System Power Outages Listing
Author: Clare Duffy, ESBI, Ireland
Analysis of system power outages can help us learn and avoiding similar events in the future. If you have information on any blackouts, please e-mail to editor@pacw.org.
30 January, 2008, Carcar City, Philippinies
A blackout that struck Carcar City and 16 towns in southern Cebu was caused by the torching of a 69 kV wooden electric pole that created a "domino effect" and brought down with it two other nearby poles. The power outage lasted nearly 14 hours.
1 February, 2008, Cape Town, South Africa
A blackout hit Cape Town at 8:45 PM on Friday and lasted until the early hours of Saturday. Eskom apologized to its customers for the technical fault involving a conductor at the major substation of Muldersvlei-Acacia, plunging most of the city into darkness.
26 February, 2008, Florida, USA
Human error was the cause of a state-wide blackout that started at 1:09 PM and affected about 584,000 FP&L customers and an additional half-million across three other utilities. It began with a field engineer diagnosing a switch that had malfunctioned at a substation in West Miami. Against company rules he had disabled both the primary and backup protection. The fault affected 26 transmission lines and 38 substations. One of the substations affected serves three of the generation units at Turkey Point, including a natural gas unit, as well as both nuclear units, which shut down automatically. Two other generation plants were affected and the system lost a total of 3,400 MW of generating capacity.
26 February, 2008, Karachi, Pakistan
A row over unpaid bills sparked a huge power blackout in Pakistan's biggest city, Karachi, leaving most of its 12 million residents without electricity. The outage came after Pakistan's main power utility accused the electricity company supplying the southern port of refusing to settle debts of more than half a million dollars.
16 March, 2008, New Delhi, India
Following a blackout that lasted several hours on March 14th, Delhi and its satellite towns were subjected to another power shutdown on the morning of March 16th, as more than thirty seven 400 kV transmission lines tripped. Most parts of West, East and North Delhi experienced prolonged power cuts. The tripping of lines was blamed on flash-over on the insulators in the presence of fog and pollutants in the atmosphere.
6 April, 2008, St. Andrew, Jamaica
Residents in Kingston and St. Andrew were left without electricity for close to four hours after a fault with one of the company's transformers triggered the outage. A zonal strategy saved Jamaica from another island wide power outage.
31 March, 2008, South Africa
South African power utility Eskom will start nationwide planned blackouts from March 31st to reduce demand, as Africa's biggest economy struggles with an electricity crisis. The utility said it would implement rolling blackouts - known as load shedding in South Africa - for at least three months to reduce electricity demand to manageable levels.
11 April, 2008, Manila, Philippinies
Shortly after 9:00 AM a falling construction crane cut an electricity transmission line and plunged most of the Philippine capital into a three-hour blackout Friday, affecting about 70 percent of metropolitan Manila and triggering an automatic shutdown at several power plants. The outage halted trains and disrupted traffic, leaving commuters stranded throughout the city.
21 April, 2008, Kuala Lampur, Malaysia
Thieves apparently looking for scrap metal triggered a blackout across most of Sabah state in eastern Malaysia when they removed iron beams from a 132 kV tower, causing it to collapse and triggering a domino effect that left 300 thousand customers in the entire state of Borneo Island without power.
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