KevinT
Active Member
Sounds like they need to rework their substations, but then I don't really know how grid failures work.
There's only so much they can do.
I'm familiar with the specification documents that were made public for Waterloo Region's ION system; and the whole thing was to be able to keep running with two 'ultimate trains' (two fully loaded 2-car sets) accelerating out of any station at any time with the nearest [traction power] substation down. Each substation, where practical, was also to be tied to multiple 13.8 kV feeders from the local distribution grid, so a single feed going down wouldn't bring down the sub. Now consider a situation where one or more of the 138 kV / 250 kV lines connecting the local provider's transformer stations to the provincial grid gets knocked out. Those redundant stations connected to redundant local feeders are not going to keep the system alive. That's just how it goes until they put batteries into the trains with enough oomph to limp them to the next station, which to the best of my knowledge, nobody is doing yet.
In this case Montreal had 200,000 customers out, so my guess is that they lost many multiples of the local feeders, if not one or two of the main lines connecting the big transformer stations to Montreal's 'ring of power'. A heavy wind storm causing multiple line sets to gallop can do that, as the automatic line reclosers are programmed on a '3 strikes and you're out' basis.
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