Near Miss of Blackout in Southern Part of North Eastern Grid of India

Abstract

In the evening of 2nd August 2019, the Southern part of North Eastern Regional (NER) Grid of India survived a “Near-Miss” event. The paper provides a short description of the sequence of events that resulted in the ‘in-extremis’ situation in the grid. This part of Indian Grid experiences number of blackouts due to weak transmission connectivity with the all India Grid. However, on that particular day, the grid survived an event that had resulted in blackout in the past. The experience of System Operator in managing the grid and lessons learnt during the “Near Miss” incident is described in the paper. Further, the paper discusses about various measures being taken to avoid disturbances and blackouts in this part of the grid in future. The paper also describes about a newly designed Active Power Flow based System Protection Scheme (SPS). It is expected that blackouts in Southern part of NER Grid shall be considerably reduced after implementation of the new SPS.