Florida blackout

[alehman]

Of course the first story I heard on the radio this afternoon was that there had been a major failure at a nuclear power plant resulting in the emergency shutdown of two reactors.

Now on CNN's web site: "... a disconnect switch failed at 1:08 p.m. at the automated substation west of Miami, and a piece of equipment that controls voltage caught fire about the same time. Neither failure by itself would have caused a widespread outage, he said."

Anyone know any more that that?

 

[7anoter4]

Company officials do have a grasp on the sequence of events, tracing it from an overheated voltage switch and subsequent fire at the Miami-Dade County substation at 1:08 p.m., to a precautionary and automatic shutdown of the Turkey Point nuclear power station.

It took only three minutes for an overheated switch and then a fire at a power substation near Miami on Tuesday afternoon to shut down a nuclear plant south of the city and trigger Florida's largest blackout in at least 20 years. Figuring out why is going to take longer.

Florida Power & Light Co. executives said they can't explain how malfunctions at a substation triggered a domino effect that left at least 2.5 million Floridians without power and affected 20 electrical substations as far away as Daytona Beach and Tampa. Internal controls should have kept the outages from spreading so quickly and that far, company officials said.
Sun-Sentinel

 

[Zogzog]

It took 3 years to report the findings from the big 2003 blackout. I got a call on this 3 minutes after it happened, the Turkey Point S/D was just a protective action resulting form the blackout, no worries there.

 

[etronics]

As of today FP&L reported that human error caused this large blackout. Apparently 2 protection systems were defeated by a field engineer in the substation. Still makes no sense that other protection would not have limited the outage to a smaller area.

Any thoughts???

 

[rmw]

I put a whole town in the dark once when I tripped a generator that was carrying the lions share of the load in the municipal (islanded) system but never a big chunk of a whole state. Wow!!!!

rmw

 

[Zogzog]

etronics you have a link to that report. I heard from another source (Utility guy in New Orleans) that part of the system was down and a fault occured on another part for 30 cycles (Yes I said 30 cycles) that shouldnt happen, maybe the truth is between both reports.

 

[subtech]

Defeating protection on a hot, humid day with higher than normal load?
Somebody better have their story figured out really, really well.....

 

[etronics]

ZogZog...Here is the link to the report.

http://www.reuters.com/article/companyNews/idUSN2924017620080229

 

[rmw]

The term "field engineer" is not normally used for company employees in my experience. Could this have been a vendor's 'field service engineer?'

rmw

 

[davidbeach]

Field engineer as opposed to office engineer. Not an uncommon distinction. Field engineers have union permission to actually do things in the field while office engineers are only allowed to look.

 

[Zogzog]

Thanks etronics

the articles says the filed engineer was suspended and mentions employees, sounds like it was a FPL guy.

 

[subtech]

Probably not an FPL guy for much longer...

 

[burnt2x]

If the field engineer followed the rules, some other guy/s (system operator perhaps)who controls clearances possibly will follow for a vacation!

 

[Zogzog]

i would hire the guy, I know he would never make that mistake again.

 

[oldfieldguy]

Zog--

I dunno. I've seen some who will make the same mistakes or interesting variants thereof, time and time again...

old field guy

 

[DanDel]

I'm sure that there will be more info out soon as far as what happened and who's responsible.

 

[Zogzog]

Yeah thats true, I have know a few guys that have caused everal outages, they kinda had a reputation.

 

[gapowermike]

Anything new on this? I'm particularly interested in chain of events with regard to disabling protection for testing.

It seems like breaker failure or back up (Z3/Z4) distance would have prevented the widespread outage.

Michael

 

[gapowermike]

I heard from a colleague today that a Test Engineer disabled the protection on a 138kV reactor following a differential operation. He also disabled the switch/breaker failure and was apparently 'testing' the reactor because it was determined (incorrectly) that the original operation was not correct. Problem was, he tested it by energizing the unit.

....then FIDVR came up as a concern for the extended collapse that led to the blackout.

Just thought I'd pass that along,

Michael

 

[ACCOTTER]

It was a Non-Unionized Protection and Control Engineer. Responsible for P&C commissioning, maintenance, and trouble shooting of all P&C substation related equipment.

Dade County P&C guys had their laptops confiscated by the government the next day.

FPL still doing full sequence of events analysis on this one. I've been talking to all of my ex FPL P&C colleagues about this since then.

Protection and Control Field Engineers are feeling the heat after this event!