Blackout and Black Start Analysis for Improved Power System Resilience: The African Experience

The subtle but yet impactful effect of climate change has led to extreme weather conditions which has culminated to many natural disasters. Such events, depending on its severity would usually trigger a partial or complete power system blackout with significant impact on social, political and economic activities. Restoring the system back to normal is usually achieved either using the top-down or bottom-up approach which is described as black start. Emerging research has indicated that distributed energy resources (DERs) and remote controllable switches (RCSs) can be deployed for black start restoration (BSR) for distribution systems and microgrids. With these developments comes the opportunity to develop a restoration strategy which would further enhance the resilience of the power system. In view of this, an analysis of some recent power system blackout events in Africa was carried out with the aim of proposing robust black start restoration strategy that would enhance operational resilience. Besides this, the review of some of the blackout events in selected African countries aims to fill the missing knowledge gap in this area resulting from poor data management system which has made access to such information to be quite a daunting task.