Introduction

Security refers to the degree of risk in a power system's ability to survive imminent disturbances (contingencies) without interruption to customer service. It relates to robustness of the system to imminent disturbances and, hence, depends on the system operating condition as well as the contingent probability of disturbances

Security of a power system is affected by three factors 1. Characteristics of the physical system: the integrated generation, transmission and distribution system 2. protection and control systems 3. Business structures of owning and operating entities 4. The regulatory framework

What is a blackout A blackout refers to the total loss of power to an area and is the most severe form of power outage that can occur in a power system. Blackouts which results in power stations tripping are particularly difficult to recover quickly. Outages may last from a few minutes to a few weeks depending on the nature of the blackout and the configuration of the electrical network.

power outage
A power outage (also power cut, blackout, or power failure) is a short- or long-term loss of the electric power to an area. There are many causes of power failures in an electricity network. Examples of these causes include faults at power stations, damage toelectric transmission lines, substations or other parts of the distribution system, a short circuit, or the overloading of electricity mains. Power failures are particularly critical at sites where the environment and public safety are at risk. Institutions such as hospitals, sewagetreatment plants, mines, and the like will usually have backup power sources such as standby generators, which will automatically start up when electrical power is lost. Other critical systems, such as telecommunications, are also required to have emergency power. Telephone exchange rooms usually have arrays of lead-acid batteries for backup and also a socket for connecting a generator during extended periods of outage.

Types of power outage

Power outages are categorized into three different phenomena, relating to the duration and effect of the outage: 1.A transient fault is a momentary (a few seconds) loss of power typically caused by a temporary fault on a power line. Power is automatically restored once the fault is cleared. 2.A brownout or sag is a drop in voltage in an electrical power supply. The term brownout comes from the dimming experienced by lighting when the voltage sags. Brownouts can cause poor performance of equipment or even incorrect operation. 3.A blackout refers to the total loss of power to an area and is the most severe form of power outage that can occur. Blackouts which result from or result in power stations tripping are particularly difficult to recover from quickly. Outages may last from a few minutes to a few weeks depending on the nature of the blackout and the configuration of the electrical network.

Protecting the power system from outages

In power supply networks, the power generation and the electrical load (demand) must be very close to equal every second to avoid overloading of network components, which can severely damage them. Protective relays and fuses are used to automatically detect overloads and to disconnect circuits at risk of damage. Under certain conditions, a network component shutting down can cause current fluctuations in neighboring segments of the network leading to a cascading failure of a larger section of the network. This may range from a building, to a block, to an entire city, to an entire electrical grid. Modern power systems are designed to be resistant to this sort of cascading failure, but it may be unavoidable (see below). Moreover, since there is no short-term economic benefit to preventing rare large-scale failures, some observers[who?] have expressed concern that there is a tendency to erode the resilience of the network over time, which is only corrected after a major failure occurs. It has been claimed[who?] that reducing the likelihood of small outages only increases the likelihood of larger ones. In that case, the short-term economic benefit of keeping the individual customer happy increases the likelihood of large-scale blackouts

Protecting computer systems from power outages

Computer systems and other electronic devices containing logic circuitry are susceptible to data loss or hardware damage that can be caused by the sudden loss of power. These can include data networking equipment, video projectors, alarm systems as well as computers. To protect against this, the use of an uninterruptible power supply or UPS can provide a constant flow of electricity in the event that a primary power supply becomes unavailable for a short period of time. To protect against surges (events where voltages increase for a few seconds), which can damage hardware when power is restored, a special device called a surge protector that absorbs the excess voltage can be used.

Restoring power after a wide-area outage

Restoring power after a wide-area outage can be difficult, as power stations need to be brought back on-line. Normally, this is done with the help of power from the rest of the grid. In the total absence of grid power, a so-called black start needs to be performed to bootstrap the power grid into operation. The means of doing so will depend greatly on local circumstances and operational policies, but typically transmission utilities will establish localized 'power islands' which are then progressively coupled together. To maintain supply frequencies within tolerable limits during this process, demand must be reconnected at the same pace that generation is restored, requiring close coordination between power stations, transmission and distribution organizations.

