BRUSSELS/MADRID (Reuters) -The massive blackout that hit the Iberian peninsula in April is the first known blackout caused by over-voltage, the European network of transmission system operators ENTSO-E said in a report on Friday.
This first report, released ahead of an Oct. 28 legal deadline, didn’t look into the root causes of the blackout, rather focused on the situation of the power systems that day and the sequence of events.
The report, like previous probes, point to a surge in voltage as the immediate cause of the outage.
A final report, to be published in the first quarter of next year, will investigates key issues like root causes, actions deployed to control voltage in the system and the performance of power generators in helping control voltage.
MISSING DATA AND UNEXPLAINED POWER GENERATION LOSSES
The report says that the reasons for some initial power generation losses aren’t known.
Some important data, in particular related to some of the generation trips that took place before the blackout, remain missing, according to the report.
The power plants owners say they don’t have such data, it added.
More broadly, “collecting complete, high-quality data proved very challenging for this investigation,” in particular from power operators in Spain, according to the report.
(Reporting by Kate Abnett and Pietro Lombardi, editing by Inti Landauro)
