Heathrow power outage triggers angst over UK energy resilience

Hello and welcome to Energy Source, coming to you this week from London.

Energy affordability is on the agenda for British politicians this week, with the price cap dictating typical household gas and electricity bills set to rise more than 6 per cent today to £1,849 annually, following an increase in wholesale gas prices.

National Energy Action, the fuel poverty charity, says the level is “not affordable” for low-income households and is urging the government to do more to support them.

Miatta Fahnbulleh, the government’s minister for energy consumers, says it will get bills down by “[getting] off the rollercoaster of fossil fuel markets controlled by dictators and petrostates” and moving towards wind and solar power.

Meanwhile, Saudi Arabia will from today start unwinding production cuts, potentially ushering in a sustained period of lower oil prices. Traders are expecting crude to stay at or below current levels (about $75 on Monday afternoon BST) for the rest of the year.

Today’s main item looks at the electricity substation fire that forced Heathrow to close last month — and the questions about UK energy resilience it has triggered.

Heathrow power outage: ‘a great British f***-up’

The fire that destroyed a National Grid substation in west London on March 21 was finally fully extinguished last Thursday afternoon, one week after the blaze broke out in a transformer containing 25,000 litres of cooling oil.

But questions continue over why it managed to cause so much chaos, chiefly the 18-hour closure of Europe’s busiest airport, Heathrow, leaving 200,000 passengers displaced around the world.

British MPs may shed some light on the issue tomorrow as they question Thomas Woldbye, Heathrow’s chief executive, and Alice Delahunty, president of National Grid’s UK transmission business (watch the session live from 9.15am BST here).

“We’re questioning senior officials on what could have been done differently,” the transport select committee, which is due to hold the hearing, said yesterday.

The fire was strong enough to knock out two other transformers at National Grid’s substation, including one designed for backup, rendering the site useless.

But National Grid said two other transmission-level substations capable of supplying Heathrow were working fine, raising questions for the airport as to why it wasn’t able to restore power faster.

The disruption has contributed to widespread angst about the state of Britain’s infrastructure and whether the right steps are being taken to ensure resilience.

“We’ve got a much more intermittent electricity system — lots of renewables that work when the sun shines and the wind blows — and at the same time an economy which is digitalising,” Dieter Helm, a professor of economic policy at Oxford university and former government adviser, said on his podcast Helm Talks this week.

“Just-in-time and just enough has replaced ready, prepared, secure and resilient,” he added. “In most of these cases, what you discover is, it’s a miracle these things don’t happen more often.”

The risk to airports from power cuts has recently gained more attention in the US, where airports that responded to an official survey in 2023 reported 321 power outages between 2015 and 2022.

One US airport reported steps it had taken to eliminate “90 per cent of its single points of failure” including installing a device “that automatically switches power to an alternate substation in the event one of the substations loses power”.

The Heathrow incident has fuelled anger among airline bosses, who were quizzed about it at the Airlines for Europe conference in Brussels last Thursday.

“It was a surprise, to be honest, that Heathrow doesn’t have resilience for a situation like this,” said Luis Gallego, chief executive of International Airlines Group, which owns British Airways.

Michael O’Leary, Ryanair’s chief executive, was typically more blunt: “It is just another example of a great British fuck-up,” he said.

Woldbye, Heathrow’s boss, risked stoking further ire when he told the Financial Times last week that airlines could end up paying, through higher charges, for the roughly £1bn cost of a more “resilient” power system.

At the committee on Wednesday, he is likely to face questions about why it hadn’t already made that investment, as well as his movements on the night of the incident.

The Sunday Times reported he went to bed as the fire burned, leaving his chief operating officer to take the decision to close the airport, as part of a planned split of responsibilities designed to make sure top teams were well-rested.

But Woldbye subsequently told the Financial Times he had gone to bed before it happened, and his team could not reach him. “Somebody gave me a call which somehow did not go through,” he said.

National Grid, meanwhile, is likely to face questions about why one fire was able to cause so much damage at the site, as well as its maintenance and fire prevention methods.

Nigel Wicking, chief executive of the Heathrow Airline Operators’ Committee, and Eliane Algaard, operations director at Scottish and Southern Electricity Networks, which owns and operates the lower voltage distribution network around Heathrow, are also due to give evidence.

Passengers and airline executives will be watching closely.

“It was very surprising to us that something like that could happen to the busiest airport in Europe, with no backup plan,” Ben Smith, chief executive of Air France-KLM told the Airlines for Europe conference.

“It was a wake-up call for them [Europe’s other hub airports] and for us.” (Rachel Millard and Philip Georgiadis)

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Energy Source is written and edited by Jamie Smyth, Myles McCormick, Amanda Chu, Tom Wilson and Malcolm Moore, with support from the FT’s global team of reporters. Reach us at energy.source@ft.com and follow us on X at @FTEnergy. Catch up on past editions of the newsletter here.