by Will Jones
Net Zero has been blamed for the complete shutdown of Heathrow after an aviation industry expert told Reform MP and Deputy Leader Richard Tice that Heathrow is moving from diesel back-up generators to biomass and the system failed “at the first time of asking” when a local electrical substation went up in flames. The Mail has more.
At least 220,000 passengers have been left stranded in Britain and around the world after an electrical fire shut the airport for at least 24 hours – with the level of global travel chaos sparked by the outage being compared to 9/11.
The UK’s busiest airport was forced to close on Friday after its main power substation exploded and set alight less than two miles away in the west London suburb of Hayes.
The complete closure of Heathrow due to the loss of just one electrical substation is unprecedented and raises major questions for the airport and the Government. It has also left many stranded travellers raging and reduced to tears.
Mr Tice said on GB News: “It appears that Heathrow had changed its backup systems in order to be, wait for it… Net Zero compliant.”
“They had got rid of their diesel generators and had moved towards a biomass generator that was designed not to completely replace the grid but work alongside it. Their Net Zero compliant backup system has completely failed in its core function at the first time of asking.
“We know diesel generators work as backup systems. If this is correct, and I have no reason to believe it’s not, they are guilty of gross negligence of the highest order.”
MailOnline has asked Heathrow to comment on Mr Tice’s claims. Its 2022 Net Zero plan confirms it is “investigating renewable-based alternatives that can still meet the stringent performance criteria” – but it is not clear how far along those plans are.
Senior sources at the airport have insisted that Heathrow does have back-up power systems but “activating contingencies for the whole airport requires some time” and “isn’t immediate”, one insider said to the Times. Bosses are expected to be hauled before Parliament to explain.
Julian Bray, one of the UK’s leading aviation experts said: “We are all amazed that Heathrow does not have a viable standby independent of the grid emergency power supply but relies on the National Grid. It’s not as if Heathrow is short of money – it has a substantial war chest for building the third runway.”
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Net Zero is a faith based electrical system. As it relies on shaking one’s fist at engineering realities, miracles are essential. One just did not try hard enough for the system to work, and if that fails, blame wreckers.
Faith-based backup electricity generation is always listening to your requests for power. It’s just that sometimes, the answer is no.
How could an all-good faith-based electric backup allow people to suffer without backup? It’s the mystery of intermittency.
Ideology once again costing society a ton. Situations like these cost people’s their lives.
Blackout data shows blackouts nearly cause a 4x multiplier of chance of accidental death plus increases other death categories.
Brilliant. And what will the cost be to UK taxpayers to bring them all back?
Rubbish! A transformer caught fire and unfortunately the fire wall between it and the backup transformer failed wiping out the substation. This was supplying power similar to the re4quirements of a city! There are 2 other substations feeding the airport that could have taken over the dead unit. This requires reconfiguring the airports electrical feed system (by computer). However the whole of the airport electronics needed to be restarted. FOR SAFETY SAKE the flights were cancelled during the reconfiguration. Some incoming flights started arriving PM friday.
THERE IS NO LINK TO NETZERO
FOR SAFETY SAKE the flights were cancelled during the reconfiguration.
It’s coming up to 7pm and nothing is flying in or out
That’s a very long reconfiguration. Almost 24 hours…
According to the TV news, the first landing was just after 6 pm., we watched it happen live.
Apparently there had been no practice of a reconfiguration. Very poor planning. But, maybe the three substations are very old, and reconfiguration requires throwing knife-switches.
According to the Internet at least part dates back to the 1970s. If so it must have been due for retirement and replacement. Another report says thst the load was permanently at or around maximum.
Passenger numbers have increased 400% and 2 new terminals built since then. Plus houses and businesses.
Truly effective back-up power systems transfer automatically to another source. How does a biomass system do that. Sounds like it has to be either steam system using burning biomass or gasified biomass feeding a gas turbine, either of which would take a fair amount of time to generate the amount of power needed,
In your “opinion” the fact that the new biomass generators, that replaced the tried and true diesel generators, failed, has absolutely nothing to do with the global warming scam?
