Analysis of the blackout in Europe on November 4, 2006

On November 4, 2006 the Europe interconnected grid experienced a serious incident originating from the disconnection of a 380-kV-line in the North German grid. The interconnection lines were tripped due to overload by the disconnection and the bad coordination between the system operators. The cascading outages of the lines caused the European interconnected network splitting into three islands with different frequencies. In order to re-establish the balance between generation and load, the automatic load shedding procedures were performed, and this resulted in the blackout. The paper provides a short description of the operating conditions before the blackout and explains the major events that occurred as the blackout initiated and evolved, focusing also on the restoration. It identifies some of the main causes that resulted in the blackout. In addition, issues related to the Europe power grid and recommendations to prevent the blackout are discussed.