Innocent Kamwa, Ning Liu
At the time of this writing, in January 2023, Québec is remembering the 1998 ice storm, which occurred on Friday, 9 January, 34 years ago. Falls of more than 100 mm of freezing rain literally pulverized part of the Hydro-Québec electrical network, blacking out more than 4 million people. This day has gone down in history as Black Friday. About 24,000 wooden poles, 900 pylons, and 3,000 km of power lines were cut down. Some households would only find power after five to six weeks (Figure 1). Such a weather-driven blackout was not the first to hit Québec province. On 13 March 1989, solar winds disrupted the Earth’s magnetic field, causing seven static var compensators (SVC) to disconnect from the grid in 1 min, due to excessive harmonics currents. Following the loss of the dynamic voltage support provided by the SVCs, the instability of the power system became inevitable. A major outage of the entire Québec network resulted, leaving 6 million people without power for 9–12 h.
According to Victor Hugo, one of the greatest French writers, “What you always need to plan for, is the unexpected.” But it is hard to believe that one can realistically plan for an event which, like the 1998 ice storm, occurs once every 100 years. By contrast, engineers are able to prevent the kind of blackout that resulted from the 1989 geomagnetic storm in Québec at an affordable cost for society. Countermeasures implemented since 1989 by Hydro-Québec, like series compensation of transmission lines, retrofitting of SVC with more robust controllers, and deployment of synchrophasor measurement-based systems monitoring, has indeed led to avoiding any such blackout over the last 34 years.
Then came the defining blackout of my lifetime. On 14 August 2003, 4:15 p.m. EDT, three 345-kV transmission circuits in northeastern Ohio contacted overgrown trees during a 40-min time span, starting a chain of events that culminated in the collapse of the electrical grid across the northeastern United States and parts of eastern Canada, leaving roughly 50 million people without power. The last client was restored only on 16 August 2003, 7:00 a.m. in Ohio. Shortly after the August event, stunning our profession, another huge blackout occurred on 29 September 2003 in Italy. A series of problems in the high voltage lines in France and Switzerland caused a domino effect and left 57 million Italians without electricity with the grid paradoxically in light-loading conditions. These were the worst blackout in this country and one of the worst in Europe.
In This Issue
The theme of this issue is power system blackouts. A blackout in power system operation is defined as large-scale interruption of power in multiple service areas. Reliability and security are the two most important criteria in power grids design, installation, operation, and planning. In many parts of the world, the endeavor from generations of power professionals helps keep the power system availability above 99%. Nevertheless, like many other large-scale, complex engineering systems, interruptions happen all the time, most of which are caused by inevitable aging failures or damages in extreme events, for instance, winter storms, hurricane, earthquake, and wild fire.
In this issue, our guest editors, Dr. Thomas J. Overbye and Jeffery E. Dagle, have organized seven very interesting articles and provide us with multi-angle views of the following topics:
• a thorough review on the history of past blackouts with sequence of events laid out
• an introduction to post fault analysis for identification of possible causes, subsequent of events and operator actions, and lessons learned
• discussion of the evolution of fault preventive solutions
• common practices to protect and maintain the reliable operation
• complications brought by large-scale renewable integration on system reliability
• Importance of collaboration and coordination among different organizations
• needs for real-time grid management and advance data analytics
• importance on operator training
• continuing efforts towards enhancing reliability during the energy transition.
The “In My View” column discusses the importance of “resource adequacy” and points out that the basic planning and operation assumption was “Capacity delivers predictable amounts of Energy AND Essential Reliability Services.” The authors further introduce the four pillars for support energy transition for ensuring the pathway to a reliable and resilient energy future.
After reading the articles, we can’t help but be in awe of the daunting work behind grid operation and planning to maintain the lights on. Many countries around the world are determined to face the many unprecedented challenges on the road to a carbon-free economy. We hope that the grid of the future will not only be clean but also continuously be reliable, resilient, and secure.
—Ning Liu
The year 2003 was one of awakening for our profession to face the modern blackouts, despite early warnings in 1996, on the west coast of North America. We reluctantly got our minute of glory. Suddenly, the spotlight shined again on power system engineers and energy scientists. Regulators needed them in the aftermath of blackouts (not before, of course), to find the root causes of such events, explain them in the media, and implement mitigation means to avoid public opinion backlash. A drove of articles was written on technical and policy aspects of blackouts, until 2006–2009, but after that the interest, as usual, quickly faded outside of the experts’ circle.
This issue of IEEE Power & Energy Magazine is about remembering the 20th anniversary of the 2003 blackout. It is a rare opportunity for the stakeholders to reflect as a community on the prohibitive costs and negative societal effects of blackouts on human life around the world. Bangladesh is the latest victim of this devil plague. On 4 October 2022, 11:10 ET, the U.S. edition of the The Sun headlined: “World’s biggest ever blackout as 140 MILLION people plunged into darkness in Bangladesh after mystery power grid collapse.” The title is not quite accurate since on 31 July 2012, 670 million Indians were left without power, or 10% of the world’s population (Figure 2). I hope this record will never be broken…. The misleading headline of the tabloid is yet another a symptom of needing more accurate and facts-based information on blackouts from experts in the field. I was unable to find in the recent past another thematic issue of the magazine dealing specifically with lessons learned from recent blackouts or “remembering” the consequential events of 2003 for the sake of educating new generations.
