TBO.com - TBO is Tampa Bay Online

FPL Might Have Made $1 Million Mistakes

Associated Press Photo

A malfunction at a single electrical substation caused a cascading blackout that shut down a nuclear plant Tuesday and briefly cut power to about 3 million people in Florida.

ADVERTISEMENT

By RICHARD MULLINS, The Tampa Tribune

Published: February 27, 2008

Updated: 02/28/2008 06:00 am

One half-second.

That's all it took for a set of sluggish circuit breakers in a Miami neighborhood to set in motion a cascade of power outages that rolled across Florida on Tuesday, from the Keys to Tampa to Gainesville, according to the first probes conducted by power regulators in Florida.

When it was all over, more than 3 million people in Florida lost power. And if anyone is looking for punishment to be handed out, federal investigators will have new weapons to deploy if they find fault with utility companies.

They'll be able to impose fines of up to $1 million per day for any faulty equipment or mishandled procedures at utility companies that broke new federal energy rules, rules brought about after massive blackouts in the northeast on Aug. 14, 2003.

Meanwhile, utility companies are still unraveling what happened.

It started about 1 p.m. Tuesday, according to the first reports from the Florida Reliability Coordinating Council, a nonprofit group that oversees the cooperative power grid that's shared by utilities across the region.

About 1 p.m., equipment failed at a Florida Power & Light substation in the Miami area. Circuit breakers at the site were supposed to instantly cut off the station from the larger power grid. Instead, they were "too slow," and took about a half second to disconnect, said Sarah Rogers, president and CEO of the FRCC. A fire broke out at the substation, but that fire was an effect of the breakdown, not the cause, she said.

That half-second delay represents a very long time in the world of making electricity, she said, and nearby power hubs responded by unplugging themselves to prevent damage. That in turn triggered shutdowns at four Florida power plants, draining about 4,000 megawatts from the statewide network. In response, Tampa Electric Co. and Progress Energy plants also disengaged themselves. Within minutes an estimated 3 million customers lost power, including several hundred thousand in Tampa Bay.

After a few hours, the vast majority of customers saw their power restored.

Several agencies now have probes into the breakdown, including the Florida Public Service Commission, the FRCC and others. Besides tracking down the root cause of the problem, they'll be employing new federal rules that were adopted after the 2004 northeast blackouts.

Those federal laws changed the voluntary reliability standards in the power industry into a mandatory set of rules. If the FRCC finds any power company had faulty, missing or misused equipment or software, it can recommend fines of $1 million per day for each violation.

"If we find several violations that caused this, the fines could add up to several million dollars per day for each one," Rogers said.

The good news is that Florida's system performed well enough in the blackout that outages didn't spread into other states, she said. That may not have been the case in the past when the new mandatory standards were only voluntary, she said.

That doesn't mean FPL would have to cut a check right away. Such fines can take nine to 12 months to impose. The Federal Energy Regulatory Commission will then take up any recommendations and fine FPL.

Other utilities like TECO or Progress Energy would likely escape punishment, Rogers said, because their systems likely were not the cause of the problem, and they only unplugged customers as a protective measure to prevent equipment damage.

Meanwhile, power companies have the right to appeal and fines in Washington, or at federal courts, which can delay the process.

Reporter Richard Mullins can be reached at (813) 259-7919 or rmullins@tampatrib.com.

Share this:

Loading Comments...

Email Print

ADVERTISEMENT