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Blackout 2011 – Volume I

Lee Layton, P.E.


Course Outline

We begin with an overview of the entities involved in with the blackout, including the reliability entities and the power companies affected by the outage.  The course then goes into detail on the seven stages of the outage, beginning with the pre-conditions that existed on September 8th and progressing through to the ultimate voltage collapse.

This course includes a multiple-choice quiz at the end, which is designed to enhance the understanding of the course materials.

Learning Objective

After taking this course you should:

Intended Audience

This course is intended for anyone who wants to understand how a widespread collapse of an electric system can occur. 

Benefit to Attendees

This course will give you a good understanding of the different entities involved in maintaining electric system reliability and the factors involved in creating a cascading power system failure.

Course Introduction

On the afternoon of September 8, 2011, an 11-minute system disturbance occurred in the Pacific Southwest, leading to cascading outages and leaving approximately 2.7 million customers without power.  The outages affected parts of Arizona, Southern California, and Baja California, Mexico. All of the San Diego area lost power, with nearly one-and-a-half million customers losing power, some for up to 12 hours. The disturbance occurred near rush hour, on a business day, snarling traffic for hours. Schools and businesses closed, some flights and public transportation were disrupted, water and sewage pumping stations lost power, and beaches were closed due to sewage spills. Millions went without air conditioning on a hot day.

Immediately following the blackout, FERC and NERC assembled a team of technical experts to investigate exactly what happened, why it happened, and what could be done to minimize the chance of future outages.   The scope of NERC’s investigation was to determine the causes of the blackout, how to reduce the likelihood of future cascading blackouts, and how to minimize the impacts of any that do occur. NERC focused its analysis on factual and technical issues including power system operations, planning, design, protection and control, and maintenance.

Course Content

This course content is in the following PDF document:

Blackout 2011 – Volume I

Please click on the above underlined hypertext to view, download or print the document for your study. Because of the large file size, we recommend that you first save the file to your computer by right clicking the mouse and choosing "Save Target As ...", and then open the file in Adobe Acrobat Reader. If you still experience any difficulty in downloading or opening this file, you may need to close some applications or reboot your computer to free up some memory.

Course Summary

In the course we have looked at the structure of WECC and the affected entities of the September 8, 2011 blackout.  The sequence of events of the outage was reviewed in detail from the pre-disturbance conditions to the final collapse of the system.

The next course in this series, Volume II, goes into more detail on the causes of the September 8th outage and reviews the 27 findings and recommendations of the study committee.

Quiz

Once you finish studying the above course content, you need to take a quiz to obtain the PDH credits.

DISCLAIMER: The materials contained in the online course are not intended as a representation or warranty on the part of PDH Center or any other person/organization named herein. The materials are for general information only. They are not a substitute for competent professional advice. Application of this information to a specific project should be reviewed by a registered architect and/or professional engineer/surveyor. Anyone making use of the information set forth herein does so at their own risk and assumes any and all resulting liability arising therefrom.