One of the biggest hubs in Europe is currently closed this Friday until 23:59 (midnight) due to a massive power outage.
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Aircraft currently en route are diverted to other airports:
They will be having a serious electrical infrastructure review there at Heathrow! Sounds like they don’t have adequate backup power generation facilities available to bring online.
A Heathrow source tells the BBC that they have “multiple sources” of energy at the airport - with diesel generators and “uninterruptable power supplies” in place.
The source says that when the power outage happened the back up systems “all operated as expected”.
The systems, however, are not enough to run the whole airport – hence the decision to close it down.
The source says the airport is in the process of redirecting power to the affected parts of the operation – but that it “takes time”.
You can’t continue operation as normal on back up power because you are then working without any reserve. The purpose of the backups is to ensure things don’t fail catastrophically - it ensures immediate aircraft operations can be safely concluded and passengers and staff are not stuck in unsafe conditions. It gives leeway to get things under control and either safely restore power, or in this case where it’s a more serious event to close things down somewhat gracefully.
This event is very unusual. Transformer failures are rare at substations of that size because they are very reliable pieces of equipment. Normally when you hear of a substation fire, it’s because of some external event that’s upset things - a lightning strike, arson, some control system or network protection system failure that’s caused it to be overloaded, and it’s normally one of the smaller substations affected.
That’s why counter terrorism police are running an investigation - it’s somewhat suspicious timing for such a rare event to happen at a time where the UK government are involved in efforts to put a lot of pressure on Russia. Sabotage might not be the most likely cause, but they definitely aren’t going to discount until they know the root cause, especially given that similar attempts to damage infrastructure have been made in Europe.
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Thanks Tom. Appreciate the details.
Well said. (20 characters).
They do have backups. But if they would run it fully operational with that, there is no second backup.
An airport cannot be operated as usual on backup only. It’s not like switching a light off and on and it is working again.
Flights are critical and cannot be operated without a backup. So it is better to shut the traffic down and keep the backup for the essential operations.
It’s a tall order when you need to have a backup for your backup to be fully operational.
Safety always comes first.
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Depends on the industry we are talking about.
Operating an airport is a more critical task than running a supermarket.
No doubt. Airport operations have some of the most difficult requirements when it comes to operational requirements\standards.
One thing is to have ermergency power to be operational directly after a power failure, so ensure safe landing and shutting down.
The other is to have contingency plans to have everything up and running again as quick as possible. That would mean some redundancy somewhere, like maybe switching to a different substation in a different area.
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That would be a proper plan if they could find sufficient available capacity at another substation. I bet the first argument is the cost involved.
The problem is mainly that the capacity is so far strechted in regards to availble power that that kind of option isn’t easily available.
So even when they have the money, the power generation isn’t up to it.
Yes Tom, that very much sounds like the real world situation.
