 Good afternoon, everybody. This is Guillermo Sabati, your host for today on Perspectives on Energy, and today we'll be talking about the Blackout in Pakistan. On my background, of course, I am an electrical engineer, and I worked in the power industry for 30 years, so I have a little bit of background on this. Currently, I'm the Director of International Services for HSI, the Health and Safety Institute, specifically in industrial skills So let's dive right in. Here in the week, Pakistan had a Blackout that pretty much de-energized the majority of its national grid. This is the second time this happened in the last few months, so they definitely had some problems. This time, apparently, they had an issue with voltage swings that eventually led to a frequency collapse, which on its own ends of spiraling into a voltage collapse, and that's usually the causes of most Blackouts, either your collapse in voltage. Frequency often isn't the only cause of a Blackout. Usually, they have under-frequency load shedding schemes that will normally shed the appropriate amount of load automatically, and usually that saves the day. But in this case, if you have a voltage collapse, that tends to be kind of hard to be able to get around that in that case. So one of the things to consider in this event is the fact that this is the second time this happens in the center year in the country, so it is definitely a concern. They were able to restore most of their system back in about three days, had a lot of problems with infrastructure, and of course, nowadays, in a highly connected society, a lot of their, what's a lot of hardship in an economy has already struggled. One of the things that became apparent was the fact that most everybody has backup generation at either every industrial or commercial facility, but the problem was that in a lot of these cell phone towers, the provider was running out of fuel at these gen sets for most of these towers. So after maybe six, seven, eight hours of running on the backup generator, they're running out of fuel, whether it's diesel or gasoline. So that presents another problem. So in this case, we'll talk about some of the general Blackout causes, how system operations personnel usually can either predict, plan ahead, or even as a few minutes away, a few seconds away, take mitigating actions, but in the end of the day, if the system is set up in a way that's very difficult to manage, all their efforts may, especially if they got set up with a bad plan for that day, they could really have problems. So again, there's still investigations going on. We won't know the root cause if we ever do for what happened until maybe a few weeks from now. We've had similar incidents in Europe, similar incidents in the US. A few weeks ago, we had Europe doing some feeder rotation and they were getting ready for rotating Blackouts, but fortunately, they got lucky. It was about whether they did not encounter those challenges. Right now in Pakistan, however, one of the root causes they've been discussing quite a bit is they haven't kept up with their infrastructure, basically moderating the grid, maintaining the grid, sometimes even reconducting equipment, substation maintenance, generator maintenance. For the most part, it's just a matter of maintaining it right now. Of course, the media and everybody else is blaming grid reliability on the fact that it hasn't been maintained. But again, we will discuss that further once we know more information as to what happened. For now, I can definitely say that from my experiences, and I don't mean to speculate, but one of the things that normally puts a utility in peril, meaning reliability for that day, is a long-term planning horizon, mid-term and short-term planning horizon. So what are those? We'll break those down as we discuss it over the next half hour. So one of the long-term planning horizon basically looks at what your load will look like over a span of five, 10, 15 years. Are you seeing a lot of customer growth? Are you seeing a lot of industrial growth in your area? Well, in that case, you'd have to probably plan ahead and start designing, citing and permitting a lot of budgeting for a lot of expanded generation, right? In a lot of cases, as your fleet ages, or you're replacing some of these dirtier fossil fuel fleets with something as cleaner burning, natural gas, or even going with some of the renewables, and so that all requires planning in a five to six-year lifespan. So this planning horizon of five years to a decade usually looks at the expected forecasted load growth. So they will plan ahead with that. If load is growing in an area as of when they're before, then they may require, of course, a construction of new transmission lines and even distribution infrastructure, right? So if that's planned right and planned well, you will meet that load with a new generation mix. You'll have the adequate amount of transmission. You'll have the correct rights of way, and then ultimately, as load grows, you'll have enough of a buffer to be able to manage that those reliability needs, right, on top of your basic generation and economic needs, right? So one of the things that happens is oftentimes these planning cycles don't, they're put off a postpone. They don't go as well. So then they may do what they have, and they continue to absorb all this load with the existing infrastructure. And then as you continue to add more load to that already existing source, you end up making your margins much, much narrower. And as the years go by, eventually your margin is so narrow that you are getting dangerously close to being able to survive a more severe single contingency. So I don't know what happened there yet, but it seems to me that there's a combination of factors on