Recent UK Power Losses: Lightning Or Enlightening?
The lightning strike blamed for unprecedented power losses in England and Wales earlier this month may not be the only cause of the fail.
Ofgem has now opened an investigation (due before 6th September) into the National Grid and other companies’ roles in the outage which caused disruption and loss of power for almost a million people. If the investigation finds the power companies to be at fault — there will be financial penalties.
What Ofgem is doing is valid. It is looking at why, when pressure-tested at this level, the fail was on such a huge scale.
The power watchdog said its investigation “would try to establish what lessons can be drawn from the power cut to ensure that steps can be taken to further improve the resilience of Britain’s energy network.”
But the regulator will also examine whether the provider companies breached their licence conditions.
There was significant disruption to transport networks and critical infrastructure in the power cut, which happened just before 5pm on Friday 9 August. It caused blackouts across the Midlands, the South East, South West, North West, North East of England, and Wales.
Thousands of homes lost power, people were stranded on trains and traffic lights stopped working
Power was restored just 40 minutes later, but problems on the rail network carried on over the weekend.
Two almost simultaneous unexpected power losses at Hornsea and Little Barford happened independently of one another — but each was attributed to the lightning strike.
While railway tracks still had power that didn’t prevent travel disruption. About half of the passenger rolling stock was able to restart when the power was restored, but the rest were left waiting for engineers to travel to restart them — and the delays caused a backlog and a headache for passengers and rail operators alike.
Friday rush hour, the mother of all rush-hours, and all trains out of London King’s Cross were suspended for most of the evening.
Airports, hospitals and London Underground all suffered too.
It’s puzzling however. National Grid’s preliminary investigation into the power cut doesn’t specify who or what cut the power.
The lightning strike before 5pm, the failure of two big power generators a few seconds later, and the subsequent loss of electricity across part of the country are fact.
National Grid’s report says the power station failures were “associated” with the strike, but points out that such strikes are not uncommon, and would normally not lead to power stations going offline. It also says there were many other lightning hits on the same day, none of which caused a problem.
So was lightning the cause — or contributory to the cause — or was it something else. If it was something else, then what? The investigation is critical, we need to be absolutely sure of the cause or we can’t be absolutely sure that we’ve delivered a cure against future fails.
What is particularly worrying is that, this length of time after the power loss event, the power companies still claim uncertainty over its cause. It was 40 minutes without power but the impacts rumbled on for much longer and there is no doubt that the ‘cost’ of that downtime was huge.
We will continue to watch with interest.
