List of historical power outages

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The list of historical power outages includes events in which there was a large-scale power outage due to an unintentional interruption of the supply of electrical energy .

Major historical blackouts

date region incident
0November 9, 1965 Northeast USA

During the power failure in North America in November 1965 in the northeastern United States and in many parts of Canada , the power went out on November 9, 1965 at 5:45 p.m. About 30 million people were affected. Many feared during the Cold War that nuclear war was the cause. The trigger, a defective power relay in Ontario (Canada), was only found six days later .

July 13, 1977 New York City In New York City and areas of Westchester County north of New York, power went out during the night due to lightning strikes. Looting and unrest broke out, 3800 people were arrested and the fire brigade had to put out over 1000 fires.
December 30, 1978 - January 3, 1979 /
February 13, 1979 - February 18, 1979 		Northern Germany During the snow disaster in northern Germany in 1978, many electricity pylons buckled; In the GDR, the supply of brown coal to the power stations collapsed.
2000 California In California , there were regular power cuts due to energy shortages. In 2000 in particular , there were more power outages due to insufficient power generation capacity. It was only after the Enron bankruptcy in 2003 that it became known that some operators had created the shortage artificially in order to manipulate market prices.
August 14, 2003 Northeast US and parts of Canada
Silhouette of Toronto during the blackout

On August 14, 2003, there was a large-scale power outage in the northeastern United States and parts of Canada . The failure is the result of market fragmentation and a lack of investment after the deregulation of the electricity market. Decades-old networks with poor maintenance could no longer cope with the constantly increasing load. A collapse had been predicted for years.

September 24, 2003 Sweden The power went out in southern Sweden and Denmark . 3.5 million people had no electricity for hours. There were many accidents as a result of failed traffic lights . The railways stood still. Phones stopped working. This is said to have been caused by a storm or repair work at the Swedish nuclear power plant in Oskarshamn . About a tenth of Swedish electricity is produced there.
September 28, 2003 Italy A power outage occurred in Italy and Vatican City on September 28, 2003, 3:30 a.m. This was caused by the interruption of two power lines from France and Switzerland after an arc between a rock and conducting at the Lukmanier line on territory of the municipality Ingenbohl . Since it happened on the weekend and in the middle of the night, there were no major incidents. The White Night celebration - a cultural night with opera performances and concerts in Rome  - ended suddenly when the lights went out everywhere.
July 12, 2004 Athens In Athens and the surrounding area, there was an hour-long power outage just under a month before the Olympic Games .
The cause of the power failure in Athens was a so-called voltage collapse. In the event of a voltage collapse, the electrical voltage in the electrical network is reduced due to insufficient reactive power feed . Since the voltages in the subordinate distribution networks are usually automatically regulated, as the load increases, they withdraw reactive power from the higher-level network that can no longer be covered. The voltage collapses and the power supply is interrupted. In July 2004 there were enough active power reserves, but the reactive power capacities were not sufficient.
The reason for this development is likely to be the increasing electrical load due to increasing air conditioning. Small air conditioning systems are characterized by the fact that they have a high demand for reactive power, an effect that also favored the "blackout" in the USA in August 2003.
June 22, 2005 Switzerland The entire railway network of the Swiss Federal Railways ( SBB) was completely paralyzed for the first time at 5:35 pm due to a 132 kV transmission line that was automatically switched off due to overload. Overload occurred because two due to construction work on the three connections between the power plants in the Alps and Central Switzerland simultaneously motorway A2 were out of order. The transmission capacity of the remaining third line was estimated to be 30 MW too high due to incorrect information in the system documentation, so that the protective devices switched off the line, although reserve capacity was assumed. The high-voltage network was thus divided into two parts: While the power plants in the south were switched off due to a lack of load, the rest of Switzerland was missing around 200 MW. Even the two lines from Germany could not compensate for the lack of power, so that gradually the remaining power plants shut down due to overload. 200,000 commuters were stuck in around 1,500 trains and had to endure the high summer temperatures without air conditioning. The power supply could be restored after three hours.
When investigating the incident, it turned out that one reason for the large-scale failure was incorrect performance management : If some smaller areas had been switched off early on, supply and demand could have been brought back into line and the very large failure could have been avoided can.
November 25, 2005 Münsterland

