General blackout in Italy Sunday September 28, 2003, h. 03:28:00

On September 28, 2003 the Italian power system experienced an electric power blackout. The outage affected an area with an estimated 60 million people and load variation in the continental grid from about 24000 MW at the early hours of the day, up to 50000 MW during the central part of the day. The event which caused the blackout began at 3:01:00 am and proceeded up to 3:28:00. Power was restored after three hours in the North area and during the same day in the large part of Italy. The energy not delivered amounts to 180GWh. The paper explains the major events that occurred as the blackout initiated and evolved and identifies the technical causes characterising the different phases of the process, which led to the general blackout. It lists the sequence of the interconnection loss and reconstructs the dynamic phases of unstable phenomena leading to the separation from Europe. The subsequent slow death throes of the separated Italian network with a cascade of generator tripping is also described up to final blackout.