Who could have foreseen this?
National Grid Failure Report Points To Wind Farms.
National Grid’s preliminary investigation into the blackout that caused widespread disruption in England and Wales last week has raised the possibility that it was caused by the world’s largest offshore wind farm accidentally going offline.
The provisional report, which was submitted to regulators on Friday, suggests for the first time that the Hornsea offshore wind farm, which is owned and run by Denmark’s Orsted, may have tripped offline seconds before an outage at a smaller, gas-fired station.
The findings, which were relayed to the Financial Times by people briefed on the report, suggest the blackout may have been avoided if not for an error at the wind farm.
Investigators had originally thought the shutdown of the Little Barford gas-fired plant in St Neots, west of Cambridge, had triggered a domino effect across the network that led to the blackout.
Investigators now suspect the problems on the grid started when lightning hit part of the network near Cambridge. This caused 300MW-400MW of capacity in the local electricity network, which normally means small-scale renewable power, to go offline. Such a small outage should not have caused any problem for the wider grid. Lightning strikes are common on National Grid infrastructure, which is hit on average three times per day, and they rarely cause serious problems.
But the strike coincided with the almost instantaneous total loss of supply from the Hornsea wind farm, which lies off the coast of Yorkshire. The facility, which is still under construction, was generating as much as 800MW for the grid last Friday afternoon before cutting to 0MW in less than a second.
National Grid Failure Report Points To Wind Farms.
National Grid’s preliminary investigation into the blackout that caused widespread disruption in England and Wales last week has raised the possibility that it was caused by the world’s largest offshore wind farm accidentally going offline.
The provisional report, which was submitted to regulators on Friday, suggests for the first time that the Hornsea offshore wind farm, which is owned and run by Denmark’s Orsted, may have tripped offline seconds before an outage at a smaller, gas-fired station.
The findings, which were relayed to the Financial Times by people briefed on the report, suggest the blackout may have been avoided if not for an error at the wind farm.
Investigators had originally thought the shutdown of the Little Barford gas-fired plant in St Neots, west of Cambridge, had triggered a domino effect across the network that led to the blackout.
Investigators now suspect the problems on the grid started when lightning hit part of the network near Cambridge. This caused 300MW-400MW of capacity in the local electricity network, which normally means small-scale renewable power, to go offline. Such a small outage should not have caused any problem for the wider grid. Lightning strikes are common on National Grid infrastructure, which is hit on average three times per day, and they rarely cause serious problems.
But the strike coincided with the almost instantaneous total loss of supply from the Hornsea wind farm, which lies off the coast of Yorkshire. The facility, which is still under construction, was generating as much as 800MW for the grid last Friday afternoon before cutting to 0MW in less than a second.
