The intelligent energy system...

The recent outage in Florida is reminiscent of the blackout that crippled the Northeast in August 2003. What’s more the effect is the same, cascading events. Ability to correlate early indicators in both cases could be considered root cause in each case in containing the events.

A NERC investigation of the 2003 blackout found that failure of the system monitoring and control functions over the electricity grid were contributing factors to the blackout. Such failures caused operators to either delay or altogether miss corrective measures for which the company managing that portion of the grid was responsible. The consequence? Events cascaded and rapidly spread across the region.

According to Reuters, reactors in Florida shut down following “an under-voltage event caused when two power lines between Miami and Daytona tripped following an equipment malfunction in a Miami substation.” In other words, as the Tampa Bay Tribune wrote “a malfunction at a single electrical substation caused a cascading blackout that shut down a nuclear plant” and “briefly cut power to about 3 million people in Florida."

Though not directly affected by the outage, one electrical provider saw the blackout in 2003 as a good reason to proactively upgrade its alarm management system. Control room operators teamed up with the IT department at Ontario’s Independent Electricity System Operator (IESO) and tapped technology vendor Managed Objects to consolidate both IT and grid management system resulting with a flexible and integrated central alarm system correlating information and pointing operators to corrective procedures. The IESO’s project is profiled in the March/April 2008 issue of Electric Energy T&D magazine – it both makes a good business case for BSM and makes for an interesting use-case Intelligent Energy System.

- Michele