System Failure – Anatomy of a Blackout Part I – Conditions Leading to the Blackout - a PDH Online Course for Engineers, Architects and Surveyors

System Failure – Anatomy of a Blackout

Part I – Conditions Leading to the Blackout

Course Outline

The course begins with an overview of how the Eastern Interconnect is structure in the northeastern part of the United States. Conditions leading up to the blackout are explored, including loading conditions as well as operational issues on the day of the blackout. The course then moves into the failures that occurred that started the uncontrolled cascading failure of the electric system.

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:

Be able to explain the conditions prior to the blackout;
Know the key players involved in the blackout;
Understand the operational failures of First Energy;
Understand the operational issues of MISO that contributed to the outage;
Be able to explain the vegetation issues affecting system reliability;
Understand how computer failures played a part in the blackout;
Explain the impacts of operators losing situational awareness;
Know how generator outages affected system reliability;
Know how a TLR works;
Understand the important of an N-1 condition;
Know how the power flows were occurring immediately prior to the blackout; and
Understand the function of a state estimator.

Intended Audience

This course is generally written at a non-technical level and is suitable for anyone interested in how a complex electrical system failure due to human error.

Benefit to Attendees

The lessons learned from this failure are beneficial to any technical field. The human and technologies of the August 14, 2003 blackout are similar to failures in many industries, from structural engineering to the space program.

Course Introduction

On August 14, 2003, just after 4 p.m. Eastern Daylight Time (EDT), the North American power grid experienced its largest blackout ever. The blackout affected an estimated 50 million people and more than 70,000 megawatts (MW) of electrical load in parts of Ohio, Michigan, New York, Pennsylvania, New Jersey, Connecticut, Massachusetts, Vermont, and the Canadian provinces of Ontario and Québec.

Although power was successfully restored to most customers within hours, some areas in the United States did not have power for two days and parts of Ontario experienced rotating blackouts for up to two weeks.

This course looks at the conditions on the bulk electric system that existed prior to and during the blackout, and explains how the blackout occurred. Note that since this report was originally written, several of the companies and organizations mentioned in the report have merged or r organized.

Immediately following the blackout, NERC assembled a team of technical experts from across the United States and Canada 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:

System Failure – Anatomy of a Blackout: Part I – Conditions Leading to the Blackout

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

Part I of this series has described how uncorrected problems in northern Ohio developed to 16:05:57; the last point at which a cascade of line trips could have been averted. It wasn’t averted and the cascade spread beyond Ohio and caused a widespread blackout for three principal reasons.

The loss of the Sammis-Star line in Ohio, following the loss of other transmission lines and weak voltages within Ohio, triggered many subsequent line trips.
Many of the key lines that tripped between 16:05:57 and 16:10:38 operated on impedance relays, which responded to overloads rather than faults on the protected facilities. The speed at which they tripped accelerated the spread of the cascade beyond the Cleveland-Akron area.
The evidence indicates that the relay protection settings for the transmission lines, generators, and under-frequency load shedding in the Northeast may not be sufficient to reduce the likelihood and consequences of a cascade, nor were they intended to do so.

Part II of this series explores how the cascading failure spread to cause one of the largest blackouts in American history.

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.