BEIS determines scope of investigation into Friday power outage

The UK government on Wednesday announced that it has defined the scope of the review into the National Grid Electricity System Operator’s (ESO) actions on Friday, when a major outage occurred in England and Wales.

The Energy Emergencies Executive Committee is due to release a report with initial findings in five weeks, to be followed by a comprehensive report within 12 weeks. Its tasks include establishing what happened to cause the outage and determining whether correct procedures were followed. The committee, which had its first meeting this Monday, will also consider if any improvements are needed to prevent future power cuts and better respond if such do happen.

Hundreds of thousands of customers have been impacted by the outage on August 9, which, as announced previously, was caused by a drop in frequency due to the almost simultaneous loss of two large generators around 1700 local time that day. These generators are the 740-MW Little Barford gas-fired power station and the Hornsea offshore wind farm, the first globally to surpass 1 GW of capacity.

Andrea Leadsom, Secretary of State of the UK's Department for Business, Energy and Industrial Strategy (BEIS), said that National Grid has already confirmed that what happened had nothing to do with the variability of wind power. Leadsom noted that the incident “does however demonstrate the need to have a diverse energy mix.”

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