Yesterday after maintenance shutdown of a 400kV transmission line in Nordrhein-Westfalen, Germany, led to an emergency shutdown of private customers in many areas of Europe to prevent a full blackout. Several areas of Germany, France, Belgium and Italy were without power for 30 minutes, others experienced brownouts, areas in Austria lost power for 13 minutes.

In Vienna we had a severe brownout, followed by a noticeable overvoltage (very bright incandescent lights) and after some 15 minutes a dip back to normal again (which most people probably wouldn't have noticed at all, it just felt like the dim on startup surges you're used to here in Vienna).

Are there any official explanations yet as to what happened? It sounds as though somebody might have just shut down the line without checking if there was adequate capacity on other routes first.

No official explanations. "Actually we don't know how it could happen!" said the spokeswoman of the German power company.
The papers aid it might take days or even weeks to determine the real cause of the overload.

It's interesting that these companies always employ spokeswoman ?

Sounds like a typically overloaded grid and not checking the loading prior to switching off that 400 kV line.

It's amazing what a bit of underfrequency can do and trip many bulk OCB's and turn countries in the dark.

Most likely.

According to several people, including a former teacher of mine Austria is in for a much bigger potential catastrophy though...
Most of our generating capacity is concentrated in the eastern and northern region (hydro, caloric, lots of wind turbines), whereas the south doesn't have much generation capacity but heavy demand.
Those two areas are linked by two constantly overloaded 220kV lines.
Since they're that heavily loaded it's impossible to shut them down for maintenance. But live maintenance like painting pylons is illegal in Austria, so the pylons can't be painted...
So IF one of those lines fails, it'll most likely shut down at least half of Austria, probably taking down large areas of Europe.

They always try to find an excuse instead of admitting a switching error.

Texas_Ranger Please post any link to a newspaper report when it is issued.

thanks

Ray

Nothing happened here except the lights flickered once or twice. But then again there's a huge nuke station within 50 miles of me up in Brittany and we are pumping jus all the way down to Italy.

Alan

Trust me to open my big mouth! Just finished writing this and the lights went dim!!

Seems that systems everywhere are being pushed to their limits.

We'll have to start rolling out some new lines!

Alan, it did upset part of your text.
somehow you got letters in the left hand side column, unless it was a temporary glitch.

Possibly due to excessive powerlosses in the grid on heavily overloaded and sagging HT pylons

OOPs it affected my post too.

edited for error

[This message has been edited by RODALCO (edited 11-05-2006).]

There are only German articles as far as I've seen. http://www.tagesschau.de/aktuell/meldungen/0,,OID6066150_REF1,00.html
According to this one they shut off the 400kV line across a river to let a huge ship pass...

All the other articles were only quoted here: http://forum.electronicwerkstatt.de/phpBB/viewtopic.php?topic=62832&forum=49

I briefly saw something in the news here in the US that they had to take down dome power lines to let a cruise ship get through somewhere, and it ended up blacking out i think over 1,000,000 customers in 8 countries. Does anyone have more info on that?

That's exactly the incident we were talking about. They shut off the 400 or 380kV line (don't know the exact figures, the articles mention both) to let the cruise ship pass from the wharf to the sea (the line crosses a river) and the shutdown resulted in an overload condition of other lines, leading to several emergency shutdowns to keep the frequency stable.

Hmmm, is someone sending an invoice to the cruise company ??

Ooops! You did say that, TexasRanger. I should have read more carefully.