Video: What is a Black Start?

One of the most widespread power outages in North American history occurred in November 1965. When a misconfigured relay tripped a breaker on a crucial transmission line on the bitterly cold evening of the 9th, the grid was operating at full capacity as people attempted to stay warm. Over 30 million people in the northeast US and parts of Ontario in Canada lost service as a result of the loss of that one line. It is not an easy task to restore electricity to that many people. In this instance, the startup began in Southampton, New York, with a small gas generator of 12 megawatts. That’s about the size of four wind turbines, but it was enough to restart Long Island’s power plants, which were able to power all of New York City and eventually restore service to all 30 million people. The grid is like a house of cards. It’s not necessarily weak, but if the whole thing falls apart, you have to start from scratch and rebuild each card one at a time. One of the most risky tasks you could imagine is restoring power after a significant blackout. There is no way to practice a real-world scenario because of the enormous consequences of making a mistake. Restoring power is more difficult than you might think, despite the fact that it appears to be as simple as flipping a switch. Furthermore, I fabricated a model power matrix here in the studio to show you how this functions. This is the final video in a series on widespread power grid outages, so if you want to learn more, watch the other videos in the series. This is Practical Engineering, and I’m Grady. We’re going to talk about grid black starts in today’s episode.