Heathrow Closure

The latest news https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/articles/cly22eelnxjo suggests that National Grid knew there was a problem with water getting into the substation electrics back in 2018, but somehow never got round to doing anything about it.  They were going to fix it in 2022, but didn't.

This is what happens when major national infrastructure is run by for-profit companies.  Shareholder dividends come before maintenance.

Simon Barker said:

This is what happens when major national infrastructure is run by for-profit companies.  Shareholder dividends come before maintenance.

The same could probably be said about the power outage that happened in Spain recently.  Takes Thames water as an example on the verge of bankruptcy and Thames Water paid out £18 million in bonuses to 21 senior managers, with the first payment of 50% of their base salary being made on April 30, 2025

Regulators need to crack the whip and maybe even consider fines to the directors not the company for bad performance

There's also a LinkedIn comment at https://www.linkedin.com/posts/simoncgallagher_heathrow-neso-powercut-activity-7346083051480707073-KKrU (I've stripped the tracking codes) highlighting that Heathrow should also be taking much of the blame.

[It was their battle to lose, as much by their inability to utilise the multiplicity of supply points]

To provide a little balance to this discussion -it doesn't make much difference if the asset is owned by a private company or the  public/government- no one likes to do maintenance.

On the public side think of all the health problems caused by mold in social housing.

On a more personal side, who likes to go to the dentist for maintenance work?

Peter Brooks

An elevated moisture reading in one of SGT3 bushings.  I wonder how many others are in the same condition that 

NG (National Grid) / NESO (National Energy System Operator) are ignoring or have not dealt with yet?  Maybe there needs to be a FOI (freedom of information) request to ascertain this information?  Ofgen and the others need to become pro-active on matters

Hello Sergio:-

There has to be an independent auditing organization that has the power (without being interfered with by the government) that has the power  to force the necessary controlling organization to do the required maintenance work.

If they do their job correctly, they become the most hated organization in the country!

Peter Brooks 

You can see if from both sides.

The network companies knowing the intricacies of their network design, point to Heathrow having supplies from several different substations, placing the responsibility on Heathrow as a very large and well resourced customer to be able to operate from any of the incoming supplies.

Heathrow's affected substation A had two separate incoming supplies from the DNO and it is the end customer, it cannot be assumed to know the intricacies of the network company's network configuration which are beyond its control. Heathrow may have assumed that two separate supplies to substation A was sufficient redundancy, that those two incoming supplies should have sufficient independence such that they should not both fail at once. Further, the restrictions on parallel interconnection between different substations imposed by the network companies meant the use of any within-site interconnectors would be highly restricted anyway.

The topic of independence is key to the whole incident, people focus on the bushing failure which was the trigger, but it was the lack of a functioning fire deluge system (due to the failure to repair the long standing fault on the fire pumps) which allowed the incident to escalate. The deluge system was there to prevent a fire on one transformer (SGT3), compromising the independence of the adjacent transformer (SGT1) and even after the initial failure of the bushing on SGT3, SGT1 continued to function for 20 minutes as the fire raged on SGT3. SGT1 finally tripping off as the fire incinerated its marshalling kiosk. At which point, SGT2 which was physically independent of SGT1 and SGT3, at the other side of the sub, but electrically dependent on SGT1 sharing the same feed also tripped off which resulted in the loss of supply.

Looking at the incident as an outsider, clearly the bushing failure was the cause of the SGT3 failure, but it was the lack of the functioning fire deluge system combined with the lack of independent 275kV supplies to SGT2 which escalated the incident to cause the loss of supply.

Peter Brooks said:

There has to be an independent auditing organization that has the power (without being interfered with by the government) that has the power  to force the necessary controlling organization to do the required maintenance work.

Agreed

Simon Barker said:

This is what happens when major national infrastructure is run by for-profit companies.  Shareholder dividends come before maintenance.

But arguably, if the government and its regulator can't apply even a basic incentive structure (carrot and stick) to improve the security of critical infrastructure then what hope is there that they can run the entire operation properly?

Personally I could live with either fully private or fully nationalised infrastructure, and anything in-between, because the problems this country faces far transcend any public vs private ownership models.

TurboGen said:

Heathrow may have assumed that two separate supplies to substation A was sufficient redundancy, that those two incoming supplies should have sufficient independence such that they should not both fail at once.

Maybe, but it's simply unconscionable that Heathrow Airport Holdings Ltd hadn't carried out and acted upon a basic Failure Modes and Effect Analysis for such a critical piece of national infrastructure.  Of course, it's quite possible that they did understand the risks entirely, but decided that it wasn't worth the extra cost of implementing any mitigation as they calculated that they wouldn't bear the brunt of the costs of any outage.