Today’s LiveWire Spotlight evaluates NERC’s recent posting of a Lesson Learned regarding an electric system incident resulting from an Automatic Generation Dispatcher failure – affecting an entire Control Area in the process. The event illustrates the growing dependency of electric system operators on computer systems to monitor performance and to automatically act when a threatening condition arises.
Wide-area electric system threats that result from the failure of sophisticated computerized systems such as Automatic Generation Dispatchers are an emerging reliability concern. NERC is evaluating the need for more standards on the topic.