ANALYSES AND LESSONS TO BE LEARNED FROM SEPTEMBER 28TH, 2003 BLACK-OUT IN ITALY: A REGULATORY ASSESSMENT

摘要

A cluster of significant power outages during 2003 has drawn political and public attention to the issue of secure electricity supply. One of these had been the disruption of electricity service occurred in Italy on September 28th, 2003, resulting in an almost total black out in Italy (with exception of Sardinia isle and some minor negligible areas). Such events have been deeply analysed from different perspectives, in particular, by system operators and by regulators. Moreover, such analyses have been often correlated with the new way of operating interconnected power systems in the liberalised context: different analyses focused on the liberalisation point of view, trying to discover whether a direct link between the parallel opening and integrating of the European electricity markets and such events can and should be established. Indeed, unbundling of different functions relevant to electricity industry "chain", i.e. production, transmission, distribution and supply, entails a new challenge both from the regulatory and technical point of view. This paper aims to report about the experience acquired by Italian Regulatory Authority for Electricity and Gas in the investigation carried out following the abovementioned blackout in Italy.