Have you ever sat offshore in the dark?

This paper will discuss applications in power management and load shedding systems for production facilities. In several recent projects in Angola and Nigeria the requirements for power management were similar. The paper will detail how to optimize and balance the energy systems across the facilities and how this was key to maintaining critical applications while keeping the operators out of the dark. Capacity planning, balance and control of the generators, was for the most part, the main concern for these areas and has historically caused the most headaches. Additionally, it will cover emergency load shedding as a means of avoiding black start situation during energy system disruptions and upsets. Design of the load shedding schemas will be touched on. Emergency load shedding schemas were difficult to complete because multiple power sources were present. Arriving at the list of load to be shed was a bone of contention in the planning stages. It needed to be done very quickly, but system reaction times (output to the breaker) varied. The final results and lessons learned during the execution of several projects will be detailed in this paper.