You are currently browsing the Gas & Diesel Generators weblog archives for the day 26. February 2008.
26. February 2008 by admin.
As many as 3 million people are affected, the state says.
The Nuclear Regulatory Commission said that the two Florida Power & Light nuclear reactors at its Turkey Point power plant 30 miles south of Miami automatically shut down. Two other power plants farther north, the Crystal River reactor and St. Lucie twin reactors, in the state continued to operate, although officials at those two facilities noticed the grid disturbance.
The outage was caused by a transmission substation that failed, said Todd Brown, a spokesman with the state Public Service Commission, which regulates investor-owned utilities in Florida. The substation was fed with electricity generated by the nuclear-powered Turkey Point plant owned by Florida Power & Light.
Once the substation stopped working, the two nuclear units at Turkey Point automatically shut down, Brown said. “If there is anything good to come of this, it is that the system worked the way it was supposed to,” Brown said.
The outages have no connection to terrorism, Homeland Security Department spokeswoman Laura Keehner said.
The two Turkey Point units, opened in 1972 and 1973, generate 1,400 megawatts of electricy, enough power to supply the annual needs of more than 450,000 houses. The units are on Biscayne Bay, 24 miles south of Miami, just east of Homestead.
“There are no safety concerns. The reactors shut down as designed,” said Kenneth Clark, a spokesman at the NRC regional office in Atlanta in a telephone interview.
He said both reactors continued to have offsite electric power. He said two coal-burning power plants at Turkey Point also shut down.
Florida’s electric network lost nearly 10 percent of its output thanks to the blown substation in South Florida, said Sarah Rogers, president of the Florida Reliability Coordinating Council, a Tampa association that tracks power production in the state.
That decrease came during a time of reduced consumption because of mild weather, reducing the possibility of more extensive outages, she said.
Utilities throughout the state were cleared to increase production and bring back generating units that tripped off by 3 p.m. The only company experiencing issues was Florida Power & Light, which had to make up for the two nuclear units that remain off line because of the bad substation that triggered the statewide outage.
FP&L is handicapped, Rogers said, because a number of large utility lines feeding its system are not in use because of routine maintenance.
There are reports of outages in Orange, Lake, Seminole, Volusia and Brevard counties, as well as both coasts from Miami to Jacksonville and Naples to
The power outage in South Florida rippled across Florida as a brownout, or drop in power flowing through the grid that connects all utilities.
The State Emergency Operations Center in Tallahassee has activated to a Level 2, partial activation, in response to the current power outage in the state. Currently there are approximately 3 million persons without power, state officials said.
Locally, schools, businesses and intersections are without power this afternoon.
That left 11,438 customers, mostly residential, without power for between two and 20 minutes, Becht said. The utility has about 250,000 customers.
Posted in USA News, News | Print | 1 Comment »
26. February 2008 by admin.
HOUSTON, Feb 26 (Reuters) - A widespread electric blackout affecting South Florida has been controlled and power is being restored, a spokeswoman for an agency that oversees the high-voltage network of transmission lines said on Tuesday afternoon.
Linda Campbell of the Florida Reliability Coordinating Council said preliminary reports showed that a problem at a substation in Dade County led to the loss of a transmission line and the shutdown of power plants owned by Florida Power & Light, a unit of FPL Group.
About 2,500 megawatts of generation was lost, she said, triggering an emergency program designed to cut power consumption to keep the overall electric system in balance.
“The load-shedding program worked,” Campbell said.
Power is now being restored slowly by utilities across the state, she said.
Posted in USA News, News | Print | No Comments »
26. February 2008 by admin.
Power outages are cascading through many parts of South Florida, with Florida Power & Light and others reporting blackouts in portions of Miami, Doral, Westchester, Pembroke Pines, Miramar and Boca Raton.
Many traffic lights are not working and nine accidents were reported in Miami-Dade County between 1:04 p.m. and 1:26 p.m. Police agencies were dispatching officers to as many intersections as possible.
The lights flickered off at several South Florida hospitals, which had to switch to generator power.
“We had a blip here and the generators kicked in immediately,” Jackson Memorial Hospital spokeswoman Lorraine Nelson said.
Mount Sinai Medical Center in Miami Beach and Baptist Hospital in Southwest Miami-Dade reported similar situations.
A spokeswoman for FPL said the company was investigating the extent and cause of the problem.
In one part of western Pembroke Pines, the outage began about 1:15 p.m., but service was restored within about 10 minutes.
The service failures came during an unusually warm February day in South Florida, with temperatures reaching near-record highs. At 1 p.m, Miami and West Palm Beach reported a reading of 84 degrees; it was 83 degrees in Fort Lauderdale.
Some air conditioning companies reported summer-like levels of service calls.
Posted in USA News, News | Print | No Comments »