The lesson that failure leaves us: take more care of the risk map

At 7:07 am,
a failure in the Litoral region, from which the hydroelectric production of the Yacyretá and Salto Grande power plants originated, provoked a chain reaction and the Argentine electricity system collapsed.
The cause of this failure is the subject of an investigation and must be translated into a report prepared by Cammesa (the company in charge of wholesale marketing and distribution of electricity) on the basis information it collects from system agents.

At that time, and on vacation, the system was no longer needed, the demand did not exceed 13,000 MW, while during a normal day of activity, the demand can reach 17 to 22 23,000 megawatts . Do not forget that peak demand occurs in the summer in very hot weather. The system also worked in the range of the area where the fault occurred.

Faced with the collapse of the system that affected practically all Argentina (the province of Tierra del Fuego was not interconnected to the national system) and the regions of neighboring countries interconnected with our system, Protocol No. 7 of "black beginning "was applied (the name is descriptive of the scale of the event) and the recovery procedure of the Argentine Interconnection System (SADI) was launched.

During the standardization process, generators are started in different parts of the country and from there, the grid is gradually powered.

The
Service standardization has experienced delays in some provinces due to the commissioning of some thermal generating stations. Atucha II is in service on the three nuclear power plants and the other two (Atucha I and Embalse) will enter the next 48 hours.

antecedents

Accidents of these occur very occasionally in different countries with different consequences. In the United States, the last
power failure (General Power Failure) that affected much of the country occurred in 2003. The attack on the Twin Towers was near and there were strong badumptions that it was going on. was acting a new attack, but the technical investigation ended up throwing it away. There was a system failure.

It is possible that the conclusion that weighs on us is also the failure of the automatism of the reaction to the incident, with the domino effect which caused the collapse of the system.

The incident occurred at the appropriate time and date. Most Argentines slept and the weatherman was asked to extend the hours of rest in the absence of electricity. In the provinces where there were votes, there were delays in setting up the tables, but the political referents themselves helped to maintain calm and avoid speculation about a problem that went beyond provincial jurisdiction. .

We will have to wait for the report on the cause of the incident, but the specialists' diagnosis coincides by giving them greater probabilities of technical reasons. Sabotage, due to the characteristics of the phenomenon and the circumstances of the day, time and place, is less likely.

Favorable panorama

The national power grid no longer has a production deficit and operates with reasonable reserves even on high demand days. The interconnected system of very high voltage (the towers we cross in the routes) is better meshed and leaves almost no isolated areas.

There may be localized problems in some regional transmission diversions, as there may be power quality issues with some distributors.

In the capital region and Greater Buenos Aires (representing 40% of demand), the quality of electricity service, measured in number of interruptions per customer and the duration of these interruptions, s & # 39; It has improved by around 20% compared to 2015..

There is no structural reason for a generalized reduction in electrical service as it was the case before. While looking for the causes, the lesson of vulnerability that leaves us reinforces the priority to occupy ourselves more in the risk map of the system.

The author was secretary of energy