I was working out in the field at a small co-generation plant yesterday in Polk county when the first of the rolling blackouts began to occur. I had a small team with me; we went out to run tests on a 13.8KV generator and ended up scrapping more test results than we kept due to the fact that our test equipment kept losing power. Aside from the minor headache there, no problems, but this was all the way up in Central Florida.
We got back to the office and made a few calls, as we work extensively with FP&L, but were unable to find out anything more than they released to the news media. Turkey Point power plant was the ultimate hub of the widespread outage - a fault in the distribution system downstream (substation) overloaded one of the 2 nuke reactors on site, and when it shut down it caused a cascading effect, as other units were subsequently overloaded based on shifting electrical demand from the downed units. The other three units (of 5) are standard coal burning units. Sometimes the operators and load dispatchers are able to switch loading fast enough to prevent this scenario, but this apparently happened very quickly.
The power infrastructure is in dire need of an overhaul everywhere Strat, not just in South Florida - many of the transmission lines and substation equipment, transformers and relays are significantly past their expected lifespan for use, but it takes $$$ and manpower to be able to address the issue (not defending FPL mind you), and when you can envision how many power lines, and substations there are in just the south Florida area - everywhere you look - you can understand the challenge involved in upgrading the infrastructure. It will take time, and it's already been happening for years now.
