Brussels, 08/11/2006 (Agence Europe) - In reply to requests from the Commissioner for Energy, Andris Piebalgs (EUROPE 9300), energy actors are mobilising to find the reasons for the blackout that deprived 10 million Europeans of electricity between 22H and 23H last Saturday and to reflect on the measures to take to avoid such an incident reoccurring.
Meeting on Tuesday afternoon in Brussels, European energy regulators agreed to “undertake an urgent inquiry at a European level…to find a preliminary report before the end of the year”. The Council of European Energy Regulators (CEER) also proposed to present a report before February 2007 outlining a list of measures to prevent another incident happen again. British regulator and the president of the CEER, Sir John Mogg said that, “this recent blackout demonstrates the need, now more than ever, for an integrated electricity grid subject to proper regulatory oversight”. The CEER explains that new legislation that will allow Transmission System Operators (TSOs) to cooperate across borders and exchange information more easily.
The Union of the Coordination of Transmission Electricity (UCTE) indicated on Monday that it had set up an investigation committee under the leadership of Gerard Maas, from UCTE's management board “to clarify the cause of the incident and identify possible additional measures to be taken to prevent such disturbances to occur again”. The UCTE is promising results from the investigation at the end of November and explained that, “Due to the fact that the disturbance had an impact on all UCTE TSOs, all UCTE members will participate in the investigation”.
Taking part in a conference in Brussels on the integration of wind energy into the European electric infrastructure, the president of ETSO - European Transmission System Operators, Daniel Dobbeni called for caution before taking new measures to prevent this kind of incident happening again “until we know the causes”. The Executive Officer of the Belgian TSO, Elia, also underlined the fact that, “The fact that power was restored across Europe within two hours…showed that European transmission operators reacted well to the event”. He did, however, recognised that the 4 November incident was “unique in the number of countries it affected”. Dobbeni affirmed that Saturday's incident was not simply due to the planned halt in very high tension (400kV) in Germany used for letting a ship pass up river, “Taking major 400kV lines out of service happens all the time for maintenance, it's not a special event…But it was not known yet why other lines tripped, forcing TSOs in other parts of the integrated European grid to cut power”. (eh)