Blackout Probe Eyes Ohio Utility

At more than a hundred power plants involved in the massive Aug. 14 blackout, officials have been scrambling to collect data and timelines of the grid collapse, reports CBS News Correspondent Sharyl Attkisson.

The Energy Department quietly summoned the companies involved, including FirstEnergy Corp. – which owns three suspect transmission lines in Ohio, where the outage may have started – to a closed-door meeting at a Newark, N.J. hotel.

All the companies were told to come ready to give their version of events on from 8 a.m. on blackout morning until the hour the lights went out.

More than a week after the northeast went dark, investigators are saying little publicly about a cause. But they are honing in on the theory that a company or utility broke the energy rules designed to keep power lines from overloading. Some have pointed to FirstEnergy.

When the grid collapsed, two federal regulators happened to be in the nerve center at the Midwest Independent Transmission System Operator (known as the Midwest ISO), the power company that oversees transmission lines across 15 states, including the region where the outage may have started.

The regulators watched the fiasco unfold before them on video monitors.

That up-close view could prove crucial as U.S. and Canadian officials track the blackout's source and investigate the failure to isolate it.

"It allowed our commission to have a very timely understanding of what was happening on the grid, and that type of information exchange from our perspective at the Federal Energy Regulatory Commission was very beneficial," Dan Larcamp, a FERC staff director, said in a news conference Thursday at the regional group's offices in the Indianapolis suburb of Carmel.

The FERC staffers' presence also allows for an independent assessment of the Midwest ISO's response.

The two staff members listened as officials at the Midwest organization discussed the blackout in telephone calls with representatives of the nation's grid watchdog, the North American Electric Reliability Council (NERC), Larcamp said. Officials declined to discuss the content of the calls.

FirstEnergy Corp. is a defendant in a lawsuit filed Thursday by a Philadelphia law firm. The complaint, filed on behalf of investors, accuses FirstEnergy of misrepresenting earnings.

FirstEnergy lines were among several lines in the Midwest that failed last week in the hours before the outage multiplied, the Midwest ISO's chief executive said Thursday.

James P. Torgerson declined to say where and when those problems occurred, whether the number of failures was unusual, or whether they were believed linked to FirstEnergy's subsequent line failures and the larger outage that spread minutes later.

"We don't want to muddy the water by speculating about what happened and why," Torgerson said during a news conference.

A U.S.-Canada task force this week took over the investigation into the outage, which darkened homes and businesses in eight states and in Ontario, Canada. The U.S. Department of Energy plans to send two investigators to the Midwest organization's offices early next week.

Torgerson confirmed that the grid manager initiated three calls to FirstEnergy, a member of the Midwest ISO, within an hour before the outages spread. The Midwest ISO also contacted counterparts that oversee neighboring segments of the power grid, including PJM Interconnection, which monitors all or parts of seven mid-Atlantic states, he said.

The Mideast ISO began operations in February 2002 overseeing power transmissions on lines controlled by 23 utilities with little history of close cooperation. Its members are spread in a hopscotch pattern from Ohio to Montana and the Canadian province of Manitoba.

The Midwest ISO is seeking greater powers to meet emergency needs by overseeing moment-to-moment electricity transfers on the spot market and gain the capability to interrupt transmissions and potentially isolate outages before they spread — powers some other regional grid managers already possess.

An application to run its own spot electricity market beginning in March is pending before FERC. Torgerson said the Midwest ISO was reviewing whether to slow the application process in light of last week's outage.

Torgerson declined to comment on whether changes to his organization's authority could leave it better-positioned to limit future outages.

"I think we're going to have to let the investigation run its course, and see what recommendations come out from that," he said.

The public may remain in the dark on the cause until next Friday when the industry-sponsored group NERC tells Congress what it's discovered.

With multiple systems in place that should have prevented the power disaster, one person close to the investigation framed the probe as "what didn't they know and when didn't they know it?"