Boston (Platts)--28Feb2008

Florida Reliability Coordinating Council President and CEO Sarah Rogers
said Thursday that an FRCC-led "event analysis team" will hold its first
meeting on Monday March 3 as the starting point for a thorough, months-long
analysis of Tuesday's power outages in southern and central Florida.

Rogers said that the team will include five representatives from
utilities in the state offering different types of expertise, as well as a
team member from the North American Electric Reliability Corp., and observers
from both the Federal Energy Regulatory Commission and the Florida Public
Service Commission.

"We will be looking at why the [substation disconnect switch] failed, why
the problem wasn't isolated to the substation," and whether the transmission
system and load-shedding program acted as they were designed to, said Rogers.

Rogers said the team's analysis is likely to take "several months," and
that its findings will be shared widely. She said that the initial analysis of
what happened on Tuesday still stands.

A fault at a Florida Power & Light substation in western Dade County
failed to be isolated, apparently because of "a malfunctioning disconnect
switch to an inductor."

That affected 26 transmission lines -- including 230-, 138- and 69-kV
lines -- and tripped offline about 4,000 MW of generating capacity, including
two nuclear units and one gas-fired combined-cycle plant at FP&L's Turkey
Point station, and gas-fired plants as far away as Tampa Bay and Jacksonville.

Rogers said that the sudden loss of those plants caused the grid's
frequency to drop to 59.7 hertz, thereby triggering a "level A" automatic
underfrequency load-shedding program under which 9% of the load throughout
much of southern and central Florida was shed, mostly for between a few
minutes and two hours.

The latest count, she said, suggests that about 900,000 customers were
cut off, including about 585,000 at FP&L, 150,000 at Progress Energy Florida,
and 59,000 at Tampa Electric.

Rogers said that aside from the malfunctioning disconnect switch, the
FP&L and state-wide grid appeared to work as they were designed to, thereby
limiting the geographic reach, customer impact and duration of the outage.