Spanish
Santo Domingo,.- The Organismo Coordinador del Sistema Eléctrico Nacional Interconectado (OC-SENI) established the acceleration of a set of corrective actions and operational improvements that are already in execution or in the process of implementation by the different agents of the system, as part of the report on the general blackout registered on February 23rd.
Among the main measures are the verification and adjustment of protection systems in transmission lines, installation of differential busbar protections in substations, as well as the optimization of operational controls in some generation units to ensure a more robust response to system variations.You may be interested in: PRD deputy claims blackouts show inefficiency and lack of planning in the electrical system
In addition, the national program for the modernization of protection and operation of substations in a double-bus scheme will continue to be accelerated, a process that has been underway for two years and that seeks to increase the resilience of the electrical system in the face of contingencies. The report also recommends leveraging emerging technologies, such as battery energy storage systems, to support the system's ancillary services, particularly in frequency regulation and in system recovery processes in contingency scenarios. He also announced the creation of a monitoring committee for the defined measures, which must meet on the third Wednesday of each month, to follow up on the defined measures, as well as the implementation of the corrections within the times stipulated in the report. The committee will be comprised of the Ministry of Energy and Mines, the Superintendency of Electricity, the Coordinating Body, the Dominican Electric Transmission Company (ETED), as well as the distribution companies Edenorte, Edesur and EDE Este, in addition to private and state generators such as Punta Catalina and Egehid. According to the report, at the time of the event the electrical system was operating under normal conditions, with 2,836.83 megawatts (MW) of synchronized generation and a supplied demand of 2,667.05 MW, which represented an operational reserve of 169.78 MW, equivalent to 6.4%, with the system frequency within the established parameters. The technical analysis determined that the incident occurred at 10:50:33 in the morning, with a fault in the 138 kV Hainamosa-Villa Duarte transmission line, which caused variations in the system frequency and the activation of automatic protection mechanisms. Subsequently, outages of some generation units were recorded, which contributed to the loss of voltage in the system. However, the report highlights that the protection and control systems installed in recent years acted correctly, allowing the fault to be cleared and limiting the scope of the event, which facilitated the progressive recovery of the service without permanent damage to the assets of the electrical system being recorded.
