On Feb. 26, 2008, a short circuit in a Miami electric power substation and an operator’s error gave managers of the nation’s electrical grids a glimpse of an uneasy future. The events triggered a chain reaction of power plant and transmission line outages in the state, unleashing sharp swings in voltages and power frequency that blacked out power for nearly 1 million customers in southern and central Florida for up to four hours.
A stunning consequence of the outage was the lightning-like spread of destabilizing power frequencies throughout the eastern United States and southern Canada in the space of six seconds. Then, fortunately, the grid managed to settle itself without a much bigger blackout.
This and similar threats to the stability of the nation’s power supply might go undetected until too late but for the development of monitoring systems that can provide snapshots of the grid’s changing conditions in each fraction of a second. Experts say this emerging capability will play a vital role in the next big evolution of the nation’s power transmission system: equipping it to handle a rising flow of wind and solar power that is central to the nation’s climate policy.
A video depicting the Florida incident’s rippling spread has been created by Virginia Polytechnic Institute and State University’s electrical and computer engineering department, which caught the disturbance on its first-generation grid frequency monitoring network. Some grid executives have downloaded the video on their laptops as a kind of horror flick for engineers of what could happen.
Power companies and grid managers are developing an advanced monitoring system across the United States and Canada, using what are called synchrophasor units to gather, analyze and distribute data on grid conditions. About 150 of the units have been deployed, and the industry has created the North American SynchroPhasor Initiative — supported by the Department of Energy and the North American Electric Reliability Corp. (NERC) — to expand the technology. DOE is offering grants totaling $615 million for smart grid demonstration projects, including synchrophasors, as part of the American Recovery and Reinvestment Act.
via Devices emerge to handle the quirks of adding more renewable energy to the grid – NYTimes.com.
