Pepco, SMECO continue outage post-mortem.
Fault at Ryceville facility causes loss of power to 75,000.
Pepco engineers are continuing their investigation into the equipment failure Tuesday at an electricity substation in Charles County that left over 70,000 customers in Southern Maryland and Washington, D.C., without power.
Around 12:45 p.m. April 7, a fault on the Pepco side of a connection point at the Ryceville substation near the St. Mary’s County line caused a power outage, ranging from the station to the Buck Hewitt Road substation in Lexington Park, according to Southern Maryland Electric Cooperative spokesman Tom Dennison.
“That transmission line was faulted where the support for that line was, the insulator failed and the line came down and created the outage,” Dennison said.
He said SMECO first addressed the issue by rerouting the power through a new 230-kilovolt system in Calvert County.
“Going on five or six years ago, we undertook the Southern Maryland Reliability Project that was a 30-mile transmission line upgrade from Calvert County that went through Huntingtown to the underwater crossing of the Patuxent River,” Dennison said. “When the problem occurred [Tuesday] and the stations were impacted, we were able to reroute the power to get the Buck Hewitt Road station back online.”
Dennison explained that the failing transmission line belonged to Pepco.
“I think it’s important for everyone to realize that this was a transmission line that is Pepco’s transmission line that interconnects with SMECO,” he said. “From SMECO’s perspective, our systems responded [Tuesday]. We were able to restore the vast majority of those customers’ power within an hour.”
As a result of the equipment failure, both reactors at Calvert Cliffs Nuclear Power Plant in Lusby shut down automatically at 12:40 p.m. Tuesday, according to a news release. The plant is designed to shut down automatically during “significant electrical disturbances.”
http://www.somdnews.com/article/20150410/NEWS/150419925/1049/pepco-smeco-continue-outage-post-mortem&template=southernMaryland
Last week's news, article in Friday's Calvert Recorder, and as facilities are in my neighborhood, I'm particularly interested.