The massive power outages and endless gasoline lines that followed Hurricane Sandy’s assault on the East Coast revealed plenty of weaknesses in the nation’s energy infrastructure.
But they also offered some lessons for the next superstorm — as well as caveats that people can do only so much to ward off attacks from nature.
Among the lessons: The Northeast can learn from the experiences of other hurricane-ravaged regions. Greener power can help. And some of the cure-alls that people inevitably proffer really aren’t.
Here’s a roundup of some of Sandy’s takeaways for energy policy:
1. The Northeast should look south for guidance — to a point
Some of the most iconic images of the post-Sandy disarray showed long lines of motorists in the New York area queuing up for hours-long waits for gasoline. While as many as 38 percent of those stations simply had no fuel to sell a week after landfall, some stations actually had gasoline — but no electricity to power their pumps.
That experience led some New Jersey lawmakers to propose requiring that some gas stations and other critical facilities have generators on-site. Convenience store and gas station trade groups quickly derided the proposal as an $8,000 tax on small businesses.
But as it turned out, it shouldn’t have been a new debate at all.
Florida underwent a similar brawl after being torn apart by four hurricanes in 2004 and then by Hurricane Wilma in 2005, which likewise left many gas stations without power and had motorists scrambling. (People who had bought gasoline-powered generators for their homes were also unable to get fuel.) That prompted Florida’s Legislature to suggest the same sort of all-encompassing generator proposal that New Jersey is now fighting about.
Ultimately, Florida wound up passing a law requiring only that certain gas stations, such as those near evacuation routes and interstate highways, be wired so they could run off a generator if necessary. The law also requires that gas station owners with 10 or more stations in a single county have access to a portable generator.
No state in the Northeast has passed a similar law, said Jeff Pillon, the energy assurance director for the National Association of State Energy Officials.
Even with such a law in place, closures of petroleum terminals after Sandy would have caused plenty of turmoil — New York Gov. Andrew Cuomo eventually said the long fuel lines and the rationing were caused by a two-day loss of supply. But Florida’s law still could lay a decent foundation for protecting homes and businesses when they need fuel the most.
2. Nuclear plants can take a drubbing after all
While Sandy’s storm surge was less extreme than the monstrous tsunami that triggered the Fukushima crisis in Japan, the hurricane did belie some of the warnings from anti-nuclear activists who said the public would be at risk if reactors continued to operate during the storm. In the end, the Nuclear Regulatory Commission said, more than a dozen plants in Sandy’s path managed the event fairly well.
Three reactors in the Northeast shut down during the storm — either automatically in response to electrical problems or manually — and two reduced their power output, and dozens of nuclear plant emergency sirens across the region were damaged or destroyed in the storm. Yet in the end, all the plants operated safely or had their safety systems perform as designed, the NRC said.
3. Going greener isn’t just about your carbon footprint
One of the most dire humanitarian emergencies just before landfall was the forced evacuation of patients and personnel from New York University Langone Medical Center, where a backup generator had failed. But at the same time, most of NYU’s campus less than 2 miles south remained alight.
The reason: As a replacement to its older oil-burning power plant, the university had completed a natural gas electric-heat cogeneration plant last year to save money and shrink the school’s carbon profile.
In preparation for Sandy, NYU cut itself off from the local utility, Consolidated Edison, and came out of the experience fairly unscathed, The New York Times reported.
Similarly, Princeton University made use of its own natural gas-powered “microgrid” to power most of its campus, including dorms and research labs, and to supply hot water after its power was disrupted by Sandy, according to The Christian Science Monitor.
The Pentagon has also been experimenting with microgrids overseas as well as for bases in the U.S.
James Newcomb, a program director with the Rocky Mountain Institute, said Sandy offered no lessons “especially new or especially unique” other than introducing Americans to a new level of destruction possible from Mother Nature. But he said the long-term impact of Sandy was that microgrids are likely to become more plentiful after their noted successes.