Back then, the grid was transitioning to more market-based processes. The concept of smart grid and wide-area monitoring systems were only nascent, same as the public policy drive for renewables resources and decarbonization. Modern technology has since boosted our immunity to blackouts, yet we cannot cry “victory,” as the top page of the North American Electricity Reliability Council (NERC) on major systems events currently lists about 20 blackouts over the last 20 years. The energy system is indeed a complex juggernaut made up of countless parts, all working together to provide a reliable supply of energy in real time. If anything can be done, it should build on lessons learned from investigations of past blackouts, while taking into account the technology transformation of the power grid as conventional generation is replaced with digitally controlled energy and power electronics-based resources. In the future, electric vehicles, battery systems, smart appliances, and building electrification will strain the distribution part of the energy supply chain by adding new components, introducing new market players, and by facilitating two-way energy flows. The juggernaut will become a frightening mammoth, which fortunately can be mastered using some techniques and knowledge disseminated in this issue.
While most discussions at the national level (and in this issue as well) focus on large-scale blackouts, as private citizens we are more concerned about what happens to grids in our neighborhoods. Unfortunately, things have not been going well recently. Due to climate change and anthropogenic activities, extreme hydroclimatic events—like heatwaves, cyclones, extreme precipitation, flood, typhoons, etc.,—have increased in frequency and ferocity, which caused severe damage to an already aged distribution system. We cannot satisfy ourselves by saying that there are no large-scale blackouts anymore, when people are lacking power in the countryside, and even in inner cities, more often than ever. Feeling disenfranchised, those citizens are equipping themselves with backup generation as we are not delivering on our promise of keeping their lights on. In Québec, during the last decade, there was no blackout, yet the number of power outages increased from 36,314 in 2012 to 42,035 in 2021, according to audit data from the general controller. During the same period, the average duration of these outages spiked from 100 to 163 min per customer, an increase of 63%. I bet that the same trend is occurring everywhere, despite the NERC adequacy design criterion being no more than “1 h every 10 years.” This occurrence has to be stopped. It is time to pay more attention to distribution grid resiliency, an interesting topic to be revisited in a future issue of the magazine.
We called on Nouredine Hajsaid, the 2022–2023 IEEE Power & Energy Society (PES) vice president, New Initiatives and Outreach, for writing the “Leader’s Corner” column of this issue. His role is to launch new projects for preparing the PES future while dealing with the most up-to-date issues of energy, and ensuring the society is properly positioned to all relevant stakeholders, whether they are industry, institutional, general public, media, or academia. One initiative underway, thanks to his predecessor, is support of the development of IEEE Smart Cities actions along with six other IEEE societies. Another example is the issue of work force development, which has become a top priority for our industry members. Nouredine also reports on the transformation of the Executive Advisory Council, a body of the governing board, to play a bigger outreach role by expanding to include regional groups of industry stakeholder executives (North America, Europe, Asia and Pacific, Latin America, and Africa Middle East).
In this issue, the associate editor for history publishes a call for contributions. Our pipeline of history articles is drying fast and only with your help can we replenish it. Please respond massively with new ideas of history pieces: the bar is open, so to speak.
A sincere thank you for the hard work by our outgoing board member, Nando Ochoa, from the University of Melbourne, who is a guest editor of the 2023 November/December issue. A warm welcome is extended to Babak Badrzadeh (Aurecon, Australia), formerly from the Australian Energy Market Operator. He volunteered to serve as the new associate editor for transmission and distribution. We also express our deepest thanks to the following board members, who have accepted becoming associate editors for the magazine in their fields of expertise: Yanli Liu (Tianjin University, China) and Julia Matevosyan (Energy Systems Integration Group, USA).
In the department of projects in progress, PES staff are currently working hard to implement a ScholarOne website for the magazine, in order to enhance our article submission and review processes. This will shorten the review time by facilitating the work of both the editors and authors, while ensuring a more rigorous and facts-based audit of the magazine performance metrics by the IEEE Technical Activities Board. We hope to have some good news about this initiative in the near future, maybe in the next issue.
After the passing of Paul F. Demello and Pete Sauer, reported as last-minute pieces in the 2023 March/April issue of the magazine, once again, we must deliver some sadness in reporting the passing of an eminent PES member, Stan Horowitz, born on 5 August 1925 in Far Rockaway, New York.
As usual, we raise a world of thanks to the guest editors and authors of this issue. To suit the needs of all readers, the articles cover a wide spectrum of viewpoints with varying levels of technical depth. The diversity of authors’ backgrounds, some of whom were key players in the postmortem analysis of the 2003 blackout, resulted in addressing a wide-range of topics with consideration for emerging inverter-dominated power systems: evolution of control centers to better combat blackouts, wide-area measurements and protection systems, reliability regulation and management, root-cause analysis, probabilistic-based security control, etc. There is even an article providing an interesting perspective on how the blackout perception by the public has evolved through the history of electrification. The “In My View” column, for once, is entitled In Our View, because it is the shared opinion column by two pillars of our industry, who currently are NERC senior executives. In summary, this issue places the bar very high for future 2003 anniversary issues and we can only be grateful to the guest editors who got this idea in the first place.
In closing, we just started the planning of the 2025 issues of the magazine (yes, already). On this occasion, I invite you to suggest to me the subjects in the scope of this magazine that you would like us to address in priority. We will discuss new topics in editorial board meetings and rank all ideas in terms of perceived reader interests and guest editors’ commitment. After checking that your idea is not already on the magazine schedule, according to our website, please let me know your ideas for new topics at innocent.kamwa@gel.ulaval.ca.
Digital Object Identifier 10.1109/MPE.2023.3247106
Date of current version: 19 April 2023
1540-7977/23©2023IEEE