Could have been worse – imagine if the ‘backup’ system had been changed over from diesels to batteries, and that the latter had been installed near the substation.
It would have been even worse if the batteries were Li-ion and they blew up when asked to provide emergency power.
https://x.com/i/grok/share/JtmtY2QH9uj4Qub1zz7NORfmp
Official statements from Heathrow and the UK Civil Aviation Authority (CAA) indicate that the closure was a safety measure to protect passengers and staff following the loss of power, which affected the airport’s operations entirely. Flights were either canceled or diverted to other airports, impacting up to 291,000 passengers.
Some posts on X have suggested that the cancellation of flights was linked to Heathrow’s net zero policies, specifically claiming that the airport removed diesel backup generators in favor of a “greener” alternative that failed during this outage. For example, users on X have speculated that the decision to prioritize sustainability targets left the airport without adequate backup power, exacerbating the situation. However, these claims remain unverified by official sources. Neither Heathrow’s official statements nor reports from reputable news outlets (such as the BBC, The Guardian, or AP News) mention the removal of backup generators or link the outage directly to net zero initiatives as the cause of the cancellations.
Don’t hold your breath for verification. It will be blamed on some poor schmuck who made a stupid mistake and has been fired
I imagine we can count on Labour politicians to do their best not to blame all this on their Net Zero policies.
“reports from reputable news outlets (such as the BBC, The Guardian, or AP News)”
Would that be the same guardian that published fairytales from Luke Harding and Carole Codwalladr
Not to mention the absolute nonsense climate hysteria it publishes on a daily basis
It was one of the main drivers behind language such as climate “crisis” and global “heating”
It never even hid the fact that this was deliberate nudge tactics
I think you need to look for more reliable sources, and do your own research for a change
“reports from reputable news outlets (such as the BBC, The Guardian, or AP News)”
That statement certain gave me a good chuckle.. whoever wrote it is totally delusional.
LMFAO…
“Flights were either canceled or diverted to other airports, impacting up to 291,000 passengers.”
I heard on the news that one flight from Texas to the UK was turned around midway across the Atlantic, and headed back to Texas.
That sounded a little drastic to me, but that’s what they said.
A flight from Charlotte was almost half way there and returned. I had a good friend on it. It was full according to him, so over 230 really peed-off people. Backup diesel generators have been around a long time primarily because they work. They can come online rapidly and as long as they have fuel, they run.
That would be bad: Fly for hours and then end up back at your starting point!
Yeah – flying’s bad enough without finding you’ve actually gone nowhere!
Did that once. Not as far but we had just turned the leg over NY and began the crossing to Germany when Bush Sr. began the air war in Iraq. Had to return to Atlanta since Frankfurt and other destinations were closed for security reasons.
Hahahahahahahahahahahahahahahaha!
(pant phew) hahahahaha (sigh) reputable hahahahahahahahahaha (gasp) news giggle hahahahaha outlets hahahahahahahahahaha
Good one half runt!!!
Even the Guardian accepts that the decision to replace the diesel back-up generators with biomass was a mistake.
Chuckle. Now that’s comedy!
Mr. half-a-runt: Your first post says something about a fire spreading, as if you knew about it. Your second comment only shows that it’s unknown, even the part you pretended to know. I doubt that the airport backup is at the same location as the grid station, so your comment struck me as obviously wrong, but I’m not there. You seem to focus on the fact that these folks aren’t admitting error, instead of asking why the int’l airport doesn’t have adequate back-up. Afraid of what you might find?
“In your “opinion” the fact that the new biomass generators, that replaced the tried and true diesel generators, failed,”
There is no fact in any of that. The generators did not fail, and there is no evidence that biomass was involved. Just speculation.
“no evidence that biomass was involved”
Quite true.. the biofuel generators failed to start, so no biomass fuel was involved. 😉
No generators failed to start.
They just couldn’t provide power. Got it. 😉
As the CEO said, they worked, but they were diesel generators and were not big enough to power the whole airport. Maybe the should have been, but that has nothing to do with net zero.
