Seminar on Large Power System Failures

Presentations

ARE YOU READY FOR THE NEXT BLACKOUT? 
LEARNING THE MANAGEMENT LESSONS

Held at the Army and Navy Club,
36-39 Pall Mall, London SW1Y 5JN, United Kingdom
on 2 October 2006

What is the greatest technological advance of the past 100 years? That was the question considered a few years ago by America's National Academy of Engineering. The experts picked an achievement without which most of our modern inventions would be useless: North America's power grid.

On 14 August 2003 a large section of this grid failed leaving 50m people in the US and Canada without power. And not just without power; in Cleveland pumping stations shut down leaving people without water; in Toronto subways were out of action for several days. Then it happened in Europe. In quick succession major power outages occurred in Southern Sweden and in Italy.

Why did these failures occur? Are there useful lessons, which can be learned from the resulting investigations? All these failures were the subject of intensive investigations. The technical issues are fully understood and have been widely debated in a number of expert forums. But what about the management issues?  WEC has carried out some preliminary research into these issues and has assembled a panel of distinguished speakers from both the US and Europe who will share their views on this important topic, including:

Nick Winser, Group Director UK and US Transmission operations, National Grid;
William F. Hederman, Jr., (USA) formerly Director Office of Market Oversight and Investigations at FERC;
Georges de Montravel, Head of International Affairs, RTE;
Luca d’Agnese, Director Italian Operations, TERNA (former CEO, GRTN);
Richard Sergel, President and CEO, NERC;
Guido Bortoni, Director, Regulatory Authority in Italy;
Odd Håkon Hoelsæter, CEO Statnett and Chairman Nord Pool;
Kieran O’Brien, Chair of the WEC Taskforce, former CEO of EirGrid
G.A. Maas, Chairman of the Steering Committee of UCTE

For further information the programme is available for download (PDF)

Speaker presentations can be downloaded by clicking on their name in the above list.

The full session summary is also available for download (PDF)