National Grid electricity blackout report points to failure at a wind farm
On August 9, just before the Friday rush hour, United Kingdom suffered a catastrophic power outage that has affected more or less one million people in the country. How and why this kind of event happened is a question that is yet to be answered. The UK government has started investing the incident. The national grid company, the company that is responsible for the maintenance of the power grid of UK has some vague explanations.
1. The chain of events
There was two separate power plant failure at the same time. One was a gas-powered power plant in Bedfordshire, and another was a wind farm power plant in Hornsea. The first outage occurred in the gas-powered plant. The line disconnected at about 5 PM in the evening. Just after two minutes, the wind farm in the North Sea also disconnected from the grid. The power outages are likely to have been caused due to a lightning strike in the UK power circuit. In about an hour and half the power was restored to normal. But millions of people were already devastated about the incident, and they demand an explanation.
2. The aftermath of the event
Right after the power outage, the backup reserve power supply failed to provide for the demand for electricity. So, the country was left almost in the dark. Flights were grounded, trains stopped midway. The traffic lights stopped abruptly causing major safety issues. A hospitals backup generator failed to kick in. But fortunately, no one was injured. Passengers of the trains were left without food and toilet for hours. The passengers of the flights were delayed for a long period of time. Although the blackout remained for an hour, the domino effect remained for several hours before everything settled down. The United Kingdom is very fortunate that no serious accident has happened during the blackout. The train system suffered the most during this blackout.
3. Who to blame?
So far, there is no confirmed reason for this kind of catastrophe to have happened. But the national grid is saying that the wind farm in Hornsea is the one to blame. Due to their technical and software glitch, the farm stopped producing power, thus starting this blackout. The weather could also be a factor. Due to the drastic climate change, the wind pattern is changing every day. So that could be the reason for the wind firm to stop producing. But in case of a situation like that, a backup reserve of electricity is kept standing by to fight this kind of situation. Why that backup reserve failed to initiate that is the question yet to be answered. The authority has already rolled out investigation to find out the ins and outs of this problem. The general grid also tried to blame the train services for their inconsistency, which may have caused the frequency to drop drastically and cause the outage. The authority has ruled out any malicious outside influence for the outage.
4. Measures to prevent future power cuts
The investigation is not complete yet. So, what measures should the UK government take is hard to tell. But this is not the first blackout in the UK. In 2008, there was another power outage similar to this one happened. The general opinion is that the management of the electric production and distribution is very poor in the UK. The government should take proper steps to take these matters seriously. Fail-proof systems and proper backup plans should be implemented very soon before other incidents like this happen again.
A developed country like the UK cannot afford a power outage like this. Many things can go wrong during a blackout. We are fortunate enough that no one was injured during this event. But Proper measures are required to ensure that this kind of incident won’t happen again.
