Being in the middle of moving house I missed this story when it broke… apparently there were quite widespread blackouts across the country on Tuesday as a near-simultaneous failure of a couple of large power stations caused the demand on the National Grid to exceed supply. The supply frequency dropped and the grid control systems automatically cut off certain substations in order to maintain a stable supply for the majority. BBC News and The Register both covered the incident.

The incident is being downplayed as a freak coincidence of several power stations unexpectedly going offline. I believe only two main stations (a 1GW nuclear unit and a ~2.4GW coal fired unit) shut down, along with a number of small units. The worry for me is that as our fleet of power stations age, this type of occurrence seems more likely. It’s not indicative of a lack of available capacity, as the National Grid would have ensured sufficient units were online to meet their demand forecast with a 20% margin. The problem seems to lie with the reliability of those units.

Hopefully the regulatory/planning noose will be loosened soon so some new nuclear units can be built as soon as possible, before blackouts become a common event!

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The BBC News website reports today on the latest in a long line of recent cable thefts:

“A suspected thief is being treated for burns after he cut through an 11,000 volt cable at a power sub-station in Teesside, police said. Officers were called to Portrack Lane, Stockton, after reports three men were cutting copper wires on Tuesday night.”

They really seem to be queuing up for a Darwin Award these days… Quite aside from the general stupidity and lack of respect the criminals display, I’m more confused about how they manage to sell it on. You’d think that when a pikey with a reel of second hand high voltage copper cable turns up at a scrapyard they’d be slightly curious as to where it came from?

Anyway, there must be an easy way to reduce this problem. Why can’t they just cover substation floors with a nice spiky grounded metal plate? The spikes to get through shoe soles obviously. The thieves would only do it once, and it would save the NHS money on treating their burns! Seems like a no-brainer from where I’m sitting…

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