Having worked at an airport and having gone through at least one loss of grid power, a minor power flicker was all that occurred. The no-break backup worked as designed, immediately taking over supplying airport power. All control systems were running on batteries together with chargers, so they didn’t miss a beat. This is how it SHOULD have worked at Heathrow.
So Nick (net zero) Stokes what do you say to that. Someone who Knows what he is talking about – unlike you.
Nut-Zero is dead, or dying. You know it, but you cling to it, still believing… Contracts must still be paying.
In the article according to MP Mr. Tice, the diesel generators failed to start because they were not there anymore.
How do you know? Do you have any evidence that they are lying?
“A Heathrow source said its back-up diesel generators and uninterruptable power supplies in place all operated as expected.”
Stop lying Stokes. From the Daily Mail:
Julian Bray, one of the UK’s leading aviation experts said: ‘We are all amazed that Heathrow does not have a viable standby independent of the grid emergency power supply but relies on the National Grid. It’s not as if Heathrow is short of money – it has a substantial war chest for building the third runway’.
What does that have to do with biofuel? It just tells that Julian Bray is amazed.
What does “Heathrow does not have a viable standby independent of the grid emergency power supply but relies on the National Grid” mean to you?
It means what it says. “standby” would have to be a full sized power station, kept on standby. No airport in the world has that.
Stokes asserts .”It means what it says. “standby” would have to be a full sized power station, kept on standby. No airport in the world has that.”
It clearly hasn’t occurred to him that the emergency electrical power can be supplied by more than one diesel generator. Tulsa international Airport has several, and can withstand a complete grid failure.
While Tulsa’s utility outages have historically been of short duration, a recent major ice storm left the airport terminal without adequate electric power for more than eight hours and stranded thousands of passengers. Determined not to let that happen again, airport officials decided to replace the terminal’s electrical system with an updated system that could reliably and fully meet the electrical needs of the facility. During a recent major renovation of the 1960s-era terminal building, mtu was the chosen supplier of a total standby power system that incorporated a unique, low-cost generator paralleling solution.
The airfield operations at Tulsa International Airport were already well protected against outages with several standby generator systems. These included FAA-owned backup generators for the control tower, instrument landing systems, runway and radar, along with airport-owned backup power for airfield lighting and limited emergency generator power for airport rescue and firefighting operations. On the passenger side, the 1960s-era main terminal building and its A and B concourses were served by a single 100 kW, natural gas-fueled generator set. With the terminal’s total electrical load at almost 4 MW, the existing set could power only critical life-safety systems such as emergency egress lighting and TSA security, as well as a portion of ticketing. During a major utility outage, there was no power for general lighting, escalators, baggage handling, food services and, most importantly, the passenger boarding bridges.
“total electrical load at almost 4 MW”
That sounds all very recent. But Heathrow’s average load is 114 MW.
So? You claimed there were no airports with 100% backup. You were wrong, as usual.
No, I said that no airport had a full sized power station, which is what Heathrow would need. You are wrong, as usual.
Why does an airport need a “full sized power station”? It doesn’t, it just needs sufficient diesel generators, like Tulsa.
Stokes is as mendacious as usual.
What is a Heathrow source? I provided a named source from the article, you didn’t.
I produced Thomas Woldbye, CEO, Heathrow. You named a politician, who of course doesn’t know, but had been talking to an unnamed “aviation expert”. A rumor, which he is probably trying to start.
Mr. Stokes: Isn’t the Heathrow CEO the source for your statement that nothing failed to turn on, the system operated as expected? Doesn’t that beg the question, why did they expect to shut down the int’l airport even when the backup system came on as expected? You don’t seem curious about that, why was the diesel not adequate? Ah well, if you don’t want to know…..
He said why. Here is the quote again:
“We have lost power equal to that of a mid-sized city and our backup systems have been working as they should but they are not sized to run the entire airport.”
They just aren’t, and the reasons have nothing to do with net zero. To back up the whole airport would require a medium sized power station, lying idle except on the once every few decades when the grid supply failed.
Do you know of any airports that have such a power station?
Mr. Stokes: I don’t know of any other int’l airport that had to shutdown because of loss of grid substation. Do you? It could have something to do with net zero, but it strikes me that you don’t want to know. You’d rather say something is unknown, “they just aren’t” and you turn off the research. And you never call out half-a-runt’s lie! Why not?
