Today’s LiveWire Spotlight examines three “teachable moments” where a latent failure mechanism in a situational awareness system manifested itself unexpectedly and resulted in a threat to Bulk Electric System reliability. The Lessons Learned look at actual events that help the industry understand the effect that subsystem defects may have on Real-time situational awareness, even if the EMS and SCADA are functioning perfectly.
The loss of situational awareness for any reason is one of NERC’s top reliability concerns. Severe penalties may be levied if an electric system outage occurs, and it is found that an Operator did not act upon these Lessons Learned.