Brazil smart grid conference
punctuated with massive outage
November 13, 2009
Smart grid players attending the Smart Grid Latin America Forum in Brazil Monday and Tuesday showed strong interest in modernizing the power grid -- and then experienced a prolonged blackout Tuesday evening that rivaled the 2003 blackout in the Northeastern US, Galvin Electricity Initiative Executive Director Kurt Yeager told us yesterday in a phone call from São Paulo. Power stopped flowing to the Southern half of Brazil and to all of Paraguay, he added. In São Paulo, it was restored after about two hours. While there was, as of last night in Brazil, no official diagnosis of the blackout's cause, Yeager suspected a problem with a key generator or problems with the transmission system. Hackers were rumored to be involved, he added. “It's indicative of a system that is analog controlled,” he said. “It might have [otherwise] been a relatively small problem, but it expanded over the whole southern half of country -- like our blackout in 2003 [spread over a wide area]. It was likely a small source issue, but because of electromechanical control it expanded much more broadly.” About 125 “high-level” people had gathered in São Paulo this week for the smart grid conference, Yeager reported, noting that representatives from EPRI, GE, IBM, GE, Kema, MIT and Siemens joined in discussions with leaders of power firms, regulators and some interoperability experts. Yeager gave the keynote address. It focused on a “comprehensive smart grid transformation, the importance of transforming policies and so forth,” he said, noting that Brazil has a “very centralized system.” Yeager, of course, spoke about bringing in DG and renewable energy sources. Many conference attendees approached Yeager after his talk, some expressing support for his assertion that “the distribution system is the key and real-time price signals are important,” he said. The smart grid in Brazil may lead to more power system efficiency -- and reliability -- but utilities are interested in modernization principally because they want to sell more power and cost is currently “a big issue,” Yeager noted. Electrification is “reasonably broad” in Brazil, but the per-capita use of power there is a fraction of the per-capita use Americans rack up, he added, in part because homes in South America are not stocked with power-hungry devices.
© 2010 MMI Inc.
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