I’m not too good at post titles, so changed this one to make it more meaningful.
A report was finally produced. As well as explaining the origin of the line failure, as already described, it also addressed the slowness in restoring power which it blamed on Transelec’s communications problems. Transelec is the entity that controls Chile’s power distribution at a national level.
That 399-page report is available here.
Of particular interest (at least to me) is the individualization of the actions required required to get each one of the many hundreds of elements that make up the National Grid back online. In many cases, manual intervention was needed when the automated control systems failed.
Being Chile, this event has largely been forgotten by now, but as far as I can see, no steps have been put in place yet to prevent a repetition of that type of blackout.
The recent mega-apagón in Spain that knocked out power in Portugal, Spain, and parts of France should serve as a reminder of the foolishness of this hyper-connectivity madness. Of course it’s trendy and cool. “We are all one” and all that hippie-dippie silliness. It also violates the first axiom of system reliability: avoid single points of failure that bring down the entire fooking network.
A well-designed system should be able to compensate for failures, at least up to a certain level by incorporating Contingency Failure mechanisms. But I suspect that we will see more of these events, as more and more Renewables sources are incorporated unless mitigation measures are adopted.
A propósito, the same site that included that excellent article on Spain’s blackout also mentions that Norway is becoming disenchanted with interconnectors.
Norway watched with dismay as the UK and Germany both closed perfectly functional generation (coal in the case of the UK, and nuclear in Germany), substituting it with imports from Norway. In effect, the UK, Germany and others including Denmark and the Netherlands, have outsourced investment in new generation to Norwegian tax and bill payers. As a result, Norway has twice amended its Energy Act to provide itself with powers to restrict electricity exports should there be any perceived risk to domestic supplies.