After heavy snowfall, one of the largest power outages in the history of the Federal Republic occurred in the north of North Rhine-Westphalia and in parts of south-west Lower Saxony . The western Münsterland with the districts of Borken , Coesfeld and Steinfurt was particularly affected . Of around 250,000 affected people, many were completely without electricity for up to three days, individual farmsteads and districts for five days until they could be supplied with emergency power generators or temporarily connected to the power grid. First estimates by the IHK North-Westphalia assumed an economic loss of 100 million euros. The cause of the power failure were buckled power poles and cracked or very low-hanging high-voltage lines . The very wet snow settled on the pipes exceptionally well and covered them with an ice sheet, the diameter of which was many times the diameter of the pipes. In addition, there was strong wind , which caused them to vibrate due to the enlarged area exposed to wind . Many masts and cables could not withstand the heavy weight of the snow and the vibrations that occurred and buckled or tore.

0November 4, 2006 Europe

At 10:09 p.m. there was a major power outage in Europe. Parts of Germany, France, Belgium, Italy, Austria, Spain were sometimes without electricity for up to 120 minutes, and the effects were even noticeable in Morocco.
The trigger was the scheduled temporary shutdown of a 380 kV high-voltage line operated by E.ON near Weener on the evening of November 4, 2006 for the disembarkation of the Norwegian Pearl , a cruise ship built at the Meyer Werft in Papenburg .

February 26, 2008 Florida The power supply in the greater Miami area collapsed due to an incident in a substation belonging to the US utility Florida Power & Light in the US state of Florida. Three of the blocks of the Turkey Point power plant are connected via the affected substation . The two nuclear reactors were automatically shut down due to the load shedding . As a result of the incident, eight other power plants in Florida with a total capacity of 3.4 GW failed and over 3 million people were without electrical power supply.
0September 8, 2011 California , Arizona and Mexico A breakdown in a 500-kilovolt line between California and Arizona resulted in a power outage in California, Arizona and northern Mexico, which affected 1.4 million households and 5.7 million people.
July 31, 2012 India The largest power outage in human history to date affected over 600 million people in northern and eastern India. This happened due to an overload of the power grid in 20 of 28 Indian states . The day before, large areas of the electricity grid in these regions collapsed for several hours, affecting around 300 million people.
March 31, 2015 Turkey Due to strong fluctuations due to the failure of several power plants in the country's electricity network, the network connection with the European network was disconnected. As a result, 80 of the country's 81 provinces could no longer be supplied with electrical energy. 76 million people were left without electricity for nine hours.
Early March 2019 Venezuela Nationwide, for about a week. The Maduro government spoke of an attack on the Guri hydropower plant, which provides 80% of the country's electricity, but the opposition said it was poorly maintained, corrupted and mismanaged, and 20 people died in hospitals because equipment failed due to the blackout.

A major power outage in large parts of the country followed in April 2019. A nationwide power outage occurred on July 22, 2019 (local time).

June 16, 2019

Argentina , Uruguay An interruption in the power supply, presumably due to storms, caused a failure in the joint network of Argentina and Uruguay. Adjacent areas of Brazil , Chile and Paraguay were affected. The disturbance began on Sunday around 7:07 a.m. local time and coincided with the beginning of winter in the southern hemisphere. The main energy producers in the interconnected network of both countries are the Salto Grande and Yacyretá dams . Over 47 million people were affected by the electricity blackout, which in addition to private households shut down public life. Only parts of the island archipelago of Tierra del Fuego remained unaffected. The national effects on the water supply were problematic. In the afternoon, the power supply was restored in some cities and regions. According to the energy supplier Edesur, the failure of the Argentine network is due to an electricity transmission connection between the Yacyretá and Salto Grande power plants in the Argentine Litoral region (along the eastern border with Uruguay). On June 17th, the power supply was largely restored.
13th July 2019 New York City

The blackout began Sunday around 7 p.m. local time and was repaired around midnight. Mainly Midtown Manhattan and the Upper West Side were affected. Around 70,000 people were affected, and part of the subway network was at a standstill.

