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Fending Off Forced Power Plant Outages
The changing profile of the power system has added new stressors on conventional power generation and may have raised the potential for forced outages. Addressing them requires a closer look at traditional and emerging risks.
Hidden within the North American Electric Reliability Corp.’s (NERC’s) July–released 2020
State of Reliability report was an underreported bright spot: The annual Weighted-Equivalent Generation Forced Outage Rate (WEFOR) for 2019 stood at 6.97%, falling below the five-year average of 7.16% for the first time since 2015.
“We lived in an electric world. We relied on it for everything. And then the power went out.” Those words were part of the intro of the 2012 TV series
Revolution, which presented a hypothetical scenario of what would the modern world be like if electricity suddenly disappeared. The show lasted for two seasons, and then it went out like a light largely forgotten.
But I remembered
Revolution on Dec. 28, when more than 10 million Mexicans, almost 8 percent of the country’s total population, experienced a world without electricity firsthand as a massive blackout occurred in different cities throughout the country. It lasted almost two hours, long enough for citizens to experience disruptions to subway services, dangerous roads because of the lack of working streetlights, interruptions to water service, and a general disconnection from all existing telecommunications’ networks. (Luckily, I wasn’t in one of the affected areas.) Since then, the country has found itself in the