Southern California Power Disruption

[Nekota]

CAISO shows a 5GW power drop due to a 500KV transmission line failure which brought all of SDGE power systems down. I hope the system recovers quickly and no LEAFS get stranded without being able to charge.

Current California ISO condition at http://www.caiso.com/Pages/TodaysOutlook.aspx" onclick="window.open(this.href);return false;

 

[Randy]

Our power came back on 10 minutes ago...That amounts to a 10 hour outage....

It sure drives the point home how much we depend on electricity, doesn't it....

Randy

 

[walterbays]

SDG&E handled the outage very well.

Most gas stations were also out - no pump power

I won't charge until tonight. Battery still about 50% and supply tight during day until San Onofre restarts

 

[gbarry42]

LEAF and I survived.

Always a new thing to try with the car. This was the one about "sitting in traffic running the air conditioning". It took an hour and a half to go from the office to the freeway. I watched 5 bars melt away down to 3, but again, creeping 3 miles or so and with A/C. I know 3 bars will get me home so I turned the A/C off for the last mile, as it was cooling off and there were shady stretches. A lot of cars had the windows down. I don't think their A/C does much at idle. Then, a half hour on the freeway (HOV lane helped a little)--A/C back on--and I was home in 2 hours; 9 miles and 1 bar remaining.

Power was restored at 1:22; the Blink waited a respectful 4 minutes before charging ahead....
She finished charging at 5 AM, before the electric demands of the day began, and ready for another day of carefree driving. Turns out, it's good to start each day with a full tank! And it's nice that you can get a fillup, automatically, while you sleep!

 

[leafkabob]

San Diego is a favored destination for those of us in the Phoenix area and I chose yesterday to come here. We hadn't been in town 5 minutes before my wife spotted her first ever leaf in the wild, a white one with a non-personalized plate.

A couple of hours later we were close to the Little Italy section of town and saw another white leaf! We were walking across the intersection and gave the couple in the car a big thumbs up!

Then the fun began. We were downtown near the stadium, looking for an architectural salvage store (turns out it was no longer in business) and the traffic light blinked red once then went out completely (approx. 3:30 pm). Spent the next hour or so negotiating the downtown intersections with what seemed like rush hour traffic, trying to get back to hotel circle. Made it back only to be told of the magnitude of the outage.

Much better now.

 

[TRONZ]

This makes me like distributed power generation even more. I don't like all my eggs in one basket for anything.

 

[jcesare]

I hope the system recovers quickly and no LEAFS get stranded without being able to charge.

I made it home just fine. Ironicly a few people at my work got stranded because they were low on gas and the gas pumps didn't work.

I spent the evening sitting in my Leaf in the garage listening to the NFL kickoff game on Sirius Satellite Radio.

 

[davewill]

Well, limped home in "low battery". Good thing there was nowhere to go, as I couldn't go there. We spent part of the evening looking at a dark sky like you never get to see in the city. While the moon was beautiful, it did wash out the stars a bit. No matter, you could still see more stars than even a moonless night normally. After that, the family sat around an oil lamp (Dad! That thing actually works?!?) and we took advantage of no internet and no TV to have a good visit.

Power was restored about 1:15...The Blink did its "charging delayed" thing and the car started charging at 1:22. I was happy to see that I didn't have to intervene in the process. The LEAF was charged to its usual 80% this morning.

I was glad I had fresh batteries on hand for the flashlights and the radio. Maybe my wife will stop complaining about me keeping so many spare batteries in the house. :ugeek:

 

[91040]

Anybody in the press blaming the outage on all the electrical demands that LEAFs place on the grid in San Diego?

 

[DaveinOlyWA]

6 million without power, nearly everyone hungering for gas with apparently only a handful of stations able to pump gas for the masses and wondering how many were stranded in their Leaf. obviously those with solar might not have noticed, but for a car that runs on electric, i fully expected to come here and see dozens of posts on this...

NICE!! :mrgreen:

 

[Soviet]

Absolutely amazing that it happened. The power company in Arizona still hasn't said what caused it, right?

 

[Nekota]

Absolutely amazing that it happened. The power company in Arizona still hasn't said what caused it, right?

Apparently it's being attributed to a capacitor bank being switched out for maintenance. A comparison of this event to the one that placed the NorthEast in darkness several years ago that was attributed to a tree branch. The Feds are conducting their own investigation so more details to follow but I suspect it will be months before the Feds report is out. It would be interesting to know more about the switch used for this capacitor bank and how the worker 'knew' something bigger had happened.

http://fountainvalley.patch.com/articles/1-workers-mistake-caused-power-failure-sdge-chief-says" onclick="window.open(this.href);return false;

High voltage switching has it's complications as shown by the video at --

http://205.243.100.155/frames/longarc.htm#500_kV_Switch" onclick="window.open(this.href);return false;

 

[DaveEV]

obviously those with solar might not have noticed, but for a car that runs on electric, i fully expected to come here and see dozens of posts on this...

