"The system is broken!"

As Quality professionals, we get into the habit of thinking along certain lines. Often these lines are very useful, which is why we develop the habits. And even when we knock off work to go home, it can be a huge benefit in our daily private lives not to blame people when things go wrong, to use incremental improvement to get better at golf, or to remember the process approach when negotiating with unhelpful Help Desks.

But every so often those habits can trip us up, when they encourage us to assume things that aren't really there. A couple of days ago I was talking to an official from ASQ, and questioned why I hadn't gotten a certain mailing. I was sure this was a sign that there was a bug in the routine that generated mailing lists, and asked for a bunch of information to help locate the error: "Which mailing list did you use? What email address does that list show for me?" After a while the answer came back, and it turned out that mailing hadn't gone out to anybody yet. Maybe I could afford to be a little more patient? 😀

The same thing can happen in bigger cases.

Last Friday, April 5, some 60,000 households in the Province of Alberta lost power in rolling blackouts, starting at 6:49 am and continuing over four hours until about 11:00.* Fortunately this was in April, so temperatures were a little warmer than they were back in January—the last time that Alberta's power grid almost failed. (I discussed that failure at the time in this post.) This time, thermometer readings hovered cozily right around freezing: from 28°F-32°F in Calgary, and from 30°F-32°F in Edmonton. Even the rural town of Conklin in the north-east experienced temperatures in the same range. Still, the unplanned blackouts caused understandable alarm across the province, and many people rushed to assign blame.

• Premier Danielle Smith said the blackouts were all because the market doesn't encourage natural gas plants to stay operating, so that they can pick up the slack in a moment when other sources fail. "This is at the heart of everything that we've been saying for the last year, that the system is broken."
• On the other hand, Marie-France Samaroden, the vice-president of grid reliability operations with the Alberta Electric System Operator (AESO), pointed out that gas plants aren't simply a panacea, because they are as subject to disruption as any other type of generator. And in fact one of the immediate triggers for Friday's blackouts was that the 420-megawatt Keephills 2 natural gas power plant went offline unexpectedly. (At the moment it is not clear why.)  
• Andrew Leach, an energy and environmental economist and professor at the University of Alberta, said that the whole market structure misallocates energy production, because it has been set up inflexibly. 
• Blake Shaffer, an associate professor of economics at the University of Calgary, summarized the situation by remarking, "People like to assign blame on power system woes to their least favorite generation technology. And the reality is, all generation technologies have reliability challenges." 

The last time I wrote about Alberta's power grid, I discussed the kind of analysis and planning that we might expect: FMEAs for individual components of the system, plus an overall system analysis for the entire grid. And I assumed that such an analysis, if it were thorough enough, would highlight exactly where Alberta has to take action to improve weaknesses, in order to prevent future failures. But I overlooked one huge fact that makes the entire problem far more difficult. It is only a small consolation to reflect that everyone else who has commented on the problem has made the same mistake.

The critical mistake we all have made is that we think of Alberta's electric grid as one large system. But it's not.

Think about it for a minute. The grid consists of producers (who generate power) and consumers (who use it). The producers are plants powered by natural gas or coal; wind turbines; banks of solar cells; and so forth. The consumers are private homes, businesses, and in fact even the production plants themselves to the extent that they need electricity to power their own operations. 

But now, what is a system? According to Wikipedia,** a system is "a group of interacting or interrelated elements that act according to a set of rules to form a unified whole"; and for the concept of system planning to make any sense at all, the planner has to be able to intervene in the system to adjust it in any spot where it is not running correctly. That's how a machine works, and it's how a factory works. All our Quality tools are designed to analyze systems that look like this.

And this is exactly what the Province of Alberta cannot do! Each of those producers is a private company. Each of the consumers is a private company or else a private citizen. The Province of Alberta has no authority to tell the owners of those power plants how to run their businesses, nor to tell private homes how much electricity they are allowed to use. But this means that the Province is powerless to reach in and adjust this or that element of the "system" in order to make the whole thing run better. (Or to keep it from breaking down!) The most they can do is to provide information and offer incentives in the hope of coordinating and influencing the behavior of the "system components." But those "components" remain stubbornly independent.

Of course I have overstated the situation when I say that Alberta's electric grid is "not a system." There are plenty of other systems that have the exact same features: the economy is one of them, and a natural ecosystem is another. Sellers and shoppers are "system components" in the economy; animals and plants are "system components" in a natural ecosystem. In both cases, the "components" do what they want, and not what we tell them to; but we still talk about both the Economy and Nature as "systems." All the same, it is important to recognize that they are systems of a very different kind than a machine or a factory, precisely because the "system components" can do what they want and ignore all our good planning. I won't enumerate examples when an attempt to plan the economy (or an ecosystem!) has had unexpected or unfavorable results, because you can probably come up with plenty of examples on your own. What is important is to recognize that Alberta faces the same kind of challenge in planning the electrical grid.

Does this mean blackouts are inevitable? Not exactly. But so long as the system is structured the way it is today, it is probably not possible to guarantee that future blackouts have been prevented.

Well, is it possible to restructure the system to prevent blackouts? Maybe, but take it slowly here. When I say that the current structure cannot guarantee an end to blackouts, I'm talking about the structure where producers and consumers are all independent. Theoretically I could imagine trying to "simplify" the system by giving the provincial government full authority over all the power companies and all the consumers. Then they could adjust the system wherever needed, to make sure it runs smoothly. But that's a lot of authority. 

Does anyone really want the provincial government telling them how many hours they are allowed to keep their lights on, or what days they are allowed to recharge their phones? Probably not. 

Or if you own a power company, do you want the provincial government to tell you how much you can produce and when you have to produce it, even if their decisions mean you lose your shirt? Again, probably not. 

Of course the whole question is a political one, to be answered by the voters of Alberta and not by me. But I can imagine an outcome where the voters decide that they'd rather put up with the risk of future blackouts, because the available alternatives are even worse. 

Like I said at the beginning, sometimes our habits as Quality professionals can mislead us. Our familiarity and facility with technical tools can make us think that enough technical skill can solve any problem. But sometimes the most difficult issues are not technical ones. 

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* You can google the event to find coverage. Here are some of the articles I consulted in writing this piece:
https://www-cbc-ca.cdn.ampproject.org/c/s/www.cbc.ca/amp/1.7165290
https://www.theenergymix.com/rotating-brownouts-in-alberta-highlight-need-for-more-flexible-grid/
https://tnc.news/2024/04/08/alberta-to-modernize-power-grid/
https://calgary.ctvnews.ca/alberta-s-second-grid-alert-in-2-days-leads-to-rolling-blackouts-1.6835023
https://globalnews.ca/news/10405013/alberta-electric-system-grid-alert-april/   

** https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/System