Heathrow Closure

Well it looks pretty serious. The question I suppose, given odd things happening around the world at the moment,  is was this a natural maintenance  avoidable failure or was it pushed? The fundamental problem with Heathrow of course is that it is too big, and really the functionality should have been distributed over a no of smaller sites

I understand it is North Hyde   www.ssen.co.uk/.../north-hyde-grid-supply-point---strategic-development-plan---for-consultation.pdf

I.

Mike

Well it looks pretty serious. The question I suppose, given odd things happening around the world at the moment,  is was this a natural maintenance  avoidable failure or was it pushed? The fundamental problem with Heathrow of course is that it is too big, and really the functionality should have been distributed over a no of smaller sites

I understand it is North Hyde   www.ssen.co.uk/.../north-hyde-grid-supply-point---strategic-development-plan---for-consultation.pdf

I.

Mike

As you mention, i can't envisage that the functionality and resilience would not be distributed around the site/area.  The statement from he Energy Minister that the fire has taken out back-up generators also seems to add more doubt in my mind.  

Faults on the power system and fires in the locality of the airport should have been well within the bounds of contingency planning.  I can understand liminted or no departures, but inbound diversions and turnarounds seems like a failure of engineering, failure of contingency planning or something else more malicious

The North Hyde GSP network is made up of 66kV, 22kV, 11kV, 6.6kV, and LV circuits. It is an urban network located in west London where the land use is a mix of residential, commercial, and industrial with no agricultural land.




It is worth noting that there are two sites where the SSEN Distribution network connects to Heathrow Airport within the GSP area. In total the GSP serves approximately 64,000 customers with the breakdown for each substation shown below 

Substation  Type No. Customers Served 2023/24 Pk recorded MVA

North Hyde (B) Grid Supply Point 63,577 169.44
North Hyde (D) Bulk Supply Point 5,894   28.15

North Hyde (E) Primary Substation 16,081 43.37
Bath Rd EastPrimary Substation  3,049   7.55

Hayes Primary Substation 17,300  31.44
Springfield Rd Primary Substation 8,476 12.81

The Green Primary Substation 4,279 8.50
Vicarage Farm Rd Primary Substation 17,484  24.33

No grid substations or DNO substations have back up generation -for an Energy Minister to suggest there was shows the level of engineering knowledge he has.

No one is guaranteed a 100% reliable supply from NG/DNO -if electricity is that important to your site it is then your responsibility to provide back up generation to cover the grid power outage.

I guess at Heathrow the cost of back up generation would be huge, a 40ft container can house 2MVA of standby diesel  generation and are commonly installed on hospital sites.in multiple configurations.- Heathrow could have followed this model.

It is reported the adjacent data centre continued operations - presumably with UPS supplies to cover the short time period while the standby generation ran up and connected.

From comments in the press it appears Heathrow had sufficient standby  capacity to undertake an orderly site shutdown but not sufficient capacity to continue operations.

Bobby123 said:

back up generation

I did see one report (www.youtube.com/watch that suggested there was a potential fire suppression system on-site (just outside the electric fence;-), which may be the source of the 'generation' misunderstanding if it had some form of diesel backup for the fire fighting/suppression aspects. These things can be less reliable than typically hoped, but then again it might not even have been a fire suppression building that was being noted!