Unexpected Power Surges Are Putting US Homes At Risk

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One morning last June in Waltham, Massachusetts, a town just outside Boston, a bunch of fire alarms started going off.

So all these neighbors and their pajamas got out and were like, what's happening, And then they also noticed that there was a fire and they were losing electricity too.

This is Neurine Malik, a Bloomberg Power and Energy reporter. A house had caught fire and local firefighters responded to the scene. The neighbors would later learn that this fire and the loss of electricity started because of a problem with the power grid. There was a power surge.

Higher voltage like rippled through neighborhoods and some houses. Every house experienced it differently. Some had flickering lights, some had actual like their own power surges within their homes and their own electrical appliances got fried. People had refrigerators, air conditioners, and of course, unfortunately for this one family, they're home caught fire and it was devastating.

And Noreene says Waltham is not the only neighborhood at risk. She says these kinds of dangerous surges can happen in lots of places and the problem is growing. Today. On the show, what caused the fire in Waltham and how many homes are at risk? This is big tape from Bloomberg News. I'm your host, Sarah Holder. Dangerous power surges like the one in Waltham are not supposed to be able to make their way to people's homes. So what happened?

So the grid is generally divided into two domains. Think of it like the highway and the road system of America. You have the bigger high voltage transmission system, which takes power produced from nuclear plants, coal plants, natural gas plants. So it's high voltage power that's too powerful to be used in homes, but you need it to stay at these high levels so that it can be transported across basically the interstate highways of power.

To get off these interstates, power has to exit through these places called substations.

The substations act as sort of like the exit ramp where the high voltage power can be downgraded to lower voltages. If you're going through a town and you see like a tangle of wires and boxes that are fenced off. That's a substation.

These substations then convert the voltage so it can flow into smaller systems like the electricity poles that we see on the street.

And then all those poles that are dotting the neighborhoods and towns, those have little boxes on them or buckets on them, and those are transformers. They're like the mini version of the substation.

These transformers convert the power even lower to about one hundred and twenty volts. This is the power that reaches our apartments and houses.

That's what our cell phones, TVs and you know, appliances run on.

Okay, so it starts at a really high voltage, it gets faried and distributed through these power lines and then downgraded once again so it can be gentle enough but still powerful enough to power the stuff that.

We use for our lives exactly.

And when this system is working properly, electricity flows to all the places it is needed at an even rate. This is called power quality.

It's basically, can you get uninterrupted flow of powerty a home? You flip on your light? Is the power there, and is it a steady flow of power? Because if you have like power that just kind of like maybe like SAgs a little or surges, it decrades the equipment.

That's how the system is supposed to work. So what went wrong in Waltham on that day back in June of life last year.

So the substation is supposed to protect a stop power surges from being passed on that process malfunctioned. There was a breaker issue, That's what the utility said. And rodent infestation is the reason that the Utility Commission and the utility itself told us was a cause for the equipment malfunctioning.

In a statement, the utility said that Waltham's quote unquote temporary over voltage was an isolated instance caused by rodents, and that it's not indicative of broader power quality issues in their system. They added, quote well, issues do occur from time to time, the electric system overall operates as designed every day, and there's no indication of widespread power

By winter storms, trees falling on power lines. It's high winds and lines hit each other. They're not supposed to touch its lines falling.

And while these types of stresses on the system have been around for decades, Marine says, one of the main factors contributing to a higher risk of these types of incidents happening now is our aging infrastructure. Infrastructure that's now facing the pressure of more extreme weather, more electricity usage, and more renewable energy coming online.

We're in this critical moment of we've got a growing economy. We're seeing more stress being placed by the push towards electrification as we increasingly have more gadgets and electrify everything like our cars. I'm thinking about someone in the energy industry that lives in affluent neighborhood in Houston told me how, like a couple of years ago now where on his street there used to be maybe like a few evs, and there was no problem. Everyone was able to hook

When we're back, we look at how widespread this problem actually is and what solutions are on the table. We're back. Before the break, we were speaking with my colleague Nourine Malik, who's been digging into why we appear to be seeing more power quality issues across the country. When we ask Mareene how frequently these voltage swings and power surges are happening exactly, she said, that's a difficult question to answer because while some parts of the system are federally regulated, these.

