Blackstart

Blackstart is the file an electricity distribution network operator keeps on what happens between the moment a high-voltage feeder trips and the moment the last customer is back on supply — and on how the regulator is told about it. It is the control room's record and the performance team's evidence, not a consumer energy app. At its centre is the interruption register: every unplanned incident with its fault number, the HV feeder and primary substation involved, the fault category (weather, third-party damage, plant failure, overhead or underground), the time of trip, the time of first-customer restoration, the time of final restoration, and the customers affected at each stage. From that register — never from typed-in numbers — the file computes Customer Interruptions per 100 customers and Customer Minutes Lost per customer against the regulatory target, and derives the resulting incentive position. Around the calculation sit the records that defend it. The Guaranteed Standards of Performance record tracks which customers passed the 12-hour and 24-hour restoration thresholds, which breached, the payment due on each breach and whether it has been made. The switching and restoration log holds the ordered schedule for each incident: every operation, its timestamp, the authorised person who carried it out, and the sections it energised. The asset register covers primary substations, HV feeders and transformers with their customer counts, condition grades and inspection dates. There are records for mobile generation despatched ahead of repair, for the Priority Services Register and the welfare actually provided to vulnerable customers on affected feeders, for storm and severe-weather event classification, for repair crews and reinstatement, for root-cause analysis on repeat-offender feeders, and for the regulatory reporting pack and its sign-off. A control-room portal shows live incidents, customers currently off supply, the restoration clock against the guaranteed-standard thresholds, and the crews and generators committed. The design is a bright paper-white four-column ruled broadsheet in the Swiss railway-timetable lineage: graphite hairline rules as real structure, a drawn single-line network schematic with open and closed switch symbols and sections state-filled energised or off-supply, tabular monospaced numerals throughout, and exactly one signal red for off-supply and breach against one green for restored. Every mark is drawn; there is no photography and no icon library.