2012 India blackouts

The July 2012 India blackout was the largest power outage in history, occurring as two separate events on 30 and 31 July 2012. The outage affected over 620 million people, about 9% of the world population, or half of India's population, spread across 22 states] in Northern, Eastern, and Northeast India. An estimated 32 gigawatts of generating capacity was taken offline in the outage. An article in The Wall Street Journal stated that of the affected population, 320 million initially had power, while the rest of the affected population lacked direct access. Electrical power was restored in the affected locations between 31 July and 1 August 2012

Background
The Indian electrical infrastructure is generally considered unreliable.The northern grid had previously collapsed in 2001. An estimated 27% of energy generated is lost in transmission or stolen, while peak supply falls short of demand by an average of 9%.The nation suffers from frequent power outages that last as long as 10 hours. Further, about 25% of the population, about 300 million people, have no electricity at all.Projections suggest India remains decades away from having a sufficient energy supply. In the summer of 2012, leading up to the failure, extreme heat had caused power use to reach record levels in New Delhi. Due to the late arrival of monsoons, agricultural areas in Punjab and Haryana drew increased power from the grid for running irrigation pumps to paddy fields..The late monsoon also meant that hydropower plants were generating less than their usual production.

Sequence of events
30 July
At 02:35 IST (21:05 UTC on 29 July), the 400 kV Bina-Gwalior line tripped. As this line fed into the Agra-Bareilly transmission section, the station also tripped, and power failures cascaded through the grid. All major power stations were shut down in the affected states, causing an estimated shortage of 32 GW. Officials described the failure as "the worst in a decade". On the day of the collapse, Power Minister Sushil Kumar Shinde stated that the exact cause of the failure was unknown, but that at the time of the failure, electricity use was "above normal". He speculated that some states had attempted to draw more power than permitted due to the higher consumption. Spokesperson for Power Grid Corporation of India Limited (PGCIL) and the Northern Regional Load Dispatch Centre (NRLDC) stated that Uttar Pradesh, Punjab and Haryana were the states responsible for the overdraw. PGCIL's chairman also stated that electrical service was restored "at a record time". A senior director for an Indian power company described the outage as "a fairly large breakdown that exposed major technical faults in Indias grid system. Something went terribly wrong which caused the backup safety systems to fail." More than 300 million people, about 25% of India's population, were without power. Railways and some airports were shut down until 08:00. The busiest airport in North India, Delhi Airport, was able to remain open, because it switched to back-up power in 15 seconds.The outage caused "chaos" for Monday morning rush hour, as passenger trains were shut down and traffic signals were non-operational. Trains stalled for three to five hours.Several hospitals reported interruptions in health services,[5] while others relied on back-up generators.Water treatment plants were shut down for several hours, and millions were unable to draw water from wells powered by electric pumps. The Associated Chambers of Commerce and Industry of India stated that the blackout had "severely impacted" businesses, leaving many unable to operate. Oil refineries in Panipat, Mathura and Bhatinda continued operating because they have their own captive power stations within the refineries and do not depend on the grid. It took 15 hours to restore 80% of service.

31 July
The system failed again at 13:02 IST (07:32 UTC), due to a relay problem near the Taj Mahal.As a result, power stations across the affected parts of India again went offline. NTPC Ltd. stopped 38% of its generation capacity.Over 600 million people (nearly half of India's population), in 22 out of 28 states in India, were without power. More than 300 intercity passenger trains and commuter lines were shut down as a result of the power outage. The worst affected zones in the wake of the power grid's collapse were Northern, North Central, East Central, and East Coast railway zones, with parts of Eastern, South Eastern and West Central railway zones. The Delhi Metro suspended service on all six lines, and had to evacuate passengers from trains that stopped mid-journey, helped by the Delhi Disaster Management Authority. About 200 miners were trapped underground in eastern India due to lifts failing, but officials later said they had all been rescued.

The National Disaster Management Authority (NDMA), not normally mandated to investigate blackouts, began to do so because of the threat to basic infrastructure facilities like railways, metro rail system, lifts in multi-storey buildings, and movement of vehicular traffic. The following states were affected by the grid failure: states on the northern grid: Delhi, Haryana, Himachal Pradesh, Jammu & Kashmir, Punjab, Rajasthan, Uttar Pradesh, Uttarakhand states on the eastern grid: Bihar, Jharkhand, Orissa, West Bengal states on the northeast grid: Arunanchal Pradesh, Assam, Manipur, Meghalaya, Mizoram, Nagaland, Sikkim

The following regions were not directly affected by the power outage: Narora and Simbhaoli in Uttar Pradesh parts of Delhi such as Badarpur areas served by Sterlite and Ib Thermal Power Station (most of western Orissa) most of the Kolkata municipal area (CESC system)

As of 2 August, Uttar Pradesh was being supplied about 7 GW power, while the demand was between 9 and 9.7 GW.