Unlike so many here, I am not an expert in airport management, and do not aspire to be. Folks who actually do run airports have decided backing up the whole airport is just impractical. Everywhere.
You seem indifferent to the truth of the headline claim here, that generators failed because they had been converted to biofuels. Totally refuted by the CEO Heathrow down. They had not been converted to biofuel, and they did not fail.
Mr. Stokes: Above, you say “no airport in the world…”, so you seem to assert a working knowledge, but wait, no airport has a full sized power station is not the same as no airport has adequate back-up, why did you change the subject? Does an airport need a full power station, or just enough diesels? Did Heathrow have enough before they adopted a policy? Do they have enough now??? The only answer you know is the last, they don’t have enough now. You don’t care how it got there, and you don’t notice that the CEO doesn’t answer the question begged, “why did your plan call for shutting down an int’l airport?” The CEO has not answered the real question, but you don’t want to know the answer. The headline may be true, but you take the CEO’s word, and don’t ask why the CEO planned for a shutdown if a city substation went off-line. Seems to me the real answer is where you refuse to look.
Stokes modestly admits he knows little or nothing about backup electrical systems at airports, then proceeds to lecture us on that very subject.
Mr. cat: I saw that, too! He changed the subject from “Heathrow back-up” to “Airports across globe with own power stations”, then tries to lecture on his new subject. He clings to the CEO statement, refusing to see that the CEO is actually begging the real question. He’s never seen a CEO who makes a bad decision, then fudges when it blows up. He WILL NOT look behind that CEO statement.
He’s a really slippery and disingenuous customer. Arguing with him is like trying to nail jelly to a wall.
“He WILL NOT look behind that CEO statement.”
I stick to topic. The CEO statement clearly refutes the furphy of this article, which was that generators had been switched to biofuel and failed. The CEO said no generators failed. Another Heathrow source said they were all diesel anyway.
That’s how it goes here. A claim is made and clearly refuted. But no-one acknowledges that; instead it diverts into endless off topic griping about airport management, nothing to do with net zero. No-one, of course, tries to add up the cost of full backup to balance against the risk mitigated. I gently try to point out that the cost would be high.
Stokes: Do you know of any airports that have such a power station?
Tulsa International Airport. See above.
I am not an airport export as you clearly are not Nick Stokes as you admit. However, I would have thought there would have been a risk management process in place with separate systems having their own power replacement. For example, my son is an air traffic controller. ATC at the airport where he works has a backup generator sufficient to power ATC because it is a critical Service. Likewise with other critical systems. You can turn off escalators and lower lighting but the critical tasks have to have a proper risk management system in place. that does not require a standby power station. It requires critical services to manage their risks. Heathrow rather spectacularly failed.
Hazop and Hazan studies should have highlighted the fragility of operations at Heathrow and appropriate backup systems installed.
Net Zero 2050 is a programmed replacement of all hydrocarbon carbon fuels unless produced from “renewable” hydrocarbons. Using a bio-diesel in place of #2 diesel would be Net Zero compliant. The question is IF the “biomass” generator was compliant with the electrical grid requirements? If not, Net Zero compliance caused a malfeasance of practice.
So from what you described, the measures were not thought through or tested for confirmation of proof of concept.
Just like net zero fantasy.
Looks like it. Let’s roll it out and see if it works.
I don’t think the Net Zero plan is a robust as that.
It’s more like “Let’s hope we can roll it out, and then hope it’ll work, and hope we’ll not be around when it fails catastrophically.”
Rubbish! The substation apparently used to have a fossil-fueled backup system. Had it ever switched over successfully without a firewall failure?
Has any substation ever had a failure to switch over to a fossil-fueled backup system?
Is this the first time that a substation has tried to switch over to a Net-Zero-compliant backup system. Has any substation ever switched over to a Net-Zero-compliant backup system.
In short, was the failure to switch over to the Net-Zero-compliant backup system unique? Was this the first time it ever happened?
