The 2015 Turkey blackout was a widespread

power outage A power outage (also called a powercut, a power out, a power failure, a power blackout, a power loss, or a blackout) is the loss of the electrical power network supply to an end user. There are many causes of power failures in an electricit ...

that occurred in almost all parts of

Turkey Turkey ( tr, Türkiye ), officially the Republic of Türkiye ( tr, Türkiye Cumhuriyeti, links=no ), is a list of transcontinental countries, transcontinental country located mainly on the Anatolia, Anatolian Peninsula in Western Asia, with ...

in the morning of Tuesday, 31 March 2015. Due to line maintenance on the main East-West corridor, which connects hydropower rich Eastern Turkey with the population centers in Western Turkey, the remaining lines became overloaded after the Osmanca – Kursunlu line tripped, as the system was not in a n-1 secure state. The electric system in Turkey split in half at CET 09:36:11 and separated from the Central European (CE) synchronous zone, i.e. connecting lines to

Greece Greece,, or , romanized: ', officially the Hellenic Republic, is a country in Southeast Europe. It is situated on the southern tip of the Balkans, and is located at the crossroads of Europe, Asia, and Africa. Greece shares land borders with ...

and

Bulgaria Bulgaria (; bg, България, Bǎlgariya), officially the Republic of Bulgaria,, ) is a country in Southeast Europe. It is situated on the eastern flank of the Balkans, and is bordered by Romania to the north, Serbia and North Macedon ...

also tripped. This was the reason that the disturbances only had effects in Turkey and did not cascade to neighbouring countries. The two parts inside Turkey behaved differently. The Western part suffered from a lack generation (21%) and

frequency Frequency is the number of occurrences of a repeating event per unit of time. It is also occasionally referred to as ''temporal frequency'' for clarity, and is distinct from ''angular frequency''. Frequency is measured in hertz (Hz) which is eq ...

went down.

Load shedding Demand response is a change in the power consumption of an electric utility customer to better match the demand for power with the supply. Until the 21st century decrease in the cost of pumped storage and batteries electric energy could not be ...

schemes did stabilize the frequency, but as some power plants in Turkey did not cope with running at reduced frequency, additional power was lost and resulted in a blackout of the Western part. The Eastern part suffered from hydropower oversupply (41%) that wasn't able to flow westward. The Eastern part was accelerated by ca. 1.6 Hz/s and culminated at 52.3 Hz. Power plants tripped due to overfrequency and the initially oversupplied Eastern part collapsed at underfrequency values less than 47.0 Hz. At 16:12 (CET) - ca. 6.5 hours after the blackout - the Western and Eastern part were resynchronised, while the Turkish grid was already about 80% energized. At 18:30 almost 95% of the loads were served again.

External links

*ENTSOE
Report on Blackout in Turkey on 31 March 2015
21 September 2015

References

2015 in Turkey

March 2015 events in Turkey 2015 disasters in Turkey {{Electric-power-stub