We've Got the Power (Cut)!

Last week the National Grid lost power to a large swathe of the country. It seems a very large part of the UK from the North East to the South West was affected, bringing trains to a halt and in one case endangering a Hospital. (The backup generator failed to kick in when the mains power failed: most reprehensible and a further vindication of my belief that our "Managers" no longer have the ability to manage things).

Well, my first reaction is how could it happen? Then, having familiarised myself with the reason, the second reaction is: get used to it.

I confidently predict this will not be the last instance of large scale unplanned power outages in the UK.

Of course National Grid have issued platitudes like "lessons will be learned", but the bald fact is that with good strategic management, problems like this are eliminated, because they are foreseen. After all, electricity is a strategic resource: the UK relies on a continuous supply of electricity for safety and security.

It should be run with all the positive security and redundancy of a military asset, not some sticking-plaster/cross your fingers and hope for it back street electricity supplier.

The independent reports that two generating assets went off-line, tripping the grid into it's massive shut-down. If you believe the Indy story, a gas generator in Little Barford and a wind farm off Hornsea went offline simultaneously. Now note these are on the East of the country.

Why then were supplies affected in Bristol, hundreds of miles away across the other side of the country, with a number of power generators in between the failed ones and Bristol? This story and excuse for the outage doesn't ring true and also doesn't square with what I've heard from other sources. My source says the issue was an inability to source capacity from a couple of offshore connectors from the European mainland. One especially from the Netherlands, which would normally be used to pick up missing capacity on the East Coast. Which dovetails with the loss of capacity on the East side of the country. There's also a connector from France to the South East of England, which I believe also failed to supply enough capacity to prevent the cascade of shut-downs we saw on Friday.

Which then meant the generators on the West coast were having to come on stream to supply the other half of the country. I assume especially in the South West the National Grid gets a bit sparse which would explain the outages in Bristol as capacity was sucked to the East.
Normally the grid should cope with this scenario and I would hope that National Grid have procedures and tests in place to prove that capacity can be moved around the grid like this on a regular basis. Stress-tests are the lifeblood of a strategic resource and to me it would be imperative that (a) any power plant supplying maximum output has a local grid robust enough to supply that capacity to the main grid without any failures and (b) once supplied to the grid that capacity can be routed successfully to anywhere in the country.

As an example the generators on one side of the country can supply full network capacity to the other side of the country without cascade failures of the network.

But with the calibre of shallow-thinking manager we have in this country, I suspect that these provisions have not been met.

Belt 'n' braces has been replaced with "that'll do" and an effort to maximise profits at the expense of security of supply.

I get it: companies have to make a profit, but the privatisation of electricity generation and the national grid should have had some minimum standards for security of supply. It is after all a strategic resource.

But these days, nothing surprises me...