Data management issues associated with the August 14, 2003 blackout investigation

Abstract

The largest blackout in the history of the North American electric power grid occurred on August 14, 2003. An extensive investigation into what happened (and why) began immediately. The joint U.S.-Canadian task force led the effort, including support from the electric utility industry and several federal agencies, e.g. the U.S. Department of Energy. The North American Electric Reliability Council (NERC) supported the task force, including particularly the electricity working group. The overall blackout investigation team drew expertise from a large number of organizations, assembled into teams to address specific attributes of the blackout. This work describes the data management issues associated with supporting the blackout investigation, beginning with the immediate response in the days and weeks following the blackout, supporting the interim report, to the long-term plans for deriving lessons learned for implementing improvements in the overall process of outage disturbance reporting. The sole focus of This work is the electricity working group activities at NERC; the security and nuclear working groups are outside the scope of this paper.