Local view for "http://purl.org/linkedpolitics/eu/plenary/2006-11-13-Speech-1-120"
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"en.20061113.18.1-120"2
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"Mr President, the serious incident on the continental European electricity network on Saturday, 4 November led to blackouts over most of the system. We know from E.ON that the fault originated in northern Germany, where switching off an extra high-voltage line in Lower Saxony later led to the switching off of lines across Europe.
E.ON had carried out a planned deactivation of an overhead line and this operation had also been done with a previous line. The incident led to the splitting of the Union for the Coordination of Transmission of Electricity Network into three zones: west, east and south-east. The western zone was short of power and the eastern zone had too much power. To cope with the lack of power in the western zone, automatic devices had to switch customers off in the countries affected.
The worst affected countries were France, where five million customers were reported to have been cut off. In Germany, millions of customers were affected, as in Belgium, the Netherlands, Italy and Spain, where some hundreds of thousands of customers were without electricity. Affected countries also included Austria, Slovenia, Portugal and Switzerland.
The incident was resolved after an hour and the power supply was re-established. The incident could have had much greater consequences but the cooperation between transmission system operators and the size of the network made it possible to supply customers very quickly.
The precise cause of the failure is not yet known. I have asked the European regulators to provide a report on what actually caused this blackout. That involves analysing a huge amount of information before the blackout and after the blackout, so at this stage I cannot report to you on what actually triggered it. The UCTE investigation committee will also provide a report, as will the European transmission system operators, who are investigating the incident.
As soon as we have a full report and a full-scale investigation has been held into this incident, I will report to Parliament in an appropriate form on what actually triggered it; but as far as I can see three lessons should be learned from it. In 2003 a huge-scale blackout had already occurred in Italy and it is clear that the measures taken afterwards were not sufficient, in particular in three areas.
One proposal, therefore, is that we should set up a formal European grouping of transmission system operators which will have the task of putting forward common positions on issues identified by the Commission and in particular network security standards. We should also institute a mechanism to ensure that these standards are formally binding on network operators. It is also clear that much more investment is needed in transmission system networks to provide for an adequate response when such incidents happen, but most importantly to ensure that lines are not overcharged.
I am very pleased that you put this question on the agenda of this House, as it is a very important issue. This was not a natural disaster but a system failure, and we should analyse it and draw the necessary lessons from it. As soon as the report is ready, the Commission will not hesitate to draw the necessary conclusions and take the necessary action."@en1
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