The Colombian 2007 black out

On April 26th, 2007, at 9:58 a.m., a fault on the Colombian power system caused by maintenance in the 230 kV Torca Bus gave origin to black out. The consequent loss of those important branches caused cascading outages of tie lines that turned out in cascade events that concluded in an electrical separation with Ecuador, causing many economical losses for the country. The Colombian power system frequency suffered a mayor imbalance that leaded to a disoperation of the automatic load shedding system and this resulted out in the Colombian blackout. This paper provides a short description of the power system analysis operation and of the main events that triggered the blackout, identifying some of the main causes that could lead to those events.