Mexico Power Plant Partially Blamed For Massive Blackout

The string of unplanned electric grid shutdowns that blacked out the southern Coachella Valley this month was first exacerbated when a power plant in Baja California protectively shut down, it was reported today.

The San Diego Union-Tribune quoted California officials who said the first power generating station to shut down after an equipment failure in Arizona was in Mexicali, where a natural gas-fired unit went off-line 20 seconds after the Arizona mishap.

The chief executive officer of California-ISO, which controls and switches power supplies in this state, said it is not yet known if the Mexicali plant’s shutdown was related to the Arizona problem. Stephen Berberich told the Union-Tribune that “the exact cause or definite answer is not quite sorted.”

Javier Larios, regional superintendent for Mexico’s Federal Electric Commission, said the Mexicali plant went down to protect its components. The plant is one of several sources of energy in Mexico for consumers in San Diego, Riverside and Orange counties.

Two transmission lines feed electricity from Mexicali-area power plants north to the U.S.

The Mexican plant’s shutdown is one of 23 events on five separate but connected power grids that transpired in 11 minutes on Sept. 8. Once the dominos started falling, Cal-ISO officials at a a control room near Sacramento were not able to “ramp up” alternate power generators and prevent the blackout of 7 million customers of the Imperial Irrigation Distric, which affected some residents of Palm Desert, and all residents La Quinta, Indio, Coachella, Mecca, Thermal and all the way south to the Mexican border.

To the west, millions spent a very dark night in San Diego County, where San Diego Gas & Electric, the Federal Electric Commission in Southern California and the power supplier in Baja California were cut from power, the newspaper reported.

Other major electricity generators, including the San Onofre Nuclear Generating Station in San Diego County, also went into standby mode as power levels oscillated. Such automatic shutdowns are necessary to prevent damage, but the Cal-ISO investigation will determine if the cascading failures could have been prevented.

Cal-ISO is reconstructing a “second-by-second” record of what happened after a switching error at an Arizona Public Service substation in Yuma, Ariz. started the cascading failures, Berberich told the Union-Tribune.