Comision Federal de Electricidad issued the following announcement on Dec. 28.
The operation output of two transmission lines between the Lajas and Güémez substations in 400 thousand volts due to oscillations in the National Interconnected System, caused the frequency of the System to increase by 61.8 hertz and 16 power plants went out of operation, 1,714 MW of photovoltaic and 877 MW of wind, for an amount of 9,262 megawatts.
When the balance-load-generation was affected, the protection system was activated and avoided a generalized blackout, where only the low frequency was decreased to 58.9 hertz, with an impact of 8,696 megawatts of load throughout the country or 26% of the energy that was consumed at that time, explained Carlos Meléndez, general director of the National Center for Energy Control (CENACE) in a press conference.
This imbalance in the National Interconnected System, which began at 2:36 p.m. (center), affected 10.3 million users -19% of total users- of the Federal Electricity Commission (CFE), mainly in the central regions, west and northeast of the country.
Manuel Bartlett, general director of the CFE, specified that the causes that caused the imbalance in the System will be reported and will be defined from a simulation model that will determine how many intermittent and conventional they generated under today's operating conditions.
Noé Peña Silva, CFE's corporate director of Transmission, explained that during the departure of two lines between Ciudad Victoria, Tamaulipas and Linares, Nuevo León, the departure of a line between Mazatlán, Sinaloa and Tepic, Nayarit, was also presented. and another line between Durango and Fresnillo, Zacatecas, due to instability.
The problem, Peña Silva indicated, could have originated between Tamaulipas and Nuevo León, since by producing a step; that is to say, a variation, the generation connected to the System registered rises and falls that activated protection systems against variations to give stability.
For his part, Guillermo Nevárez Elizondo, CFE's Corporate Director of Distribution, clarified that at no time was the electricity supply in clinics, hospitals and drinking water systems affected.
The restoration of the electricity supply in these cases is subject to the instructions of CENACE, which must guarantee the security of the National Electric System.
The reset started at 2:33 p.m. and was carried out as follows:
3:30 pm 4.7 million users were restored (45% complete).
16:15 hours 10 million users were restored (97% complete).
16:30 hours the service was restored to 100% of the affected users.
We will continue working in coordination with CENACE to identify the cause of the low frequency and minimize the risk of events of this nature repeating.
Original source can be found here.
Source: Comision Federal de Electricidad
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