$25,000,000 (25 million dollars) - The largest fine ever made by NERC on a company. Yes, this is how much a great engineer could have saved the company!
Florida, February 26, 2008, A protection and control engineer is called on the field because a circuit switcher is malfunctioning.
The engineer communicated with the load dispatcher at the control center; the engineer disabled the primary and backup protection and then instructed the load dispatcher to try to close the switcher again.
This is when the absolute worst case occurs. As the circuit switcher is trying to close, an arc occurs. The arc lasted about 18 seconds, then propagated to the adjacent circuit switcher.
A 3-phase fault occurred on the 138 kV adjacent circuit switcher, and most of the lower Florida lost power: Catastrophe.
That event is also known as Florida Black Out.
NERC investigation: The company violated standards in every single grid reliability standard area:
1- BAL: Balancing
2- COM: Communications
3- EOP: Emergency Preparedness and Operations
4- PER: Personnel Performance, Training, and Qualifications
5- TOP: Transmission and Operations
6- TPL: Transmission Planning
The absence of incidents does not mean the absence of flaws.
EEEngineering, LLC
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