The UK is Discovering that You Need Electricity

If you want to maintain a modern society, that is.

If you know anything about modern technology, you would think that this would be apparent. But the folks running Heathrow Airport, Europe's busiest, didn't realize that, and had no contingency plan. Well, they did have a contingency plan; it just wasn't worth the paper it was written on. London’s Heathrow slowly resumes flights after a fire cut power to Europe’s busiest airport

A fire at an electrical substation knocked out power to Heathrow Airport for most of Friday, forcing Europe’s busiest hub to shut down for roughly 18 hours, causing widespread cancellations and rerouting headaches, and stranding roughly 200,000 passengers.

The blaze started just before midnight on Thursday at a substation about 2 miles (3.2 kilometers) from the airport and took firefighters around seven hours to bring under control. Authorities said they found no evidence that it was suspicious, and the London Fire Brigade said its investigation would focus on the electrical distribution equipment at the substation.

The fire was not suspicious. Would they tell us if it was? This is the UK, where they denied, and then covered up the existance of rape gangs for a couple of decades, for fear of not being PC, or being called raaaaacist.

No one does proper systems design anymore. Heathrow Airport blackout exposes weak spot in its power supplies.

The public blowback to the outage was swift, with Willie Walsh, the former chief executive officer of British Airways parent IAG SA and now IATA director, saying it’s “yet another case of Heathrow letting down both travelers and airlines.”

Walsh said it’s a “clear planning failure by the airport” if critical national infrastructure relies on one energy source without an alternative.

Whenever a system is designed, especially a critical infrastructure system, you need to look at things like points of failure, and modes of failure, mean-time-to-failure, and mean-time-to-repair. If you lose electric power in an airport, you lose radar, radio communications, air traffic control systems, ground traffic control systems, refrigeration, elevators, escalators, intercom systems, the internet, and more. Depending on where the cell towers are located, and how they are powered you may also lose cellphone communication. You should figure out what you can live with, what can't live without, and then make damn sure you know how to get more than one source of electrical power to that system.

This is the MGUY Australia video Was NET ZERO to blame for #Heathrow CHAOS? (Very likely).

But such is the fragility of the UK's electricity grid, that just one outage of a substation is enough to disable the UK's major airport for 24 hours. Where was the backup? Where was the redundancy?

There are reports that diesel generators, that were previously used for such purposes, had been decommissioned and replaced with a biomass generator, which could only power certain functions

The video is nine minutes long.