Prior disaster-proofing
Before the grid collapse, the private sector spent $29 billion to build their own independent power stations in order to provide reliable power to their factories. The five biggest consumers of electricity in India have private off-grid supplies. Indian companies have 35 GW of private offgrid generation capacity and plan to add another 33 GW to their off-grid capacity. Some villages that were not connected to the grid were not affected, such as Meerwada, Madhya Pradesh which has a 14 kW solar power station built by US-based firm for $125,000. Reactions On the day of the collapse, Power Minister Sushil Kumar Shinde ordered a three-member panel to determine the reason for the failure and report on it in fifteen days. In response to criticism, he observed that India was not alone in suffering major power outages, as blackouts had also occurred in the United States and Brazil within the previous few years. The Washington Post described the failure as adding urgency to Indian Prime Minister Manmohan Singh's plan for a US$400 billion overhaul of India's power grid. His plan calls for a further 76 gigawatts of generation by 2017,produced in part by nuclear power. Rajiv Kumar, secretary general of the Federation of Indian Chambers of Commerce and Industry (FICCI) said, "One of the major reasons for the collapse of the power grid is the major gap between demand and supply. There is an urgent need to reform the power sector and bring about infrastructural improvements to meet the new challenges of the growing economy." On 1 August 2012, newly appointed Power Minister Moodbidri Veerappa Moily stated, "First thing is to stabilize the grid and it has to sustain. For that we will work out a proper strategy." He declined to blame specific states, saying, "I don't want to start with the blame game." Team Anna, the supporters of anti-corruption activist Anna Hazare, charged that this grid failure was a conspiracy to suppress the indefinite fast movement started on 25 July 2012 for the Jan Lokpal Bill and targeting Sharad Pawar. Some technology sources and USAID proposed that another widespread outage could be prevented by integrated network of microgrids and distributed generation connected seamlessly with the main grid via a superior smart grid technology which includes automated fault detection, islanding and self-healing of the network.

Reasons behind july Blackout

The three-member investigation committee consisted of S. C. Srivastava, A. Velayutham and A. S. Bakshi, and issued its report on 16 August 2012. It concluded that four factors were responsible for the two days of blackout: Weak inter-regional power transmission corridors due to multiple existing outages (both scheduled and forced) High Loading on 400 kV Bina-Gwalior-Agra link.

Inadequate response by State Load Despatch Centers (SLDCs) to the instructions of Regional Load Despatch Centres (RLDCs) to reduce overdrawal by the Northern Region utilities and underdrawal/excess generation by the Western Region utilities. Loss of 400 kV Bina-Gwalior link due to mis-operation of its protection system. The committee also offered a number of recommendations to prevent further failures, including an audit of the protection systems

Preventing Blackout 1.Synchrophasor Monitoring

Most monitoring of the grid is based on non-simultaneous average values . Monitoring of line voltage phase angles (phasors) can fill that gap, providing the instantaneous measurement of electrical magnitudes and angles. Synchronized phasors (synchrophasors) provide a real-time measurement of electrical quantities from across the power system. Applications include wide-area control, system model validation, determining stability margins, maximizing stable system loading, islanding detection, systemwide disturbance recording, and visualization of dynamic system response. The basic system building blocks are GPS satellite-synchronized clocks, phasor measurement units (PMUs), a phasor data concentrator (PDC), communication equipment, and visualization software. A phasor measurement unit (PMU) or synchrophasor is a device which measures the electrical waves on an electricity grid, using a common time source for synchronization. Time synchronization allows synchronized real-time measurements of multiple remote measurement points on the grid. In power engineering, these are also commonly referred to as synchrophasors and are considered one of the most important measuring devices in the future of power systems.A PMU can be a dedicated device, or the PMU function can be incorporated into a protective relay or other device

Operation
A PMU can measure 50/60 Hz AC waveforms (voltages and currents) typically at a rate of 48 samples per cycle (2880 samples per second). The analog AC waveforms are digitized by an Analog to Digital converter for each phase. A phase-lock oscillator along with a Global Positioning System (GPS) reference source provides the needed high-speed synchronized sampling with 1 microsecond accuracy. (The Global Positioning System (GPS) is a space-based satellite navigation system that provides location and time information in all weather conditions, anywhere on or near the Earth where there is an unobstructed line of sight to four or more GPS satellites. The system provides critical capabilities to military, civil and commercial users around the world. It is maintained by the United States government and is freely accessible to anyone with a GPS receiver.)The resultant time tagged phasors can be transmitted to a local or remote receiver at rates up to 60 samples per second.