there, right? The long-term planning horizon is where the aspect comes in of maintaining infrastructure and properly developing infrastructure. So that's a long term. Near term, of course, is you're looking over the next few years, right? A lot of that has to do with opacity upgrades on lines, adding reactive devices and support voltage, upgrading, for example, the carrying capability of some of these transformers and some of these substations, right? And a lot of times, most of these components, and not all of them, especially in a system that's already heavily loaded, that usually gives you an extra three to five years to be able to get by, and it's not as expensive as building a new generation and any transmission lines. So it's almost as if you're stretching the life of what you've got. In a lot of cases, adding a transmission capacitor banks will help support voltage, but then, of course, the benefit of that is now you have increased the carrying capacity, the transfer capability, right, of that particular path to carry more flow, which means now you can have generations from somewhere else come and supply load at the other end without sacrificing voltages in as much, right? So in this case, they'll plan these particular upgrades, whether it's capacity upgrade, usually on transmission lines, or they'll even adding all of these reactive devices to support voltage, right? That definitely helps with the dangers of a voltage collapse, which, as I said earlier, a voltage collapse can pretty much lead you down into an area of instability and then pretty quickly into a blackout. Frequency collapse, usually there's protection systems in place that will shed load automatically, depending on how badly that rate of decay is or frequency, right? And usually, I save a day. I've seen server utilities have that happen where they were able to by design, please set, it actually saved the day. So they were able to survive their transmission grid, you know, still energized. I mean, they shed a lot of their distribution customers, but their transmission grid was still intact and they were able to restore from that starting point. So now let's look at near term. And here in the US and Canada, when Merck has specific regulatory standards, and they regulate, for example, real-time operations, right? Of the grid, whether you're a transmission provider or a system operator, a balancing authority, reliability coordinator. And one of the things that is particularly important is what they call the next day planning. That's usually governed by nurse standards, TOP 002 for the transmission operators. And then with the reliability coordinators, they have an IRO 008 and IRO 006. So these two different standards, right, have an impact on both sides, right? So they each have responsibilities for reporting and also disseminating information. So what are those standards, right? So those standards, they impose the obligation of actually having to study all of your outages and system conditions for the next day or the next several days, right? So normally, in most utilities, right, usually maintenance has to happen. They have to take out a transmission line, they need to take out a transformer, they need to take out a component out in the system. And it's usually, of course, the one that's the most important is the transmission systems, right? Anything above 100 kV. And for the most part, right, we used to not study the next day, right? So now, for example, you have programs like Siemens's PSSE or Power Factory from the Edgey Silent, for example, that allow you to take a model of your system, meaning all the lines, all the buses, all the stations, all the generators, all the loads, right, all the reactive devices. And you'll have a pretty good mathematical model of your system is you can then study and simulate. So what you'll do is, you know, you'll look at your expected load for that day or that week. For example, you look at your planned equipment outages, whether it's a line, a bus, or a transformer, or reactive devices. And you'll basically get your model and you'll take and you'll set up your system exactly as it would be when, you know, for the time period you're studying. For say you're studying for 1400 hours, you know, on a Wednesday, you'll set the load curve for that day, the expected load. You'll set up the generation profile. You'll set up what generations are in service, which ones are out of service. You'll even set up, for example, the loading of the generators based on their economic dispatch, right? You'll also set up the expected power transactions, meaning the floor power between utilities, right, who's buying and selling power, who's, for example, wheeling power from one area to the next. You'll also be setting up, for example, and most importantly, you're looking at at the element outages. There's a certain line that's going to be out of service for that day. And that's planned. What part of your part of your plan is to actually study that and see if your system can support it, right? So ideally, once you run this study, right, then you'll, you'll do a what if analysis to see what happens to the next component, you know, goes out of service and accidentally. So in this case, you're already preparing yourself to see if you can withstand the most severe single contingency. So you do like a base case study, where you see what your system will look like and make sure you don't have any real time base case overloads. And then you'll do what they call a contingency analysis, which is looking at a what if scenario. So what, how the way this works is that based on your model, the system's data estimator will go ahead and take a one component out at a time, run a powerful study, and then we'll show you what the result is of