29th September 2019 Tenerife With an explosion in the Granadilla di Abona substation at lunchtime, all of the island's 900,000 residents lost their electricity. After hours in the evening, at least the capital region around Santa Cruz was supplied again (approx. 65% of the failed network area).
August 17, 2020, around 11.45 a.m. local time Sri Lanka Because of a breakdown in an important power plant near the capital Colombo.
August 25, 2020, early local time Syria The explosion (on) a gas pipeline caused a pressure drop, which caused a power plant to fail and for a short time the power went out across the country.

Other large-scale disturbances

date region incident
Beginning of 2018 all of Europe

The European electricity companies had slightly lowered the network frequency to below 50 Hz over the long term, because they could only partially compensate for a lower output on the part of electricity companies from Kosovo and Serbia. Throughout Europe, this meant that simple device clocks, for example from the microwave or stove, were increasingly "slowing down" - from January to March 2018, around 6 minutes of "slowing down" added up. Since the frequency decrease was only slight, it could only be noticed by adding up in this way.

See also

Individual evidence

  1. ↑ UCTE - Final Report of the Investigation Committee on the September 28, 2003 Blackout in Italy (PDF)
  2. ↑ SBB - Report on the electricity failure of June 22, 2005. ( PDF  ( page no longer available , search in web archives )  Info: The link was automatically marked as defective. Please check the link according to the instructions and then remove this notice. )@1@ 2Template: Dead Link / www.sbb.ch  
  3. ↑ The blackout at SBB . In: Eisenbahn-Revue International , Issue 8–9 / 2005, pp. 373–379.
  4. ↑ UCTE (2007): Final Report - System Disturbance on November 4, 2006 ( PDF )
  5. ↑ FPL announces preliminary findings of outage investigation; February 29, 2008. (No longer available online.) Florida Power & Light Company, archived from the original on July 22, 2010 ; accessed on January 31, 2010 (English). Info: The archive link was inserted automatically and has not yet been checked. Please check the original and archive link according to the instructions and then remove this notice. @1@ 2Template: Webachiv / IABot / www.fpl.com
  6. ↑ Spiegel .de: Massive power failure hits millions of Americans
  7. ↑ 600 million people in India without electricity. Archived from the original ; Retrieved July 31, 2012 .
  8. ↑ Blackout in Turkey: Was a chain of mistakes responsible? In: German Turkish News . April 3, 2015 ( deutsch-tuerkische-nachrichten.de [accessed on February 28, 2018]).
  9. ↑ Another large-scale power failure in Venezuela . In: orf.at . July 23, 2019 ( orf.at [accessed July 23, 2019]).
  10. ↑ SDA: 48 million people without electricity. Huge blackout in Argentina and Uruguay . News from June 16, 2019 on www.blick.ch
  11. ↑ Tjerk Brühwiller, Carl Moses: Massive power cut in South America . News from June 16, 2019 on www.faz.net
  12. ↑ Tom Phillips: Millions across South America hit by massive power cut . News from June 16, 2019 on www.theguardian.com (English)
  13. ↑ Normalización del servicio. June 16, 2019, accessed June 17, 2019 (Spanish).
  14. ↑ https://www.zeit.de/gesellschaft/zeitgeschehen/2019-06/blackout-argentinien-uruguay-stromausfall-mauricio-macri
  15. ↑ Exactly on the anniversary of the blackout: Manhattan after a power failure in the dark orf.at, July 14, 2019, accessed July 14, 2019.
  16. ↑ tagesschau.de Power outage Tenerife 09/2019
  17. ↑ Power failure throughout Sri Lanka orf.at, August 17, 2020
  18. ↑ [ https://orf.at/#/stories/3178619/ Gas pipeline exploded in Syria: Nationwide power failure] orf.at, August 24, 2020
  19. ↑ Subsequent clocks winter 2017/2018: