, New Yorkers are nevertheless worried about the consequences of the heat peak expected at the end of the week, with a high of 42 degrees Celsius felt on Saturday.
“ConEd is one of the most reliable energy providers in the world (…) but they still have their problems,” warns Berkley, noting that a power outage in New York had more serious consequences. than elsewhere taking into account the physiognomy of the city.
“You have something like a third of the elevators in the world,” he says. “Thousands of people can get stuck. And there is also the subway.”
The federal state has released funding to promote the use of artificial intelligence and machine learning in network management, to increase the speed of adjustments.
ConEd has recently equipped itself with new mobile stations to be able to deal with an extended outage.
“We have to make sure that the system is designed so that this does not happen,” Democratic Governor Andrew Cuomo warned on Saturday. “You face the risk of chaos and security issues. The system has to be better (than it is today). Period.”
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