that one component being out of service. Then it puts it back, runs it again, and it does it for every single component in your system, every single element in your system until it's done, right? So the worst offenders, for example, will show up first on the list of contingencies, and it says for the loss of this line, you'll have this other element overloading or undervoltage or overvoltage. And then you can make decisions based on that, whether you can proceed with that outrage or not, or you have a mitigation, right, to go and proceed forward. There have been outages in the U.S. with that that resulted in a so some blackouts, right, that have also several areas. And as a result of that, NERC eventually came up with these standards to make sure you have an adequate next day study, meaning that that's what it is, right? It's next day planning, right? So make sure you haven't, you studied your next day, you studied your near term. And one of the suspicions we're having is the fact that it them that may not have done adequately in Pakistan. We don't know yet. But usually, for example, if you have, you're saying that there was some switching happening, and that switching caused the voltage instability, which then of course, you know, caused the voltage swing. And then eventually that voltage swing caused the frequency swing. And then, you know, from that point, the whole thing, you know, collapsed and cascaded. So if you're unable to handle that sort of condition, right, where you're switching, and they may have done a proper study of that particular line outage, right? The issue there is that something may not have been modeled correctly when they were trying to switch it back in service. But what's more concerning is that something when it got switched out of service caused that issue, which means that particular outage wasn't properly studied. Or worse, it wasn't properly modeled in the system. So somebody may have studied, they may have looked great on paper, but when they went ahead and tried to execute it in real life, the results were not matching what they had seen on their forecast, which is a concern. So again, this will be something that they will probably look into with much, much greater detail. So how does one, these are the reasons, for example, that you may run into a blackout situation from the planning perspective, right? So what happens if everything's planned right, you're operating, everything's looking like everything in real time is looking pretty close to what you saw on your day ahead study, right, on your day ahead plan. So if you're the operator, you're the grid operator, you're the dispatcher sitting at the desk and you're basically flying this plane, right, that is performing how you predicted or what the engineers predicted was going to happen. All of a sudden, you lose one or two more components beyond that most severe single contingency. So now you're in a double contingency or what they call n minus two, right? So n minus one is the usual, what if, for every one contingency that you lose at a time, n minus two is for two contingencies ahead. And usually they don't plan that far unless it's a defined double contingency. But if you're in a situation right now, it's up to you to go ahead and do studies on your own real time while you're there, right? And that may involve, you know, canceling outages that may involve doing is taking certain actions. And in some cases, up to and including the shedding of for load. May not have a lot of time to do all this, but that's usually what the real time operator is going to be faced with in this time, right? Usually shedding load, usually separating, usually going up in an island of condition, which means you might have an area of load that has its own generation that separated, has no ties with the neighboring areas, but still, you know, running not synchronized, but that's an island, right? So that's another situation they might find themselves in. So one of the things that we do at HSI and industrial skills training is train these system operators on how to go through steps, right? Where it's like there's the planning aspect of it, understanding how that works. And then there's the actual operator real time operations of the system. And one of the ways to prepare them for that is to do simulation training. And we have a simulator, which I'll show at a later date, right now, to do a full demo that gives them an overview of how to run a power system. And one of the things that you understand, right, is what the effects are, for example, of having unplanned outages happen beyond the scope of what you're already, beyond the work that you had already planned, right, and how to react to that. In a lot of cases, usually it involves quick mitigation or running a study, but when you don't have enough time, especially studies reveal, usually you may have maybe minutes or sometimes you may have hours take action. And a lot of times that may lead to, at worst, the shedding of firm customer load, which means opening up. You're going to put some customers in the dark to save the rest of your system. But in most cases, what happens is they have to usually read dispatch generation, or they have to cancel planned outages that either are already in effect, or that they're waiting to actually be executed. So in a lot of cases, if a field crew has a line that they're going to take out of service, and you're noticing problems already, and the thinking of that line based on your studies reveals that it's going to get really, really bad. Well, then it's up to you to go ahead and cancel that outage or postpone it. And for the reasons being that you run a study in this line that's not working based on some other conditions that were not foreseen in the day I had