Today’s LiveWire Spotlight article examines NERC’s analysis of an oscillation event that impacted the entire Eastern Interconnection on January 11, 2019 for about eighteen minutes. The incident induced 0.25 Hertz power swings reaching an amplitude of 200 MW in Florida and about 50 MW in New England – triggering alarms/alerts at nearly every Control Center in 18 states.
The monitoring and analysis of forced oscillations are increasingly becoming 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 the lessons learned from this incident.