In Part I, the cost of various Cornell utilities were detailed, Our second part discusses what happens during a large scale power outage.
Given how much Cornell spends for electric service, you’d assume that electric service is 100% reliable. Is it?
Every first-year physics or electrical engineering class teaches the equations that govern simple alternating current circuits. The larger and more complex the circuit, the more complicated the equation. Because the entire eastern half of the US operates as a single AC circuit, very large computer programs are used to model its operation.
To oversimplify, the circuit is like a fancy Las Vegas swimming pool with many islands. Each generating station is like a fountain pouring more water into the pool, and each use of electricity is like a drain removing water from the pool. Overall, water will flow around the islands so that a uniform water level (the voltage) is maintained for the entire pool. The computer models are useful to prevent too much flow on any given powerline to avoid the powerline from overheating or failing.
Depending on where the failure occurs, it can cause an outage for a neighborhood or even an entire utility. The failure of one utility can cause neighboring utilities to also fail like toppling a row of dominos.
Power for the entire Northeast has failed twice: on November 9, 1965, a protective relay at Niagara Falls tripped and caused an outage for 30 million people for up to 13 hours. Then on August 14, 2003, a software bug in an alarm in Akron, OH triggered an outage that affected 55 million customers in eight states and Ontario. All of New York, including Cornell, lost power, but the University at Buffalo managed to keep its campus powered.
The Electric Reliability Council of Texas (ERCOT) made the news in February 2021 when a winter storm left 4 million customers without power across Texas. Although most power lines were up, the generators were down, leaving the customers freezing. This followed extremely cold weather in February 2011 which cut off natural gas fired generation, leaving 3.2 million customers without power throughout the state.
All of these outages demonstrated that climbing back from a mass outage can be slow and take days.
Ithaca has also experienced local outages, some caused by fallen power lines, others by transformer fires and one by a squirrel. The evening before Slope Day 2012, 2,765 people in Tompkins County lost power.
Emergency Response Plan
We asked Cornell about its own emergency response plan in the case of a massive power outage. Cornell referred us to its website, which has a very vague plan. It does not outline evacuation procedures, establish emergency food and medical sources or designate back-up shelters.
Instead the “plan” calls for an Incident Management Team to meet and decide what is best. This team would then disseminate their remedies via CornellALERT to all students, who by that time may already be freezing off campus without cell phone or internet connection.
Our Power “Island”
Cornell claims it has the “[a]bility to ‘island’ and provide all campus power needs during power outages.” But its ability to deliver on that promise has never been seriously tested.
New York State Electric and Gas (NYSEG), our local utility, not only provides power to Cornell, it also provides “ancillary services.” These include load following (matching the exact load with the right amount of generation), reactive power, frequency control, and operating reserves that are standing by if Cornell’s on-campus generation is not sufficient.
Cornell hopes that the electronics it purchased to control its solar farms and its central plant cogeneration can handle all of the niceties of operating its utility “island” if the rest of the state loses power. However, designing and operating an AC power system is an art, and Cornell won’t say if the “island” has ever been successfully tested disconnected from NYSEG.
One lesson from past mass outages is that everything can crash before the protective circuits disconnect Cornell from the NYSEG grid. This means that Cornell would have to restart (“cold start”) its hydro plant and its central cogeneration. Although Cornell has a lot of on-campus solar on a sunny day, does Cornell have enough power at the ready to restart its generation without outside help?
Similarly, Cornell’s central heating plant relies upon the delivery of natural gas that flows through pipelines under pressure supplied by compressor stations. If some of these compressors need electricity to operate, the central cogeneration plant may be unable to make power or steam.
Indeed, on January 17, 2023, NYSEG had a natural gas outage in Schuyler, Yates, and Steuben counties that left over 600 customers without heat, some for days. If gas flows into Ithaca were interrupted, Cornellians may lose heating both on and off campus.
Cornell declined to comment on the size of its “island.” Although the central campus is linked together by Cornell-owned power lines, there are important buildings that are separately connected and metered to NYSEG.
We asked about facilities not directly connected to the campus, such as the Lake Source Cooling station on Cayuga Lake, the Collyer Boathouse, the Schuyler House, the Cornell Child Care Center, and Cornell-owned fraternity houses. Does Cornell have battery backups in those facilities? Cornell refused to provide a specific response.
The Lake Source Cooling station, located at 961 E Shore Dr, is critical because its electric pumps send chilled water to the campus. If an electric outage takes it down, campus cooling must rely upon a thermal storage tank and backup electric mechanical chillers.
Although Cornell now has enough solar panels to meet all of its power needs on a sunny day, Cornell won’t say how many panels will be connected to the campus power “island” when Cornell disconnects from NYSEG.
While Cornell has protected critical equipment such as the Vet Hospital and the computer servers in Rhodes Hall with backup power, Cornell has not announced any plans, beyond its “island,” to protect student living areas. In the 1960s, following several fire fatalities, Cornell set strict fire sprinkler standards for both dorms and off campus Greek houses. Surprisingly, Cornell has not required even minimal backup power to address outages in those same facilities.
Cornell’s own electric infrastructure is also aging. For example, in April 2016, a transformer failure caused Rockefeller Hall to lose power. Cornell recently presented a study of its costly electric system upgrades in Geneva, and we can expect that the Ithaca campus has similar needs. However, when questioned on the issue, Cornell officials have either declined to answer, or redirected us to vague outlines of emergency operations that are not reassuring.
The community needs to know that the entire Ithaca campus system is well maintained and unlikely to fail us. Cornell should be more transparent in the steps it takes to achieve electric reliability and in deciding how it will serve Cornellians left off its central campus “island.”
Part 3 will look at recent regulatory efforts to “decarbonize” utility service by limiting natural gas use.
