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3 October 2003 - The Union for the Co-ordination of Electricity Transmission (UCTE), the association of transmission system operators in continental Europe, said Thursday it is to set up a Committee to investigate the Italian blackout. The committee will comprise all 5 directly involved Transmission System Operators (TSOs) in Italy, Switzerland, France, Austria, Slovenia as well as UCTE experts from non-involved TSOs.
French grid operator RTE said on Thursday it has asked UCTE to set up an international commission of inquiry to look into Sunday's blackout
All concerned parties committed themselves to provide the necessary data, to consolidate the sequence of events and to evaluate them with regard to existing reliability rules - in a spirit of full transparency.
"After first analyses performed in the individual systems, such a common in-depth investigation is absolutely necessary since in an interconnected system each action immediately impacts the other systems" said UCTE President Martin Fuchs.
A first interim report will be delivered on 20 October. Before this interim report is available, the UCTE said that further comments on possible causes of this event would be premature.
In a second investigation step UCTE will reassess its relevant operational rules. In this context, especially the changes in operational patterns due to the liberalized European electricity market will also be taken into account.
The blackout in the early hours of on September 28 that plunged millions of Italians into darkness, prompted French, Italian, Swiss and Austrian grid operators to point their fingers at each other for the chaos.
"Contradictory information from actors directly concerned, in particular the Swiss Company Etrans, did not make the reasons for this major incident very comprehensible," RTE said in a statement.
"Based on the technical data available, there is an urgent need to clarify the exact chain of responsibilities concerning the event, which triggered the blackout," it added. RTE has also asked UCTE to look into communication between the grid operators concerned following the outage.
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