Final call at Heathrow: should energy security be a mainstream debate?

Heathrow has improved immeasurably in recent years but I’d never want it to be my home from home, although it sometimes feels like it. I’m one of 31m Europeans who travel through Europe’s busiest airport (and the world’s second busiest) each year. 

That’s why, like so many others, I was baffled that a fire at a substation just northeast of the airport could bring one of the world’s most important transport hubs to a standstill for a day. The story made international headlines – and so will the fallout.

Yes, Heathrow restored power within a day. And yes, normal service has resumed. But the questions about the disruption are going nowhere. 

How back-up power increases resilience

The map below shows Heathrow and the two nearest substations where the airport draws power from. North Hyde, to the north, was knocked out by the fire. But Laleham, to the south, was not and others should also have been available.

We also now know a data centre close to Heathrow, which is fitted with 12 emergency standby generators, each with a capacity of 3.2 MW, maintained power and was unaffected. Surely if a data centre can keep calm and carry on – so should a major airport? 

Indeed, National Grid CEO John Pettigrew took to the nation’s media to insist the transmission network could have supplied power to Heathrow. “There was no lack of capacity from the substations,” he told UK financial daily, the Financial Times. “Each substation individually can provide enough power to Heathrow.” 

Heathrow has emergency back-up power supplies, which use diesel generators and batteries, but these only keep crucial safety systems running, such as landing equipment and runway lights. A separate biomass power generator also provides heat and electricity to Terminal Two.

The airport’s CEO Thomas Woldbye has said a back-up transformer failed during the power cut, meaning systems had to be shut down before power could be restored. 

So who is to blame? We should know in six weeks’ time when the UK government’s review into the incident concludes. The TSO, National Energy System Operator (Neso), is also assessing the country’s energy resilience. 

In the meantime, I remain puzzled and I’m not alone. My fellow columnist and colleague Phil Hewitt, director at Montel Analytics, is too. “This is all rather bewildering,” he said, expressing concern over a lack of resilience at a critical national and international infrastructure site. “While fires at grid supply points are rare, they do occur, and this incident highlights the urgent need to review and potentially bolster Heathrow’s security of electricity supply. An airport as large and as important as Heathrow should not be vulnerable to a single point of failure.” 

Energy security and the new world

The repercussions will be felt far and wide. And not just at other international European airports. Schiphol in Amsterdam, Europe’s third busiest airport, has also had its own power outage problems that have caused incidents of major disruption in recent years.

Unfortunately, the Heathrow incident will provide food for thought for malicious actors looking for ways to cripple an advanced Western democracy. No internet. Mobile phones out. Electric vehicles stranded. Several northern European countries have already distributed war preparation guidance to their citizens, imploring them to stock up on water, pasta and cash.

Do we now need to fortify key energy assets like power substations? Is this just a problem for the UK government? How resilient is the transmission grid across Europe?  

We are already in the midst of a hybrid war in the Baltic area, with interconnectors a known weak point. But where are the other single points of failure in our increasingly complex power system? Montel News recently revealed that private companies are now considering how to protect offshore wind farms from sabotage. Are European governments too? Are we testing the resilience of the connections to the grids they feed into? 

And key European infrastructure, such as Heathrow, will need to increase on-site back-up generation capacity or energy storage systems to ensure continued operations in the event of a national power outage, let alone a single substation going offline.   

It is not only Heathrow’s ambitions to grow and build a third runway that will come unstuck if it can’t rely on a robust and reliable power supply. More mature industries in the UK – generators and consumers – will need to take heed and ensure resilience in the form of batteries and back-up generators. 

A point that all of us in Europe would be wise to remember in these uncertain times. Take it from me as I write this article sat in Terminal Two at Heathrow waiting to board my flight home to Oslo. Yes, everything is back to normal here now. But Heathrow’s embarrassment could be a final call for us all.

This article originally appeared as a column on montelnews.com