Impact of Super-Cyclone Phailin on Power System Operation - Defense Mechanism and Lesson Learned Subrata Mukhopadhyay, Senior Member, IEEE EEE/ECE Department Guru Tegh Bahadur Institute of Technology (Guru Gobind Singh Indra Prastha University) G-8 Area, Rajouri Garden New Delhi – 110064, India subrata@ieee.org Sushil K. Soonee, Senior Member, IEEE Vinod K. Agrawal, Senior Member, IEEE S. R. Narasimhan, Senior Member, IEEE Samir C. Saxena Power System Operation Corporation Limited B-9 Qutub Institutional Area New Delhi-110016, India sksoonee@gmail.com, vka1996@gmail.com, srnarasimhan@gmail.com, saxena.samir@gmail.com Abstract— On October 12 and 13, 2013 devastating super- cyclone (also known as hurricane) Phailin struck the east coast of peninsular India, mainly the state of Odisha and then to some extent Andhra Pradesh lying on the western side of Bay of Bengal. With accurate forecast by the Indian Meteorological Department, wide-scale damage to properties and loss of life could be prevented by timely massive evacuation. Adequate preventive measures were taken for the power supply system as a whole with the availability of online monitored data including those received from Phasor Measurement Units. Even deployment of large-scale portable Diesel-Generating sets on the power generation front and Emergency Restoration System for the transmission system helped to minimize supply disruption time and in post-super-cyclone period in coming back to normalcy. Index Terms-- emergency restoration system, phasor measurement unit, Saffir-Simpson Hurricane Scale, smart grid, super-cyclone Phailin. I. INTRODUCTION This paper presents impact of recent super-cyclone Phailin, as named on October 9, 2013 by the Indian Meteorological Department (IMD) of Government of India, on power system operation right from generation to utilization of electricity through transmission and distribution. While on a number of occasions earlier [1] there have been chances to report grid failure due to failure of equipment, devices and system to some extent due to lesser degree of redundancy and / or human failure to take stock of situation in time to take preventive action, this time it is concerning natural disaster. However, due to progress in technology, be it for weather forecast, communication, and any other information support system, to a large extent now it is possible to predict the level of disturbance. Accordingly preventive measures taken in time can reduce the impact as a whole in different front. In the instant case though the severity of super-cyclone in Saffir- Simpson Hurricane Scale (SSHS) rose as high as 5, loss of life was much minimized over a wide area in comparison to what happened on a similar occasion earlier, i.e., Odisha super- cyclone of October 29, 1999. With online data monitored taking help of traditional equipment and as transmitted to control centers at various levels general observation of the grid was possible as usual. In addition this time due to large-scale deployment of Phasor Measurement Units (PMU), it has been possible to have wide-area monitoring too possible accurately and in a very fast manner under the concept of Smart Grid. II. ODISHA GRID SYSTEM AND SUPER-CYCLONE PHAILIN The power map of Odisha, a part of Eastern Regional Grid which along with Northern, Western, and North-Eastern forms NEW grid is shown in Fig. 1. Figure 1. Power map of Odisha. 978-1-4799-6415-4/14/$31.00 ©2014 IEEE