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  • Investigation Starts with a Volt

    Kommersant, Russia
    May 27 2005

    Investigation Starts with a Volt


    // Prosecutor's Office begins questioning in the power company case


    Electroshock


    Anatoly Chubais, the chairman of RAO UES of Russia was questioned
    yesterday evening by officers of the Moscow Prosecutor's Office,
    which is investigating a criminal case of negligence and abuse of
    authority instituted in connection with the power blackout. Its
    consequences were mostly eliminated yesterday. The first theories as
    to why more than two million people were without electricity for
    almost 24 hours have appeared. Losses are being calculated. Chubais
    promised to compensate for damage if power consumers can prove it.


    The Causes

    The first theories as to the causes of the blackout appeared in RAO
    UES of Russia yesterday. Recall that a cascading failure of
    transformer substations, high-voltage lines, and power stations that
    affected Moscow and Moscow, Tula, Kaluga, and Ryazan regions occurred
    after an accident at Moscow's Chagino substation. The first,
    relatively small flare at Chagino occurred in the evening of May 23.
    The fire was quickly extinguished, but there was not enough time to
    eliminate the consequences. Exactly one day later, the substation
    again caught fire.

    At 21:17 on Tuesday, a 110-kV transformer, one of six installed in a
    substation with 500-, 220- and 110-kV high-voltage lines leading to
    it, exploded from overheating. The other transformers, wreaths of
    suspended bus line insulation, air ducts, and switches were either
    destroyed or severely damaged by fragments of this transformer,
    red-hot oil pouring out of it, and a fire that burst out. The
    automatic safeguard shut off the units still in one piece, and the
    entire substation shut down.

    As a result, as they explained at RAO UES of Russia, four units at
    Moscow's Cogeneration Plant 22 automatically shut off, since they
    were fed from Chagino through 220- and 110-kV overhead lines. Because
    of this, the power supply was disrupted in five Moscow districts -
    Marino, Lyublino, Pechatniki, Tekstilshchiki, and Kapotnya. Three
    large factories located in the Southeastern Administrative District
    also came to a standstill - the Moscow Oil Refinery, a cement plant,
    and a gypsum pasteboard factory.

    Power company officials contend that the situation at the time was
    very serious but not disastrous. `We could have left everything as
    is,' one of the company's technical specialists told Kommersant. Five
    Moscow districts and three factories were without electricity for
    several hours while repairs were made and there was a big outcry. We
    could have taken a risk and at best, have avoided a scandal, and at
    worst, ended up with a chain reaction. RAO's regional dispatch
    control center had to make a decision.'

    As they explained at the company, even in a critical situation, power
    company officials do not have the right to redistribute power flows
    or cut off power station units or consumers. The agent on duty at the
    regional dispatch control center, who reports to the main dispatch
    control center of the country's Unified Power System, does this for
    them. This person sits beside monitors and constantly views a map of
    the power flow distribution for the whole region, tracks the increase
    and decrease of loads at individual networks, and thus makes
    decisions in critical situations.

    Why the regional dispatcher decided to keep supplying blacked-out
    Southeast Moscow from reserve sources will be determined only after
    members of a specially formed committee study his log. He was
    probably just afraid of leaving the Moscow Oil Refinery without
    electricity, because deenergizing it posed a threat of an explosion
    or ecological disaster owing to the peculiarities of the oil refining
    process cycle. For these considerations, electricity was supplied the
    same night to the oil refinery and the residential districts
    together.

    `The oil refinery in Kapotnya is the largest consumer of power in the
    entire Southeastern District,' a RAO UES spokesman explained to
    Kommersant. `It uses electricity at a rate of about 600 million
    rubles a month.'

    As a result, by five o'clock on Wednesday morning, the refinery,
    which is normally supplied with 220 kV from a high-capacity
    substation, had been `hung up' on the sole remaining 110-kV line at
    Chagino, which was rather weak for it. In addition, other consumers
    put a load on this line all night as well. About ten o'clock in the
    morning, the usual morning peak of electricity consumption began, and
    the last transformer at Chagino burned out. The entire load taken on
    by the Chagino substation was redistributed in one throw to the six
    remaining high-voltage substations located around Moscow and
    connected to one another. Some of them were unable to sustain the
    load and also shut off after the automatic safeguard was triggered.
    This was the start of a system-wide crisis.

    The Explanations

    Anatoly Chubais, the chairman of RAO UES of Russia, appeared in
    public yesterday afternoon at a meeting of the CIS Electric Power
    Council, of which he is a member. First of all, Chubais announced
    that as of 16:00, Moscow Region's power supply had been fully
    restored. He added that RAO UES of Russia was prepared to compensate
    for economic damage caused to consumers if they could prove it.

