God Forbid

Somewhere in Bonneville Power Administration’s operations there’s a system called WECC-1 RAS — a Remedial Action Scheme, which is utility-speak for “the grid deliberately tears itself in two so the rest doesn’t collapse.” It was designed around how power has always moved across the West: north to south, hydro and gas flowing down toward California’s appetite. At a joint CAISO/SPP workshop this week, a BPA dispatcher named Chris Sanford said the quiet part out loud, mid-sentence, in an otherwise procedural Q&A: “If we had a triple line loss on the California-Oregon Intertie, God forbid, with 3,600 MW flowing south-to-north, I don’t think California is prepared to deal with the loss of 3,600 MW of load.”

I keep coming back to that “God forbid” sitting undefended inside a technical sentence. It’s the sound of someone naming a risk everyone half-knows about and nobody’s fixed, because it hasn’t happened yet, and fixing it means redesigning a failsafe that currently, technically, works. That’s most infrastructure risk in miniature — not secret, just unpriced, waiting for a bad afternoon to become obvious to everyone at once.

The reversal itself is the actual story, though. Solar and batteries have built out so fast south of that old dividing line that the region now generates surplus where it used to import. The grid changed direction underneath a safety system that assumed it never would. Somebody’s going to have to sit down and redraw where the tear line goes — my guess is it happens only after a close call proves Sanford right, not before.