planned, which happens all the time. You can have a generator that came out of service at a trip, or you may have some issue with a solar site. They lost a line that feeds out of the solar site. And that can change your entire plan. And once your whole plan has changed, then now you have to do it on a case-by-case basis, whether that particular outage can be carried out. So these are just examples of how you can get to a blackout. Again, training is a really important aspect for the system operators when it comes to running the grid. But it's not just the actual real-time operator, because if they're stuck with a really bad plan for that day, where they're coming up with a lot of surprises that they weren't expecting, then that's also a bad plan. So there's training that goes on the back end to make sure the next day plan is done correctly as well. And then even the near-term studies. Some of these outages are studied two or three weeks in advance to give them a rough idea whether this can be done this time of the year or season. So in a lot of cases right now, I'm not sure what the seasonal conditions are in Pakistan right now, but I imagine they could be going through a winter. So in a lot of cases, there's a lot of winter load. Usually it's a lot of inductive or heating strips, which places a lot of demand in the system at certain times of the day. More so than the summer, we have a lot of air conditioning load. So that is an example, seasonal things that could be done. And in a lot of places, usually generator outages and transmission outages happen, which is known as the shoulder ones, which is usually at times of mild weather, whether it's spring or it's in the fall. Now every once in a while, you run into a mild winter and then some planners are, they want to take advantage of this opportunity, and they go ahead and schedule an outage. And then all of a sudden this mild season, this mild break in the weather only lasts a one or two weeks, but the outage is a three, four week long outage. So now they find themselves with a lot of high demand and load without enough resources to meet it. So it's another challenge when you see when it comes to different causes of a blockout. Another example as well is usually, the ones I've seen usually stems from either a bad plan. I seen some outages happen from the fact that they had too many outages at the same time. In some cases, you had somebody that was completely unplanned, that somebody was troubleshooting at a station, and they went ahead and disabled some of the protection to be able to troubleshoot something. And then the fault happens. And then you had a sustained fault that was there for a long period of time. And then you ended up with the fault clearing from all of the remote ends at the station, which of course, this utility lasts about 25, 30 different generators all throughout the system. So really, really significant, of course, that led to an underfrequency event. But fortunately, the underfrequency load shedding took effect, and they were able to actually not block out. They saved the system. So the customers felt like a blackout because they were sitting in the dark, but the transmission grid was mostly intact, and they were able to restore everything back in about three to four hours. So it was really, really significant in that case. So again, I'm really anxious to see what, I'm eager to see what happened. I feel really, really bad for that particular the customer. Their customers, I feel bad for the utility. I feel bad for Pakistan in general, for what they went through. Right now, I know that they're having their challenges when it comes to the economy at this time. But they did a great job in restoring. I know for a fact that some of the nuclear plants, some of their coal plants are still going to be out another two or three days at least, because that's normally how long it takes to get those units back online. So hopefully they'll be able to do this rather soon and get back to normal. But again, I mean, this is a problem that is not unique to Pakistan. I think the majority of the world right now is experiencing challenges when it comes to maintaining infrastructure on both building additional lines is not an easy thing, especially since everybody has what they call not in my backyard, Navy, I think, which is not in my backyard attitude. It's like nobody wants to see a brand new power, a brand new transmission line through their area, but everybody knows they need it, right? So as one example, the other one is nobody wants to allow the building of new conventional generation, everybody wants renewables, which is great, but that also causes an issue with reliability sometimes. So a lot of different things are happening. We saw some of the challenges in Europe right now with their issues when it comes to fuel. So again, this would be an interesting year as we're approaching right now in the peak of winter in some places, right? But where I'm at, it's mild weather. But for us, the summers are brutal when it comes to low and heat. So again, I'm really, really interested to see what they find as a root cause and what were the different components that lined up to place them in this blackout condition and what it was that impacted their reliability so severely that they blacked out. All right. Well, again, thank you so much for joining me today and hopefully I'll have a second segment of this particular discussion coming up in a few weeks. Thank you again and have a great afternoon. Thank you so much for watching Think Tech Hawaii. If you like what we do, please like us and click the subscribe button on YouTube and the follow button on Vimeo. You can also follow us on Facebook, Instagram, and LinkedIn, and donate to us at thinktechhawaii.com. Mahalo.