On the Front Lines of the Power Grid

[phantom power]

Utility companies used to hire and train their own people to operate their systems. As the grid became more interconnected, some utilities organized themselves into power pools, with one control room handling the supply for multiple utilities. The earliest was the entity now known as PJM, which used to stand for Pennsylvania-Jersey-Maryland but now stretches into all or part of Delaware, Virginia, West Virginia, Ohio, Illinois and scattered parts of other states. New York had a power pool and so did the six New England states.

The job got exponentially more complicated when the federal government pressed the pools to convert into power markets, where the utilities would sell off their generating stations and third parties would be allowed to build generators. The hour-by-hour decisions about who would generate to serve what load were made mostly by an auction process and turned the pools into “independent system operators.”

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Recruiting is a challenge, though. Grid entities look for candidates with some background in engineering, but they also need certain personality traits, like the ability to work collaboratively but not to debate endlessly. People with military backgrounds are favored, because they often have appropriate organizational and technical skills.

One aspect that makes the job complicated is that on the grid these days, there is a market not just for electricity, but also for “ancillary services.” These include the ability to ramp up and down quickly, which will be required as the wind and sun vary in intensity; the ability to add or subtract very large amounts of power in tiny fractions of a second, to keep the alternating current system working as closely as possible to 60 alternations per second; the ability to step in to control voltage; the ability to stand by for hours or days at a time, poised to start up if something goes wrong; and the ability, if everything goes wrong, to begin generating with no outside power to help.

http://www.nytimes.com/2011/10/26/business/energy-environment/behind-the-power-grid-humans-with-high-stakes-jobs.html?pagewanted=1&_r=1