Thank you for the compliment. To be fair to the press my article is almost 3,000 words. Publications for a general audience are not usually willing to devote that amount of space to an issue, though more specialised magazines are. That is the great merit of Substack for me - the possibility of discussing issues at reasonable length.
Despite the climate doomsters the likelihood of an outage is a pretty rate event in the UK. I don't its economically viable to storm proof every power line. It should be celebrated that the supergrid has show itself to be extremely resilient against whatever mother nature throws at including lightning strikes.
What happened at North Hyde s/stn was a rare event but a perfectly plausible scenario that Heathrow should be able to cope with. To me this is another example of the failure of regulation in that Heathrow should be obliged under its licence to able demonstrate that it has continuity plans to cope with the lost of 1 out of 3 infeeds. To suggest they need their own power station is unnecessary they just needed to have a response its not as if the airport doesn't have the staff on shift to manage it surely. I worked in safety critical railway industry and we could have coped with that scenario (and have done) by adept staff in operations undertaking the necessary switching in minutes not 10's of hours. Oh and we had kit that coped fine with losing power and then having it restored.
Re Heathrow: I agree fully with your comment on regulation and contingency planning. Heathrow's response was appalling. My point about backup generation was that is what many airports do. You are quite right that there are better & cheaper ways of achieving the same result, if ... if one can rely on managements to implement them seriously. The threat of being forced to implement a relatively expensive fallback may be what is required to concentrate minds.
Re your first paragraph: I did not intend to suggest that all power lines should be storm-proofed. What I have noticed is that Enel in Italy, where we have a family home, makes more effort to clear large branches in corridors along main distribution lines. A casual observation based on nearly two decades of living in both countries is that minor outages are much more frequent in Italy (our house is in a mountain area with lots of summer and winter storms) but major outages are more of a problem in Scotland.
That is partly a matter of how UK DNOs respond to storm damage. They appear to be less well organised and equipped to deal with storms - e.g. emergency generators - and more focused on dealing with "easy" problems. This may be the right strategy but it is pretty harsh on people living in areas that have suffered 2 outages of 5+ days in the last 4 years. We have been lucky and only had 1 such outage in that period.
My central points concern honesty in acknowledging and managing network risks. It is also unconscionable to deal with a government that wants to penalise or prohibit off-grid sources of heating & power while not being willing to implement serious measure to ensure that people won't need them. A couple of decades ago we had an outage of nearly a week in December with sub-zero temperatures. That is life-threatening for someone elderly. Rural Scotland is not the SE of England, so policies should not be designed as if it was.
Thank you. This is a brilliant, clear, balanced and thoughtful explanation. Alas, such articles are extremely rare in the popular press.
Thank you for the compliment. To be fair to the press my article is almost 3,000 words. Publications for a general audience are not usually willing to devote that amount of space to an issue, though more specialised magazines are. That is the great merit of Substack for me - the possibility of discussing issues at reasonable length.
Despite the climate doomsters the likelihood of an outage is a pretty rate event in the UK. I don't its economically viable to storm proof every power line. It should be celebrated that the supergrid has show itself to be extremely resilient against whatever mother nature throws at including lightning strikes.
What happened at North Hyde s/stn was a rare event but a perfectly plausible scenario that Heathrow should be able to cope with. To me this is another example of the failure of regulation in that Heathrow should be obliged under its licence to able demonstrate that it has continuity plans to cope with the lost of 1 out of 3 infeeds. To suggest they need their own power station is unnecessary they just needed to have a response its not as if the airport doesn't have the staff on shift to manage it surely. I worked in safety critical railway industry and we could have coped with that scenario (and have done) by adept staff in operations undertaking the necessary switching in minutes not 10's of hours. Oh and we had kit that coped fine with losing power and then having it restored.
Re Heathrow: I agree fully with your comment on regulation and contingency planning. Heathrow's response was appalling. My point about backup generation was that is what many airports do. You are quite right that there are better & cheaper ways of achieving the same result, if ... if one can rely on managements to implement them seriously. The threat of being forced to implement a relatively expensive fallback may be what is required to concentrate minds.
Re your first paragraph: I did not intend to suggest that all power lines should be storm-proofed. What I have noticed is that Enel in Italy, where we have a family home, makes more effort to clear large branches in corridors along main distribution lines. A casual observation based on nearly two decades of living in both countries is that minor outages are much more frequent in Italy (our house is in a mountain area with lots of summer and winter storms) but major outages are more of a problem in Scotland.
That is partly a matter of how UK DNOs respond to storm damage. They appear to be less well organised and equipped to deal with storms - e.g. emergency generators - and more focused on dealing with "easy" problems. This may be the right strategy but it is pretty harsh on people living in areas that have suffered 2 outages of 5+ days in the last 4 years. We have been lucky and only had 1 such outage in that period.
My central points concern honesty in acknowledging and managing network risks. It is also unconscionable to deal with a government that wants to penalise or prohibit off-grid sources of heating & power while not being willing to implement serious measure to ensure that people won't need them. A couple of decades ago we had an outage of nearly a week in December with sub-zero temperatures. That is life-threatening for someone elderly. Rural Scotland is not the SE of England, so policies should not be designed as if it was.