Saturday, March 01, 2008

Human Error Responsible for Massive Florida Power Outage

Via The Herald Tribune.

Florida Power & Light said that a preliminary investigation has found that human error was responsible for the massive power outage on Tuesday that affected more than 584,000 customers.

A field engineer was diagnosing a switch that had malfunctioned at FPL’s Flagami substation in west Miami. Without authorization, the engineer disabled two levels of relay protection — something contrary to the Juno Beach-based company’s procedures.

During the diagnostic process, a fault occurred. With both levels of relay protection removed, the outage affected 26 transmission lines and 38 substations.

One of the substations served three of the generation units at the company’s Turkey Point nuclear plant, which was designed to automatically shut down if there is a lack of enough power. Also affected were two other generation plants in FPL’s system. The system lost 3,400 megawatts of generating capacity.

More here.

0 Comments:

Post a Comment

<< Home