Power system blackouts: lessons learned

In August 2003, large areas of the Midwest and Northeast United States and Ontario, Canada, experienced an electric power blackout. The outage affected 50 million people and about 62000 megawatts (MW) of electric load. The final report on the August 14, 2003 blackout by the US-Canada Power System Outage Task Force makes clear that this blackout could have been prevented! Similar events, but in a lesser extent, happened in Europe at about the same time. Some other major outages had occurred around the globe prior to the great blackout of 2003. What are the lessons learned from these blackouts? This paper will partially address this question. It will also explore the relevance of these lessons to the electric power network in Australia.