Phasor networks
A phasor network consists of phasor measurement units (PMUs) dispersed throughout the electricity system, Phasor Data Concentrators (PDC) to collect the information and a Supervisory Control And Data Acquisition (SCADA) system at the central control facility. Such a network is used in Wide Area Measurement Systems (WAMS), the first of which was begun in 2000 by the Bonneville Power Administration. The complete network requires rapid data transfer within the frequency of sampling of the phasor data. GPS time stamping can provide a theoretical accuracy of synchronization better than 1 microsecond. Clocks need to be accurate to 500 nanoseconds to provide the one microsecond time standard needed by each device performing synchrophasor measurement. For 60 Hz systems, PMUs must deliver between 10 and 30 synchronous reports per second depending on the application. The PDC correlates the data, and controls and monitors the PMUs (from a dozen up to 60). At the central control facility, the SCADA system presents system wide data on all generators and substations in the system every 2 to 10 seconds. PMUs often use phone lines to connect to PDC, which then send data to the SCADA or Wide Area Measurement System (WAMS) server. PMUs from multiple vendors can yield inaccurate readings. In one test, readings differed by 47 microseconds or a difference of 1 degree of at 60 Hz- an unacceptable variance. China's solution to the problem was to build all its own PMUs adhering to its own specifications and standards so there would be no multi-vendor source of conflicts, standards, protocols, or performance characteristics.

2.FACTS devices Unified Power Flow Controller

A Unified Power Flow Controller (or UPFC) is an electrical device for providing fast-acting reactive power compensation on high-voltage electricity transmission networks. It uses a pair of three-phase controllable bridges to produce current that is injected into a transmission line using a series transformer. The controller can control active and reactive power flows in a transmission line. The UPFC uses solid state devices, which provide functional flexibility, generally not attainable by conventional thyristor controlled systems. The UPFC is a combination of a static synchronous compensator (STATCOM) and a static synchronous series compensator (SSSC) coupled via a common DC voltage link. The UPFC concept was described in 1995 by L. Gyugyi of Westinghouse. The UPFC allows a secondary but important function such as stability control to suppress power system oscillations improving the transient stability of power system

Static Synchronous Series Compensator

The Static Synchronous Series Compensator (SSSC) is a device that belongs to the Flexible AC Transmission Systems (FACTS) family using power electronics to control power flow and improve power oscillation damping on power grids. The SSSC injects a voltage in series with the transmission line where it is connected. The SSSC contains a solid-state voltage source inverter

connected in series with the transmission line through an insertion transformer. This connection enables the SSSC to control power flow in the line for a wide range of system conditions. Static synchronous series compensator (SSSC) uses a voltage source converter to inject a controllable voltage in quadrature with the line current of a power network. Such a device is able to rapidly provide both capacitive and inductive impedance compensation independent of the power line current. Moreover, an SSSC with a suitably designed external damping controller can also be used to improve the damping of the low-frequency power oscillations in a power network.

3.Distributed Generations
Distributed generation, also called on-site generation, dispersed generation, embedded generation, decentralized generation, decentralized energy, distributed energy or district energy,generates electricity from many small energy sources. Most countries generate electricity in large centralized facilities, such as fossil fuel (coal, gas powered), nuclear, large solar power plants or hydropower plants. These plants have excellent economies of scale, but usually transmit electricity long distances and can negatively affect the environment. Distributed generation allows collection of energy from many sources and may give lower environmental impacts and improved security of supply. Use wind turbines, Solar arrays, Geothermal, Stream turbine from a small local stream, Wave, Tidal energy Offer significant economic, environmental and security benefits Small, modular, located near load site

Why blackout is a disaster

Electric power: Essential resource of national security It affects : finance,transportation,food and water supply, health and welfare, communications, research, heating, cooling, lighting, computer and electronics, industries, commercial enterprise and many more Impact on grid and public life is countless

REFERENCES 1. http://www.powermin.nic.in August 2012 2. http://wikipedia.org/India_blackouts 3. ieee.org