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.
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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.