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29 February 2008 -- Florida Power & Light Co. said the results of the investigation so far into the February 26 outage indicate that human error was the primary factor immediately responsible for the event, which began at 1:08 p.m. Eastern Time.
A field engineer was diagnosing a switch that had malfunctioned at FPL's Flagami substation in west Miami, the company said. Without authorization, the engineer disabled two levels of relay protection. This was done contrary to FPL's standard procedures and established practices. Standard procedures do not permit the simultaneous removal of both levels of protection.
During the diagnostic process, a fault occurred and, because both levels of relay protection had been removed, caused an outage ultimately affecting 26 transmission lines and 38 substations. One of the substations affected serves three of the generation units at Turkey Point, including a natural gas unit as well as both nuclear units, which, as designed, automatically and safely shut down due to an under-voltage condition. Also affected were two other generation plants in FPL's system. Total impact to the system was a loss of 3,400 MW of generating capacity.
The final account of customers affected by this incident totals 584,000 customers, or 13 percent of FPL's total. Of these, 66 percent had power restored within an hour, 90 percent within two hours and virtually all customers whose service was affected by the event had service restored by 4:30 p.m. Some FPL customers who participate in On Call, a program that cycles off major appliances during peak demand, did not have their appliances turned back on for as many as several hours.
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