The UK experienced a widespread power blackout Friday afternoon, affecting more than a million Britons. The BBC reported that the incident occurred when both an onshore gas-fired generator at Little Barford in Bedfordshire and the Hornsea offshore wind farm went off the National Grid transmission and distribution system within two minutes of each other at about 5 p.m.
The Little Barford plant is a 740-MW gas fired combined cycle plant, in service in 1996 and now owned by German-based RWE Generation UK. Hornsea has 1.2 GW of generating capacity, located in the North Sea off Yorkshire. It is part of a planned 6-GW project, owned and operated by Danish developer Orsted.
According to the British government, total UK generating capacity in 2018 was about 82 GW.
National Grid said it restored power in about 40 minutes, but widespread reports said the disruptions, particularly to train and subway services, continued into Saturday. The ever-sensational Sun tabloid headlined: “BLACK FRIDAY Power cut plunges Britain into chaos as thousands stranded on trains in pitch dark for six hours and desperate passengers ‘pee from windows’”
No full cause of the simultaneous outages has yet emerged. The Mirror newspaper noted that the outages occurred “as parts of the UK were battered by strong winds and heavy rain”, although that is not an unusual circumstance for the “bejeweled and sceptered isle.”
Duncan Burt, National Grid director of operations, told the BBC that he didn’t believe a cyber attack or unpredictable wind power had anything to do with the event. The UK regulator Ofgem has called for an “urgent detailed report.” Ofgem pledged enforcement action, including fines, as, in the words of the BBC, “train passengers were stranded, traffic lights failed to work and thousands of homes lost power during the blackout.”
But Burt also defended the national electric grid operator, telling the BBC that the disruption of two major generators tripping off was outside what the operator was prepared for, causing automatic safety systems to shut down major portions of the grid. He said, “We think that worked well; we think the safety protection systems across the industry, on generators and on the network, worked well to secure and keep the grid safe, to make sure that we preserved power to the vast proportion of the country.”
RWE said it had shut down the Little Barford plant as a routine response to a technical issue. Orsted said automatic systems shut down much of Hornsea at the same time.
— Kennedy Maize