Contingency (electrical grid)

In an electrical grid, contingency is an unexpected failure of a single principal component (e.g., an electrical generator or a power transmission line) that causes the change of the system state large enough to endanger the grid security. Some protective relays are set up in a way that multiple individual components are disconnected due to a single fault, in this case, taking out of all the units in a group counts as a single contingency. A scheduled outage (like maintenance) is not a contingency.

For other uses, see Contingency.

The choice of term emphasizes the fact that a single fault can cause severe damage to the system so quickly that the operator will not have time to intervene, and therefore a reaction to the fault has to be defensively pre-built into the system configuration. Some sources use the term interchangeably with "disturbance" and "fault".

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