An important work was the identification of a set of facilities called strategic facilities. These are the power plants, substations and transmission trunks which, if turned off by electrical problems or destroyed / damaged for other reasons, the interruption of their services may lead to the occurrence of loss of large blocks of generation and even blackouts, whose social, economic and political impacts affects the security of the state and society.

Knowing the strategic facilities allows adopting measures to:

• Preparing the BIPS to cope with total / partial loss of the facility, caused by multiple contingencies, and analyzing and suggesting possible improvements that will strengthen the intrinsic security of the installations.
• Enabling the secure areas to know the set of Strategic Facilities, in order to allow the adoption of preventive and / or corrective actions in case of possible threats, to ensure continuity of services, even in crisis situations.

Based on the knowledge of strategic facilities, ONS, with the participation of the agents involved and Cepel, undertook the following actions regarding them in 2012:

• Identification of the set of substations assisted.
• Improving information on environmental weather conditions (rain and direction of winds, lightning, air temperature, atmospheric pressure) and busfires, available in control centers, in order to prepare the BIPS for multiple contingencies.
• Interacting with the planning area of expansion for the definition of reinforcements to minimize the consequences of certain multiple losses.
• Implementation of new Special Protection Systems (SEPs).
• Improving the project of new SEPs to minimize accidental or incorrect performances.
• Adoption of more conservative criteria when maintenance services are performed at these facilities.
• Analysis of conditions of substations in order to identify possible changes that may contribute to their intrinsic improvement, minimizing the consequences of major disturbances.
• Adoption of special criteria for the testing of black-start devices of the generating units.