    `All legislatively proven damage must be, and, of course, will be,
    compensated,' Chubais said.

    Meanwhile, in the opinion of Aleksandr Remezov, the head of the City
    of Moscow's department of fuel and energy utilities, RAO UES of
    Russia's subsidiary, AO Mosenergo, bears more responsibility to
    consumers than RAO UES itself. `Mosenergo is responsible for the
    malfunctioning of the substation. Thus, Mosenergo is the source of
    the blackout,' Remezov told Kommersant.

    Chubais gave his own theory of the cause of the blackout, noting that
    he had given his subordinates two weeks to make a detailed analysis
    of the situation. According to Chubais, there were two reasons: the
    accident at the substation and the fire, which caused the wires to
    sag, and as a consequence of this, the automatic safeguards cut them
    off. `If it had been only the substation, we could have coped with
    the situation. But this is only a preliminary assessment, of course,'
    Chubais noted. It is notable that Chubais never once mentioned that
    the Moscow substation was severely overloaded and in a deteriorated
    condition. But as Remezov said to Kommersant, `there was nothing
    technically unexpected in the accident that occurred. The Chagino
    substation is only a direct reflection of the technical condition of
    all of Moscow's susbstations.'

    Participants at the Power Council meeting supported Chubais in any
    way they could. `No country in the world is secured from similar
    blackouts, said Areg Galstian, Armenia's deputy minister of energy;
    and Evgeny Mishchuk, the secretary of the Power Council's executive
    committee, praised RAO personnel for their efficiency in eliminating
    the consequences of the blackout. Chubais agreed with him, saying
    that `Mosenergo, Tulaenergo, and the system operator performed their
    work responsibly, and I have no criticisms in this regard.'
    Meanwhile, as Chubais was speaking with journalists, they were
    waiting for him at the Moscow Prosecutor's Office, claiming that the
    possibility of postponing the examination of the RAO UES chairman
    scheduled for 16:00 had not been discussed. `There has been no
    discussion with Chubais on this matter,' said Sergey Marchenko, the
    press secretary of the Moscow Prosecutor's Office. Chubais himself
    said he couldn't make it to the examination before 19:00. He
    explained the delay by the need to hold a meeting at 18:30 of the
    operations staff responsible for eliminating the consequences of the
    power crisis. This was where he went after the end of the Power
    Council meeting, saying, `Prosecutor, you have my word. Rest assured
    that we'll find the time for mutual understanding without any
    problems.' In response to a question about the possibility of his
    dismissal, Chubais noted that the company's shareholders, which
    included the state, must make this decision.

    The Examination

    Chubais never appeared at the Moscow Prosecutor's Office yesterday.
    At 20:10, Marchenko came out to journalists awaiting Chubais' arrival
    and said that the examination had already started, but was being
    conducted at the Zamoskvoretskaia district prosecutor's office on
    Tatarskaia Street. Andrey Trapeznikov, a member of RAO UES of
    Russia's management board, soon came to the journalists who had moved
    there. He talked about what his boss had been doing that day and what
    measures the company was taking to eliminate the consequences of the
    blackout.

    `A committee has been set up at RAO to evaluate the actions of the
    management of various subdivisions and levels the day before the
    blackout, when the accident occurred, and during elimination of the
    consequences,' Trapeznikov said.

    When journalists asked him if there had been external influence at
    the substation, Trapeznikov said `I would suggest waiting for the
    results of the investigation.'

    `Do you think the criminal case could be connected with politics?',
    one of the journalists asked him.

    `No, I don't think so,' he said. `The Prosecutor's Office is acting
    according to the law.'

    Kommersant has learned that the case in which Chubais was being
    questioned falls within the jurisdiction of the economic crimes
    department of the Moscow Prosecutor's Office. In 1997, investigators
    from this same department conducted the so-called writers' case,
    which also involved Chubais [see the reference below]. But none of
    these investigators work in the department anymore. And according to
    Kommersant's information, the people who replaced them were planning
    to question Chubais about how operations at the Chagino substation
    were organize, who was responsible for what there, and how all the
    substation's units were checked. `We'll see how the talk goes; there
    will probably be questions during the conversation. Maybe Chubais
    won't admit his guilt and will say others were responsible for
    Chagino. Then there'll be more people to question, and maybe we'll
    find the first guilty parties,' they said in the department. The
    examination ended in late evening. Kommersant will report on the
    results in the next issue.