Big utility sites nuclear plants, coal plants, natural gas plants like on that transmission super highway system, it has federal oversight and there's regulatory agencies that develop standards of reliability.

Others are regulated locally, so local energy sites like the substation where the walth And fire started don't necessarily have federal oversight. And it's important to note in the Waltham case, the local regulator did not pursue a formal investigation, citing a satisfactory response by ever source, which is committed to installing new breakers and also redesigning aspects of the substation. In any case, the data gathered is sparse.

You know, we've been looking at outages and just trying to better understand risk to consumers and the cost to consumers, and it seems like these events are more frequent, But no one I couldn't find a body like a federal or a repository anywhere of people that actually looked at this level of risk.

Nourene says. One bit of data she was able to get on the potential size of the problem was from a company called Whisker Labs, which sells sensors to monitor surges and power quality, so.

You can see if a home has a lot of power swings up and down within an hour, within a day, or within a few days. They consider that to be a high fire risk because you suddenly have dangerous flows of power consistently coming into your home.

Whisker Labs estimates one point two million homes are exposed to dangerous power.

So the type of power surges and SAgs that happened frequently in a year, and in that case, that does represent fire risk. Now, not every flicker is like a fire risk, but I think these are important issues to understand so that if there are hot spots across the country or in parts of the country, that they are looked at so that you can prevent damage that can be avoided otherwise.

So, given the increased strain on the US power grid, we wanted to know what steps utilities are looking at to prevent these types of dangerous wings from happening in the future.

A utility in northern California is working on undergrounding more lines because the risk now there is too great. In Florida and the Southeast, they do try to underground lines there because of hurricane risks. But like in places like Texas or the Midwest, and even in New York, it's hard to underground lines because you have to then tear

But Noreene says a major factor holding back utilities from just putting all their power lines underground right now is cost.

You know, you can never fool proof the system on one hundred percent because it's too costly, say that you're going to basically do the gold plated standard. In some cases, that might be undergrounding all the lines that cost one million to three million dollars a mile to underground them.

Figuring out how to pay for changes like moving power lines underground can be complicated because ultimately the costs of any changes will be passed on to the customer's bills.

They're already facing higher costs because the grid is aging, and then the extra growth is adding two people's transmission bills and distribution bills. They pay for that directly, So there is this conscious effort of trying to figure out how to make the most prudent investments.

As for the house where the fire broke out in Wealth in last June, Nourene says, the surge caused fire damage so bad that the home was completely ravaged.

The family has been displaced, and it's been like six plus months. And then on top of that, all these other people are facing extra costs, some of them thousands or tens of thousands of dollars several blocks away, even like a mile away or within the mile. People were also experiencing issues the utility.

Ever Source has told the local regulator will redesign parts of the substation and install new breakers.

Eversource has said that they are continuing to make investments to maintain, strengthen, upgrade, and modernize both its transmission and distribution systems, so make sure that all pieces of the grid can better weather these But when.

It comes to making the US power grid more resilient, the task ahead is bigger than Waltham. You know.

The electric industry has been called one of the most complicated machine ever made by humankind because it has to flow in real time and perfectly balance everything, and there's so many things that can go wrong. But on a consumer level, it's rare to get that level of insight. You only see it manifesting in the form of like flickering lights or if your appliances get fried. But for the most part, these are hidden risks and we're getting insight into them for the first time.

Thanks for listening to Big Take from Bloomberg News. I'm Sarah Holder. This episode was produced by Adriana Tapia. It was edited by Caitlin Penny and Millie Munchie. It was fact checked by Tiffany Choi. It was mixed by Alex Uguia. Our senior producers are Naomi Shaven and Jill Duddy Carlely. We get editorial direction from Elizabeth Ponso, Nicole Beemster bor is our executive producer. Sage Bauman is Bloomberg's head of podcasts. Thanks so much for listening. We'll be back tomorrow.