Instead, the arrangement serves the marketer by securing a needed path into TVA s transmission system. Later, when the marketer finds a buyer, it can inform TVA with as little as 20 minutes notice that thousands of megawatts will be flowing across the transmission system, ready or not. We consider this a dangerous misuse of the transmission system and have determined that we will accommodate the marketer s transactions only if reliability can be protected. In airline terms, we are building planes and sending them from the gate with hoards of travelers onboard, even though we are dangerously short of runways . Established electric utilities don t always wear the white hat.
Competitive pressures can bring out rogue behavior in many organizations.
Last summer, for example, one midwestern utility had more demand for electricity than it could supply. Normally in such circumstances, the price of power rises when demand exceeds the supply. If a utility cannot meet its contractual requirement, it should interrupt noncritical and keep critical loads, like hospitals, from being at risk. Instead of interrupting lucrative sales when power prices were exorbitantly high, however, the utility simply allowed its system to become a black hole on the grid. Because electricity flows to where it is needed, the utility sucked in power from other utilities without paying the high prices for it and increased the risk of blacking out its neighbors.