Saturday blackouts led to 13,350 MW of load shedding: UCTE

Saturday blackouts led to 13,350 MW of load shedding: UCTE

London (Platts)--7Nov2006

The blackouts that swept Europe late Saturday led to a total of 13,350 MW
of load shedding, according to European grid operator association UCTE. The
fault in Germany led to grid operators as far away as Portugal, Italy and
Spain cutting users off the network to restore the balance between supply and
demand in the European electricity system.
The total was published in a new statement by UCTE, the Union for the
Coordination of Transmission of Electricity, which set out further details of
the event, outlined below.
UCTE Monday set up a committee under the chairmanship of Gerard Maas to
investigate the event. Preliminary results are due by end of November.

BEFORE THE DISTURBANCE
On Saturday evening, around 2200 (2100 GMT), the consumption in the
control area of E.ON Netz was about 13,500 MW. At the same time, the injected
wind power amounted to 3,300 MW. Due to transits, the lines towards West were
already loaded. But this situation was in itself normal.

SEQUENCE OF EVENTS
At 2138, both circuits of the 380-kV line Conneforde-Diele were switched
off in order to secure the passing of the Ems river by a ship. A routine
simulation of the switching-off of the line was computed in advance and did
not bring up concerns. After the line had been switched off, the energy flow
was transferred to other lines in the South. This situation was still stable.
After some time, a higher load appeared on the E.ON Netz grid, especially
on the line Wehrendorf-Landesbergen (East-Westphalia) between the transmission
systems of RWE TSO and E.ON Netz.
At 2210, the lines Wehrendorf-Landesbergen and Bechterdissen-Elsen
tripped. UCTE says that the reason for this needs "to be analyzed."
Because of the tripping of the high-voltage lines, further tie-lines were
overloaded within seconds and tripped in cascade. This lead to a split of the
European UCTE interconnected network into three islands with different
frequencies, as UCTE outlined Monday.
Since at this moment, the geographic generation power was no longer
evenly spread over the system, the North-Eastern part of the system (after the
split) had a generation surplus of 6,000 MW. Both the Western and
South-Eastern parts, however, were short of power.

LOAD SHEDDING BY COUNTRY
In order to re-establish the balance between generation and consumption,
load-shedding was performed as follows:

Country/TSO Load shed
Austria/APG 1,500 MW
Belgium/Elia 800 MW
France/RTE 5,200 MW
Germany/E.ON Netz 400 MW
Germany/RWE TSO 2,000 MW
Italy/TERNA 1,500 MW
Netherlands/TenneT 400 MW
Portugal/REN 500 MW
Spain/REE 1,050 MW

The European UCTE network was reconnected after 38 minutes and the
customers were gradually brought back online.
The Union for the Coordination of Transmission of Electricity coordinates
the interests of transmission system operators in 23 European countries.

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