Country-Wide Power Cut To Be Investigated By Government

It will also examine if there were technical performance issues in the country’s power system, the efficiency of communications around the incident and how power demand was restored.

According to Professor Tim Green, co-director of the Energy Futures Laboratory, Imperial College London, the first generator to disconnect on Friday was a gas-fired plant at Little Barford in Bedfordshire at 4.58pm.

Two minutes later the Hornsea Offshore wind farm also disconnected.

National Grid said it would seek to “understand the lessons learned” from the incident, while energy regulator Ofgem called for an “urgent detailed report” on what went wrong.

Duncan Burt, operations director at National Grid, said the power cut was an “incredibly rare event”, but back-up systems had “worked well” in response.

Speaking to the BBC, he explained that automatic processes triggered by the loss of the two generators had temporarily disconnected electrical demand across the country to “help keep the rest of the system safe”.