And was the failure of the firewall specifically related to the Net-Zero-compliant backup system?
Of course there is no link to net zero in all this.
Why do you suppose they got rid of their diesel backup generators? Answer: Net Zero.
There is no evidence that they did.
They got rid of the diesel fuel and replaced it with “vegetable oil”. Why? Answer: Net Zero.
“They got rid of the diesel fuel and replaced it with “vegetable oil”.”
No evidence. They did not.
Regardless, two generations ago when this experiment was tried on a lesser scale we knew about the limitations of ‘renewables’. I was teaching environmental assessment and management which had been politicalized to a lesser degree and/or was the beginning of what we have now. We also knew that the amount of energy to obtain hydrocarbons was increasing. All this nonsense obscures the real problems. I was just talking to my insurance agent about the problem on the Texas coast. Taxpayers subsidize coastal residents through Texas Windstorm which hides the incentive to face the real costs of dumb building. It’s a small version of Japan’s nuclear plant in a tsunami zone that keeps adding up.
My 2 year old Australian Labradoodle, Milo, exhibits a higher intelligence than your pathetic defence of the the undefendable crap from British Politicians.
Ghalfrunt,
despite the negatives to your post, i agree completely.
Stand by generation requires generators that can start and come on line in minutes, Biomass is generation type that uses steam turbines which cannot be used for stand by duty as they take very many hours to build steam and warm up the turbines before they can be loaded.
Power will also be supplied by uninteruptible power supplies for the time between loss of mains and the stand by genertaors coming on line and the user at worse may just see a small flicker. Power should not have been lost at all on most of the critical services.There is the possibility that a UPS may fail but in general the loss of mains should not affect operations.
I cannot comment on the computers requiring re configuration (that’s not my field) but they should not have lost power unless there was a signifiacnt failure of the stand by systems?
It will take some time to analyse what went wrong and then we can find out the truth, but the failure of a mains supply to the airport should not cause the devastation that occurred.
The auto-loader soup slinger also failed.
designed not to completely replace the grid but work alongside it
Obviously, if the grid falls over there’s nothing to work alongside.
Still, there was net zero flights in and out of Heathrow today.
Hmm. The end goal is in sight then?
Think of the CO2 sequestration no flights resulted in!
Definitely a win for Net Zero
/sarcasm to the extreme
“Obviously, if the grid falls over there’s nothing to work alongside.”
I wondered about that statement. It seemed a little contradictory.
The backup is supposed to work when the grid does not work. That’s the purpose of a backup.
It’s hard to believe that the Powers-That-Be allowed this situation to develop. One failed substation takes down the whole airport and disrupts air traffic all over the world.
The aftermath of this is going to be interesting.
And the backup should have been a no-break setup.
Why is there just ONE substation feeding the airport? I live in rural Kansas and my power feed is able to feed off of two different substations, one north of me and one east of me. They have to be switched but that’s not a reason for a 24 hour interruption in service. Critical services should have their *own* backups for at least 24 hours. My younger brother was involved for a time installing such systems in FAA operation locations. The major telephone company I worked at for 30 years had *all* critical services powered by battery strings designed to handle at least 8 hours of commercial outages. We had contracts with a number of companies to provide BIG portable diesel generators within 8 hours and with fuel providers to keep them running.
And Heathrow didn’t have the same thing? That’s just stupid.
There are three substations feeding Heathrow. But to different terminals. So they could of switch effected terminals to working substations. I don’t think they had anybody there who knew how to do it.
I don’t know what to say, what is wrong with Britain? They are better than this.
You are remembering a Britain that no longer exists.
Sad but true.
There are pockets of resistance…
A bit too much in one of those transformers.
Short circuits are actually a lack of resistance.
But nothing to do with the primary problem in this case.
Some of the power transformers in the UK are old – they have at least one that was installed in 1933. They are not supposed to be in service for decades.
It doesn’t help trying to push 80+Mw through a 75Mw transformer, and stupid power company’s offering cheap rates at that time to charge your EV!! Also changing the cooling oil, to a bio version that has a lower flash point. I look forward to the report, which no doubt will be a whitewash/lessons learnt affair.