Not every facility is suited for early adoption of microgrids, but Newcomb said research facilities, corporate campuses, data centers, military bases and any other areas with integrated ownership have to take the technology seriously. Other benefits to microgrids include the ability to give a company more control and monitoring of its energy consumption.
Microgrids are also part of a larger sea change for the electric grid and the utility industry, Newcomb said. “I think we’re still at a stage where some utilities view microgrids as a threat and a few see it as a possible business opportunity where they can engage with a microgrid partner,” he said. “It’s a little bit of ‘barbarians at the gate.’”
Moreover, a recently unclassified National Research Council report suggested that state legislatures change utility laws to enable the creation of microgrids to help protect against blackouts, whether they’re caused by storms or terrorist attacks. For instance, some state laws grant utilities exclusive service territories, which makes the installation of small microgrids “difficult or impossible in much of the country,” the report said.
4. Burying power lines is not a panacea
The perennial question every time a tree knocks out electricity to more than one house: Why not bury the power lines and be done with it?
Many Floridians asked that question in 2004 and 2005, and it has come up a lot in Sandy’s wake.
But New York City was a great, though unfortunate, example of how putting the lines underground doesn’t solve the problem: Trees didn’t knock down power lines in Lower Manhattan, but the storm surge that inundated parts of the city still threatened harm to above-ground power stations. Many homes and businesses in the city’s other four boroughs and on Long Island also suffered too much flood damage to receive power after the trees had been dealt with.
Cuomo didn’t entertain the idea of burying power lines after the storm. “I don’t know if we’re prepared to move all the wires underground,” he said after deriding the local utilities as “long-standing, basically monopolistic bureaucracies” whose preparation, responsiveness and communication were lacking.
“If you were designing a new system, if you could go back and do it from scratch, you would put the wires under the ground, there’s no doubt,” Cuomo said at a news conference earlier this month. But, he quickly noted, “it’s very expensive, it’s very time-consuming. It would be an investment of billions and billions of dollars.”
For a lot of the places flooded by Sandy, including large swaths of New York, New Jersey, Connecticut and Massachusetts, burying power lines may harden the system in some ways but wouldn’t solve the outage problem — or make repairing the lines any easier.
“There are a few things we can do short of insanity,” Electric Power Research Institute fellow Clark Gellings said. “Insanity being: ‘Put everything underground.’”
“A lot of times people jump to the idea of putting it all underground,” he said. “Well, I never want to build a power system that has to operate underwater. … Undergrounding may be selectively OK but undergrounding in general is just a [way to spend] money.”
And when it comes to spending money to bury power lines, who ought to pay?
A regularly touted 2003 report from the staff of North Carolina’s public utility commission investigated the cost and benefits of burying power lines in that state after a powerful ice storm and billed such a project as “prohibitively expensive.”
The undertaking would take about 25 years to complete and cost about $41 billion, with a price tag in some areas as high as $2.1 million per mile. To pay for the undergrounding, utilities would have to charge their power customers 125 percent more.
The analysis further noted that buried lines “are not impervious to damage” and that “the repair time for underground systems is almost 60 percent longer than for overhead systems when damage does occur.”
5. Sometimes, it just pays to be prepared
Just ask Goldman Sachs CEO Lloyd Blankfein.
While most of Lower Manhattan sat in the dark for days after Sandy made landfall, Goldman Sachs’s headquarters managed to keep its lights on without building a natural gas-powered microgrid like NYU or Princeton.
“We learned a lot from 9/11, so when we built our building, we built it with a lot of redundancy, and a lot of backup power, and obviously invested a lot in testing and preparation and resilience in planning,” Blankfein told New York Magazine. “And I tell you, the day before the hurricane, we put 25,000 sandbags around our building, and the front of our building looked ridiculous, but it worked.”
The investment firm’s building is less than 1,000 feet from the Hudson River and ground zero, which was inundated with floodwaters during Sandy.
Once the immediate crisis was averted, Goldman Sachs let the Port Authority borrow its pumps. It also set up a charging station and let people in the neighborhood come by to take showers.
“We worked hard and did sensible things,” Blankfein said.