You need batteries AND solar to avoid going dark when the grid goes away. The grid is reliable enough that it's not worth buying a system that will run off-grid.

The funny thing is - I suspect that more distributed generation in the San Diego area might have kept the lights on. The initial theory is that losing the AZ link (we import a good amount of power from AZ) caused San Onofre to shut down thus causing us to lose our northern link - perhaps because the surge of power requested tripped something up there. With more local generation, we can lessen imports thus reducing the impact of losing a high voltage line.

Anyway, when I got home I plugged in my car as usual. Power came on in the middle of the night and the car charged to 80% by the time I woke up as usual.

No worries! If power hadn't come back on at my house and I needed to go to work, I would have had enough to get to work and back without issue.

Felt bad for the line of cars waiting to get gas this morning - usually one can pull right up. It's nice waking up fully charged! (Or at least 80% charged in my case).

 

[PhatBoyG]

With more local generation, we can lessen imports thus reducing the impact of losing a high voltage line.

This line really stood out to me, it's the same theme used when comparing local and foreign oil reserves. It was just funny to read it in the context of electricity.

 

[TRONZ]

With more local generation, we can lessen imports thus reducing the impact of losing a high voltage line.

This line really stood out to me, it's the same theme used when comparing local and foreign oil reserves. It was just funny to read it in the context of electricity.

Yes, very interesting. The (American) pattern of "foreign" reliance saturates the energy markets. Individuals could use an education in how much they actually use and even better being directly responsible for it's production. This accountability would be a profound shock to most.

 

[garygid]

Initially, it was "reported" that the East and North power lines turned OFF at the same time, as if they had been "commanded" to "trip", perhaps by some automated monitoring system.

Does anybody know the actual timing of the events?

 

[DaveEV]

Initially, it was "reported" that the East and North power lines turned OFF at the same time, as if they had been "commanded" to "trip", perhaps by some automated monitoring system.

Does anybody know the actual timing of the events?

I believe the North line (and San Onofre) went off about 10 minutes after the East line from one report I read.

 

[EricH]

Initially, it was "reported" that the East and North power lines turned OFF at the same time, as if they had been "commanded" to "trip", perhaps by some automated monitoring system.

Does anybody know the actual timing of the events?

News reports attributed the 500kV line outage to a maintenance technician in Yuma, AZ. The issue is less the (potential) human error in Yuma, than the failure of system protection schemes which are supposed to localize even a major transmission loss.

Severe load/generation imbalances manifest as frequency gyrations; the normal 60.00 cycles/second can either speed up (over-gen) or slow down (under-gen). Utility switching centers are generally set to trip circuits (e.g. drop load) somewhere below 59.9 cycles (different switching centers are set to slightly different levels, in an attempt to "cascade" only as much load shedding as is needed to stabilize the system). Generating plants have low tolerances; they can't run at 58 cycles/second, for example.

In the case of San Onofre, my guess is that the breakers at the plant opened (separated from transmission) in order to protect the generators there from the low-frequency event; shortly thereafter, the plant would have noticed 2,000 MW of steam pushing against little resistance, and the plant would have automatically shut down.

Fortunately, the load-shedding scheme appears to have worked by the time the "event" got to south Orange County, so the event was primarily limited to SDG&E's territory. The question will be why SDG&E was completely blacked out by a single transmission loss; that could not possibly have been their design.

Disclaimer: While I work for Southern California Edison, I neither speak for the company nor have any specific information about the power disruption specific to this thread; my comments here are based upon utility system training I received many years ago and published news articles.

 

[Nekota]

With more local generation, we can lessen imports thus reducing the impact of losing a high voltage line.

This line really stood out to me, it's the same theme used when comparing local and foreign oil reserves. It was just funny to read it in the context of electricity.

More local generation should mean more large electric generation near San Diego by SDGE instead of the importing of power from out side of state boundaries. I can accept the importing of excess power that comes from stationary sources like hydro, geothermal and wind but importing gas, nuclear and coal power simply because we don't want the 'risk' in our back yard presents another set of risks. With a growing population the outsourcing of energy and conservation to meet energy requirements needs to be reconsidered, especially when encouraging the use of electricity to displace petrol based energy. I'm sure the local PV generation and maybe someone has the current GW value that PV supplies to SDGE system. The CAISO showed a 5 GW power drop and nearly half of that (2.2GW) was from San Onofre. The central idea of local is better applies to many things besides oil and electricity.

 

[Herm]

More local generation should mean more large electric generation near San Diego by SDGE instead of the importing of power from out side of state boundaries. I can accept the importing of excess power that comes from stationary sources like hydro, geothermal and wind but importing gas, nuclear and coal power simply because we don't want the 'risk' in our back yard presents another set of risks.

is that even possible in California?.. I can imagine the paperwork to build a new plant has to be extensive.. much easier to just build the plant over the border in Mexico or Arizona.