    Who Was Responsible for Power Blackouts in the Rest of the World

    On March 31, 1999, the municipal services committee of the State of
    California published the results of an investigation of a blackout of
    the electricity supply network in San Francisco on December 8, 1998,
    when 940,000 residents were left without power. A `breach of labor
    discipline' by Pacific Gas & Electric (PG&E) employees was given as
    the main cause. The company was obliged to improve the system of
    employee supervision. In May 1999, PG&E signed an agreement settling
    claims and paying $440,000 in fines to the government. PG&E paid
    another $7.3 million in compensation against lawsuits from companies
    and citizens.

    The power company Consolidated Edison, which serves New York, was
    named as the offender in a blackout on July 6, 1999, that left
    200,000 Manhattan residents without power for 19 hours. The company
    did not incur legal liability, but it paid nearly $2 million on more
    than a thousand lawsuits from companies, private individuals, and
    governments.

    On July 19, 2002, Geidar Aliev, the president of Azerbaijan,
    reprimanded Etibar Pirverdiev, the head of the state company
    Azerenerzhi, for an accident on July 13 that left Baku without
    electricity for a day. Aliev publicly accused Pirverdiev of being
    incompetent to manage the sphere entrusted to him. No other practical
    conclusions were made.

    On September 3, 2003, Mexican President Vicente Fox fired Energy
    Minister Ernesto Martinez after a power blackout on the Yucatan
    Peninsula the day before left 4.5 million Mexicans without power; the
    Cancun international resort was without power, and production came to
    a halt at fields producing 80 percent of Mexico's oil. In making his
    decision, the president did not even take into account the fact that
    the blackout was cause by a lightning strike at one of the
    susbstations.

    On April 5, 2004, an investigative committee published a report on
    the causes of the blackout in the United States and Canada on August
    14, 2003, which affected more than 50 million people. No specific
    culprits were named. In the committee's opinion, the disaster was the
    result of a number of factors, including errors, negligence, computer
    miscalculations, failure to observe safety requirement, poor
    coordination, and general aging of the North America's unified power
    system. In the committee's opinion, the main causes of the blackout
    were violations committed by FirstEnergy Corp. It was ordered to
    improve labor organization. Private individuals and a number of
    companies filed a group lawsuit against FirstEnergy, under which the
    company paid $17.9 million.

    The Chilean power supply system operators Transelec and CDEC-SIC paid
    a fine of $6 million for an accident at Chile's central electric
    power station that left 600,000 Santiago residents without power. It
    was discovered that the companies did not coordinate their actions
    when one of the generators shut down.

    --------------------------------------------------------------------------------


    Who Was Responsible for Power Blackouts in Russia

    A special committee of RAO UES investigated an accident in the Ural
    power system on September 9, 2000. As a result of a malfunction, the
    unit of the Beloyarsk Nuclear Power Plant automatically stopped, and
    electricity was cut off to some consumers in the region for an hour.
    Personnel at the Novo-Sverdlovsk Cogeneration Plant were the main
    culprits in the initial accident, while employees of the nuclear
    power plant were blamed for the emergency. Several people were
    disciplined.

    Based on the results of an investigation of a power outage in the
    city of Berezovsky in Kemerovo Region on September 6, 2001, a
    committee of Kuzbassenergo established that technological violations
    (resulting in a short circuit, wire burnout, oil ejection, and
    emergency cutoff) by electricians at Severokuzbassugol, not
    Kuzbassenergo employees, were responsible. The committee recommended
    the following as punishment measures: `recertify the guilty parties,
    organize unscheduled instruction and extra emergency training.'

    On October 5, 2003, a power unit of the Kashirskaya Regional Power
    Plant shut down when oil ignited. Automatic safeguards shut off the
    other five units. Nearly 20,000 residents of the town of Kashira-2
    were left without heat and hot water. The committee investigating the
    accident discovered that the cause of the damage to the power unit
    was a defect in the generator. One of the power plant's managers was
    pensioned off.

    There was an active investigation of a power blackout at the Nizhny
    Novgorod Airport on the night of November 15, 2005. A committee of
    the Ministry of Transport and the Federal Air Transport Agency
    arrived to conduct it. Regional leaders declared loudly that they
    intended to seek the harshest possible measures against the
    offenders. The Nizhny Novogorod Region Prosecutor's Office even
    instituted a case of administrative infringement under Article 9.11
    of the Administrative Code of the RF (violation of the regulations
    for operating electrical installations). However, the case was closed
    for lack of serious consequences and major damage. Three airport
    electricians got off with fines and reprimands.
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