powerquality.sg

Much has been said about the blackout on Tuesday morning. Thus far, these are the official findings

• Disruption lasted for about 38 minutes, between 1:18AM and 01:56AM on the 18 September 2018.
• 19 areas in Singapore were affected: Boon Lay, Choa Chu Kang, Clementi, Jurong, Pandan Loop, Aljunied, Geylang, Tanjong Rhu, Mountbatten, Kembangan, Bedok, East Coast, Ang Mo Kio, Bishan, Thomson, Mandai, Admiralty, Sembawang and Woodlands (~146,000 customers).
• Caused by the tripping of power generation units belonging to Sembcorp Cogen and Senoko Energy.
• Dubbed the worst major power outage since 2004.
• Previous major blackout (albeit much smaller scale than this incident) was on 1 June this year confined to the CBD area.

We had one advanced energy logger on-site (an office in Cecil Street – CBD area), doing harmonics compliance measurement during the incident. Here, the trending graphs showed that frequency ‘dipped’ down to as low as 48.83 Hz. The journal logs showed that it returned to its normal operating range (49.5 Hz to 50.5Hz) in about 18 seconds (Nation-wide under frequency relays automatically kicked in for load shedding during these 18s).

Unfortunately, we did not use our higher-end equipment here (Dranetz HDPQ for instance). Hence the limited information (eg. Waveforms, detailed rms trends, etc could not be shown).

This particular office was not affected by the blackout.

I was invited to a talk by my former Deputy Managing Director, Mr. Chang Swee Tong at SP Group HQ.
It was a like a walk down memory lane, as he went thru various PQ-related initiatives that he led while at the helm.
Got to meet some old friends and mentors too.

Thanks again to SP Alumni Secretariat for the invitation.

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A paper on the same topic by Mr. Chang and the seniors of my old section can be found here.

A good workshop experience with some excellent pointers shared by the speakers.

Had a great time catching up with friends and former colleagues, especially my old team at PQTM.

The third and final day of PQSynergy 2017 ends with a sharing session by PQT’s Terry Chandler and Mirus’ Tony Hoevenaars on the topic of harmonics.

It has been another fruitful conference, with a good mix of local and international speakers. Thomas Pua’s (PSL) presentation on synchrophasors was particularly interesting and Bill Howe’s (EPRI) insights on the proactive use of PQ data is a welcome change for the industry.

I always look forward to these sharing sessions with fellow practitioners, something not common back home for me, especially in power quality.

This year, I shared some common and simple day-to-day PQ related cases encountered back in Singapore. The presented slides will soon be available for download at www.pqsynergy.com

My 2nd year presenting a topic in PQSynergy. It has been an enjoyable 2-day conference.
Made new friends and learnt new things from fellow practitioners. Glad to have met the guys from Sonel too.
Will definitely take a closer look at some of your instruments.

And congratulations to Terry Chandler and his Power Quality Thailand on another successful conference.
Happy 30th anniversary, PQT. Many more good years ahead.