Print this page Blackout 2011 – Volume II
Lee Layton, P.E.
Course Outline
This is Volume II of a two part series about the September 8th outage. This course reviews the causes, findings of the investigating committee, and gives recommendations to minimize a future event of this type.
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:
- Understand the importance of next day planning;
- Understand the impact of not sharing next day planning on outage;
- Know how not conducting next day planning impacts reliability;
- Understand the impact of not maintaining up to date models of external networks;
- Be able to explain the impact of the sub-100 kV system on the outage;
- Know the impact of inadequate process for estimating scheduled interchanges;
- Understand the issues with a lack of coordination of seasonal planning process;
- Be able to explain how misoperations in UFLS schemes contributed to collapse;
- Be able to explain the purpose of a State Estimator;
- Understand how WECC staffing levels may have contributed to the outage;
- Know the meaning of an IROL and its impact on the outage; and
- Understand the impact of inadequate margins in relay settings on system reliability.
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:
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 this course we have looked at the causes of the September 8, 2011 outage and the 27 findings and recommendations of the study committee. Unfortunately, the September 8th outage shares some of the same characteristics of the earlier August 14, 2003 outage in the Eastern Interconnect. Both outages had root causes that included: Inadequate long-term and operation planning; inadequate situational analysis of real time events; and protective relay schemes that may have accelerated the outage.
The electric power system is a complex machine with vast interconnectivity. Developing procedures to prevent future events such as the September 8th event is a worthy – though likely unattainable – goal; Widespread voltage collapse events will happen again.
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.
