UK power cut: National Grid promises to learn lessons from blackout

From The BBC

10th August 2019

National Grid has said it will "learn the lessons" after nearly one million people across England and Wales lost power on Friday. But director of operations Duncan Burt told the BBC that its systems "worked well" after the "incredibly rare event" of two power stations disconnecting. He said he did not believe that a cyber-attack or unpredictable wind power generation was to blame. Regulator Ofgem has demanded an "urgent detailed report" into what went wrong. It said it could take enforcement action, including a fine, after train passengers were stranded, traffic lights failed to work and thousands of homes lost power during the blackout. An energy department spokesperson said National Grid must "urgently review" what happened. National Grid power was restored by 17:40 BST on Friday but some train services continued to be disrupted on Saturday.

The power cut happened at about 17:00 BST on Friday, National Grid said, with blackouts across the midlands, the south east, south west, north west and north east of England, and Wales. National Grid said its systems were not to blame. Industry experts said a gas-fired power station at Little Barford, Bedfordshire, failed at 16:58 followed, two minutes later, by the Hornsea offshore wind farm disconnecting from the grid. Speaking on BBC Radio 4's Today programme, Mr Burt acknowledged the "immense disruption" the blackout had caused. He said the near-simultaneous loss of two generators was more than the grid was routinely prepared for, prompting automatic safety systems to shut off power to some places.

"We think that worked well; we think the safety protection systems across the industry, on generators and on the network, worked well to secure and keep the grid safe, to make sure that we preserved power to the vast proportion of the country," he said. But he said the industry needed to examine whether these safety systems were set up correctly to have "minimal impact" on people's daily lives. RWE, owner of the Little Barford power station, said it shut down temporarily on Friday as a routine response to a technical issue, and called for National Grid and Ofgem to investigate the "wider system issues". And Orsted, the owner of the Hornsea offshore wind farm, said automatic systems on Hornsea One "significantly reduced" power around the same time others failed. A spokesperson added: "We are investigating the cause, working closely with National Grid System Operator, which balances the UK's electricity system."

Police were called to help travellers during the huge disruption on the railways on Friday, with delayed passengers stranded for hours. Govia Thameslink Railway (GTR), which operates Thameslink, Southern, Great Northern and Gatwick Express, says it is investigating why the power cut had such a severe effect on its trains. Thameslink trains were particularly badly impacted as GTR had to deploy technicians to manually restart trains north of London. Shadow business and energy secretary Rebecca Long Bailey said the impact of the power cut was "unacceptable" at a time when National Grid reported £1.8bn in profits and increased dividends to shareholders.  King's Cross was one of the worst-hit stations, with all trains suspended for several hours. Passenger Dayna McAlpine told BBC Radio 5 Live her train took nearly 13 hours to reach London King's Cross from Edinburgh - a journey which would normally take less than five hours. "By hour seven things were starting to get pretty tense," she said. "People were threatening to self-evacuate off the train... Food ran out about five hours ago." Others on social media reported having travelled for 12 hours, while some rail passengers were stuck on trains until the early hours of the morning.

[We weren’t directly affected by these rather bizarre events – although one of my gaming buddies said they lost power for about 2 hours before he came on-line. We did have some game connection drops (two in around 20 minutes) but that was probably various companies resetting their systems post-outage. It’s weird though how two systems went off-line practically simultaneously. Either it was a (successful) cyber-attack [possible] or it might have been a systemic cascade failure caused by how their system is set up. I guess we’ll find out when the report comes out. It does show the lack of resilience though. I know it (mostly) only lasted for a few hours but still….. rather worrying!]