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25 November, 2003 - An official Swiss government investigation said Switzerland must accept some responsibility for Italy's nationwide power outage last September, but said that blame also lay with the lack of European rules governing the electricity supply market.
The Swiss Federal Department of Energy report warned that without effective regulation, future blackouts were inevitable.
It reiterated claims by the Swiss grid operator ETRANS that the Italian operator should have responded quicker to a Swiss request to decrease imports after a power line shorted out in Switzerland during a storm. A second Swiss power line went down 30 minutes later, and the ensuing chain reaction plunged nearly all of Italy into darkness for up to 18 h.
An investigation by the Union for the Coordination of Transmission of Electricity, which groups almost three dozen European operators, last month faulted the Swiss for failing to act with sufficient urgency or to introduce adequate countermeasures.
The Swiss government report countered that this was only the superficial reason.
"The underlying causes ... are the unresolved conflict between the trading interests of the involved countries and operators, and the technical and legal requirements for safe and reliable operation of the networks," it said.
There are plans to introduce new EU-wide standards on cross-border electricity trading next July. Switzerland is not a member of the EU, although usually conforms to EU technical norms.
"It will only be possible to prevent blackouts of the kinds that occurred on September 28 if these regulations are implemented in an effective manner throughout Europe," said the report, which recommended that comprehensive legislation governing the electricity industry should be rushed through the Swiss parliament.
The report said that Switzerland, which is a major energy exporter to Italy, should have a "right of co-determination together with the regulators of Italy and France."
On the night in question, Switzerland was supplying 550 MW more power to Italy than had been agreed, while the other major provider, France, was supplying 438 MW less than agreed.
The blackout - which left 55 million Italians without power - happened after a wind-blown tree shorted the Mettlen-Lavorgo line in Switzerland at 3:01 a.m. Due to high loads on remaining lines, an automatic device intended to protect the line blocked attempts to bring it back in service.
The ETRANS centre called the Italian grid operator GRTN's control centre in Rome at 3:11 a.m. to ask it to decrease imports by 300 MW to relieve the overload in Switzerland. The Italians complied within 10 minutes. However, at 3:25 a.m., a second Swiss power line shorted because of the storms, tripping all interconnectors toward Italy and subsequently isolated Italy, which is highly dependent on imports, from the European network.
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