Cascade Tripping

Subject – Economy

Context – Mumbai 2020 outage due to ‘cascade tripping’, not sabotage: Report

Concept –

Cascade tripping is the tripping of the power grid in unbalanced condition or it is the tripping of safety devices and isolation of the part of the system to prevent damage to the equipment.
This tripping occurs during under-frequency or other unbalanced condition.
When demand is more than power generated the frequency of machine goes down. When this frequency is less than a certain limit, the grid will trip. This will result in a certain loss of power.
If demand is less than the generation it will also cause such a situation which is also called blackout or grid failure.
To avoid this synchronism must be maintained in the grid.

Basic structure of a power grid

During cascade tripping –