Were better…
Story tip;
Children aren’t going to know what glaciers are… because of GHG emissions and models.
Earth’s glaciers ‘will not survive the 21st century’ scientists warn – as five of the past six years have seen the most rapid glacier retreat on record
Earth’s 275,000 glaciers currently store around 70 per cent of the world’s freshwater and are relied on by almost two billion people.
But to mark World Glacier Day on Friday, scientists now warn that glaciers in many parts of the world ‘will not survive the 21st century’.
A report from the World Meteorological Organization (WMO) found that five of the last six years have seen the fastest glacier retreat on record.
https://www.dailymail.co.uk/sciencetech/article-14522893/Earths-glaciers-melt.html
End of eternal ice: Many glaciers will not survive this century, climate scientists say
Glaciers in many regions will not survive the 21st century if they keep melting at the current rate, potentially jeopardising hundreds of millions of people living downstream, UN climate experts said on the first World Day for Glaciers.
https://news.un.org/en/story/2025/03/1161296
Community estimate of global glacier mass changes from 2000 to 2023
Glaciers are indicators of ongoing anthropogenic climate change1. Their melting leads to increased local geohazards, and impacts marine and terrestrial ecosystems, regional freshwater resources, and both global water and energy cycles. Together with the Greenland and Antarctic ice sheets, glaciers are essential drivers of present9, and future sea-level rise.
https://www.nature.com/articles/s41586-024-08545-z
Analysis of alternatives, again, is missing.
There is no mention of sublimation, for example.
There is also no mention of variable weather.
There is only “the sky is falling.”
Lots of scare raising scenarios with no discussion of reality or probability.
I recall in A. Gore’s “Inconvenient Truth” that the Himalayas were devoid of ice and snow and that was “proof” of global warming. Seems there is plenty of ice and snow today.
Are the glaciers disappearing permanently?
Let’s let the models project 65 years into the future for the answer.
/s
Trump needs to pull funding from the WMO.
They are not doing the core mission of weather.
I dunno, seems better than glaciers visibly advancing, swallowing forests, fields, and entire villages as they did around 1560-1600. Of course then as now, it was blamed on the sins of Man.
Correction –
“Children aren’t going to know what
glaciersfacts are”I worry that children might not know what stupid is after climate activists are gone.
I hope someone is preserving the record.
Don’t worry. Stupid is as perennial as the grass. They will come up with their own.
This comment pertains only to Antarctica. You need to read the vast amount of literature about the actual mechanisms in Antarctica affecting the loss of SMB. It is NOT the rise in atmospheric temperatures nor the mean state of ocean temperatures. It is the episodic incursion onto the continental shelves of relatively warm waters of the CDW. There is also a growing body of research that geothermal activity has a role in basal melting of glaciers in the WAIS. Even IPCC6 identifies lack of consensus and significant uncertainties about the dynamics involved in loss of SMB in Antarctica.
https://www.nature.com/articles/s41598-019-53190-6
But… Think of the children!
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Think_of_the_children
But… Think of the children!
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Think_of_the_children
Zero flights out of Heathrow–Imagine all the carbon savings!
Also, fewer (that which shall not be named).
What a load of codswallop!. No one knows if any generator failed, let alone whather there was a change to biofuel!
The Heathrow chief executive, Thomas Woldbye, said:
“We have lost power equal to that of a mid-sized city and our backup systems have been working as they should but they are not sized to run the entire airport.”
This was in the article which you missed apparently:
Non e of that has anything to do with net zero, or climte change, or any of the things folks here normally bang on about. It is about airport management.
They were infected by the idiotic NET ZERO delusional propaganda promoted by the English government, the media and a small slate of pseudoscientists who blow the climate change scam into the realm of fantasy.
There is nothing there about net zero. Someone with wonderful hindsight says they should have had a full backup system (which would be a midsize power station). OK, but they never had one. Nothing to do with net zero.
Most airports, like hospitals, shopping centres, etc., DO have good no-break power backup systems. Certainly all Australian major airports had decent, well-designed no-break backup systems that worked very well.
It is standard 101 stuff that backup generators are NOT to be dependent on the power grid to work.
