At approximately 1:09 p.m. EST Tuesday, customers of at least four utilities in Florida lost power. The loss of generation activated automatic under-frequency load shedding equipment, and more than 4,000 MW of load was shed. The first priority in such cases is restoration of service by the utilities involved in the outage, followed by a thorough review to determine its root cause and any lessons learned that can benefit the industry overall.

The North American Electric Reliability Corporation (NERC) was named by the Federal Energy Regulatory Commission as the electric reliability organization under Section 215 of the Federal Power Act and is charged with evaluating and reporting on events involving the bulk power system. NERC, working with the Florida Reliability Coordinating Council (FRCC) and all relevant parties, will examine this event.

NERC’s analysis will attempt to find and recommend specific preventative measures that could be adopted to ensure that similar disruptions are avoided at other locations in the future. NERC and FRCC will also determine compliance with NERC’s reliability standards.

Rick Sergel, president & CEO of NERC, made a statement yesterday in reference to the category four system disturbance in South Florida. The event involved the loss of approximately a dozen generating units, 26 transmission lines, and the loss of more than 4,000 MW of load. NERC’s event classification system has five levels and is designed to designate the severity of bulk power system disturbances. Category five is the most severe on this scale.

“We commend the restoration efforts conducted by the affected utilities yesterday,” commented Sergel. “Their ability to restore power quickly and effectively to the hundreds of thousands of consumers affected by the outage clearly exemplifies excellence in planning and the execution of those plans.” Reports have indicated that nearly all affected consumers had power restored by 4:15 p.m. EST Tuesday evening.

“While we can’t predict the timetable of analysis, information collected by new monitoring technologies, called ‘synchro-phasors,’ will enable our teams to analyze yesterday’s outages more quickly than in the past. This new technology is like the ‘MRI’ of bulk power systems, giving operators and analysts more granulated data and helping them to dissect and piece together the events that occurred step by step, microsecond by microsecond.”