Control centers and their role in the blackout

Summary form only given. Although digital control centers have become more sophisticated since their revolutionary introduction in the 60s, their application and use have varied according to the individual tastes rather than a coordinated agreement on the functionality to ensure reliable operation. This was dramatically illustrated during the minutes before the August 14, 2003 blackout when the operators at the first energy control center were blissfully ignorant that not only were their own system in jeopardy but was about to shut out the lights for 50 million people. Moreover, after the blackout the post-mortem was made particularly difficult when it became clear that the data preserved at the many control centers within the blackout area could not be easily matched to determine what happened. In fact, even the task of aligning the data in time sequence was manual and arduous (and not very accurate). Much has been said about making reliability standards mandatory, and, by and large, reliability standards already exist for planning and operating the power grid. Unfortunately, these standards do not cover monitoring and control in any detail (with the notable exception of frequency control), perhaps because of the mistaken assumption that only redundancies in transmission and generation provides reliability. However, closer monitoring and better control of the grid also provides reliability because it enables the operation of the grid even closer to its limits.