Absolutely! The no-break backup was located very close to the main terminal building and as far as I recall, was not connected to the grid. The control systems were all running off batteries, with attached chargers, so they didn’t miss a beat.
Now you are simply LYING!
HEATHROW’S NET ZERO PLAN
LINK
The post you quickly forgot:
Diesel generators were replaced for only one possible reason, and it was step down in reliability and affordability, but YOU will deny it because you are in total denial in WHY they were replaced by wood burning generators that has a built-in slow reaction time to providing power.
Your silly avoidance of the only reason why the massive airport downgraded their back up quality to satisfy a Climate change fantasy.
“LYING”
“It appears…” says Mr Tice, who has spoken to an unnamed “aviation expert”. But, as I have quoted,in several places, Mr Tice has gone off half-cocked. Quotes from elsewhere in thew thread, from Heathrow sources, who actually know:
From the Heathrow CEO, generators did not fail:
“We have lost power equal to that of a mid-sized city and our backup systems have been working as they should but they are not sized to run the entire airport.”
“A Heathrow source said its back-up diesel generators and uninterruptable power supplies in place all operated as expected.”
Yes, I know what the addled CEO said that you quoted but somehow the 200,000 people were stranded for a while because there was no power available where it matters the most, that is an abject failure in my view a reality you and that CEO fails to observe which has resulted in a great financial loss because they couldn’t replace old transformers that were barely keeping up with electricity demands anymore.
Notice you ignored the LINK was it because they weakened their back up power set up that you apparently cherish because it fits an ideology you so dearly love?
They do have a NET ZERO plan that have been posted twice in the thread which you have ignored both times, could it be because it destroys your silly argument…….
You have never quoted what it actually said that is relevant. But what matters is what was actually there, and if the CEO says, with inquiry pending, that the generators were diesel, then they were.
The backup would be a very large power station (power = that of medium sized city). backup power would not start instantly therefore all systems would shut down abd need resetting/rebooting as in fact happened.
In June 2019, the UK Government committed to reducing the UK’s net greenhouse gas emissions by at least 100% by 2050, compared to 1990 levels. This target is known as net zero, and milestones towards moving to a net zero emissions economy are now set down in UK law.
In June 2019, the UK Government committed to reducing the UK’s net greenhouse gas emissions by at least 100% by 2050, compared to 1990 levels. This target is known as net zero, and milestones towards moving to a net zero emissions economy are now set down in UK law.
document from 2014 has biomass generator (combined heat and power) already operational i.e. 5 years prior to net zero
https://assets.publishing.service.gov.uk/media/5a7dbe83ed915d2acb6ede03/15-operational-risk–lhr-nwr.pdf
LOL, you fail to look at the big picture, the INTERNATIONAL Airport one of the world largest was totally dependent on a SINGLE substation for power and the greenie back up was too small and too slow to generate the needed power up for the massive Airport.
Diesels back up power kicks in SECONDS while wood burning pellet back up power would take a while (hours) to ramp up to the necessary generating power curves to meet the needs of the airport thus would have failed by default.
LINK
By the way the UK’s effort is irrelevant because a single year of CO2 emission output increase in China erases 10 years of CO2 emission reductions, it was never worth the expense to develop a failure for no discernable change in the postulated warm forcing effect reduction.
The UK wasted ALL of their money for nothing, pathetic!
” the INTERNATIONAL Airport one of the world largest was totally dependent on a SINGLE substation”
Not true …
There are 3 electricity substations supplying Heathrow… North Hyde (the one with the fire and furthest away) East Bedfont and Longford.
Also, there’s a 11kV link from the rail line into the terminal
The airport shuts down over a single failed substation, which shows it was indeed overly dependent on a single substation as the backup power was grossly inadequate.
200,000 people knows this firsthand as they were stranded there.
Tommy,
that makes no sense whatsoever, the National Grid does not provide back up as such, it is up to the customer to provide their own system to safeguard critical systems from a power failure. This system certainly will have an uninterupptable power supply to transition between mains failure and the coming on line of the stand by genertaors so critical systems should not notice the loss of mains.
I never said that I am focusing on the inadequate back up set up when the main grid fails that should have kicked in fast.
Stop deflecting. An airport like Heathrow either has backup or it doesn’t. If someone screwed up and didn’t properly size the backup, then someone DID screw up.
Would you expect a hospital or fire department or police to not have complete backup? Most would not.
When I was supervising power in the telephone company, we tested the entire central office backup once a month to insure all the switches worked correctly. Batteries were only sized for short term so emergency workers could arrive and cut in the backup generators.
There’s a deflection. The headline blazes “net zero blamed“. Now folks are just griping about airport management.
The jury is out on whether there were any specific decisions made in pursuit of net zero which had any effect on this outage.
But if you read their net zero strategy document its clear they are living in never-never land. If it really reflects the level of their thinking and planning and prioritizing it is not surprising that events showed up their airport management so dramatically.
They are putting solar panels on Terminal 2, for instance. They are using non-carbon fuels for fire training. Right, got your eye firmly on the ball there! As for the passages about aviation fuel, words fail one.
The obsession with net zero doesn’t just lead to individual bad decisions. Its also a whole change of attitude, about what you focus on, what your priorities are, how you evaluate things.
Take as another UK example the little town of Thetford, whose council is seeking to make them a net zero town. Do you think this results in the same level of attention being paid to garbage collection? Not likely! Do you think that a health service which thinks changing the composition of its anesthetics to eliminate greenhouse gases ‘because climate’ is worth spending time on is thinking with the same care and attention to patient welfare and operational safety?
“The jury is out on”
Nonsense! There is no evidence.
I would not say ‘no evidence’. Nothing more than suggestive, that’s for sure.
But you are missing my point. An airport whose management team deluded enough to adopt and publish their net zero strategy document does not have its eyes on the ball.
Just like a health service obsessed with GHGs is not fully focused on patient care. A town council obsessed with reaching net zero for its town is not focused on garbage collection etc.
For that matter, a country which does 1% of global emissions and has a political class obsessed with net zero is similarly not focused on the welfare of its citizens.
There are masses of people in management positions in the UK not doing their day jobs properly because they are obsessed with net zero related initiatives they have invented, none of which will have any effect on global emissions or climate.
There is no climate crisis, the UK cannot run on wind and solar or get to net zero, Heathrow cannot get to net zero either, and if it did it would have no effect on global emissions or climate. But the deluded attempts to do these things can do lots of collateral damage.
Was there such damage in this case? I don’t know, but it seems plausible based on the full-on idiocy of their strategy document.
They should tear it up, and get back to running an airport.
“Was there such damage in this case? I don’t know, but it seems plausible based on the full-on idiocy of their strategy document.”
There is no plausible evidence that they had changed their generators to biofuel, or indeed that any generators failed.
Instead there are explicit statements from Heathrow management that the backup used diesel generators and they all worked as they should.
“our backup systems have been working as they should but they are not sized to run the entire airport.””
Maybe that’s why they talked about their backup system “running alongside” the grid. In other words, the backup was not intended to be sufficient to run the whole airport.
So?
It was not a true back up is what you didn’t understand.
I understand that the airport management experts here think it wasn’t enough. But it has nothing to do with net zero.
Wrong the system was downgraded from reliable diesel…
… to a Net-Zero compliant system
Exactly!
“So?”
So the airport was paralyzed and the adverse effects rippled around the world.
How much did this airport interruption cost the UK and everyone else?
How much would adequate airport backup have cost?
There appears to be a lack of imagination on the part of the UK planners.
And a whole article, with its thread of comments based on a statement by Richard Tice, who is not known for letting actual facts interfere with a snappy soundbite.
“…Heathrow is moving from diesel back-up generators to biomass and the system failed “at the first time of asking”…”
First of all what is green about cutting down trees and shipping them across the ocean to produce power? This disregard for our forests just proves that it is all about the money. Secondly, biomass has a L-O-N-G startup time whereas natural gas powered diesels start generation within minutes or even seconds and are relatively free of pollution.
I’m thinking that reporters have confused biomass with biofuel in this story.
So diesel generators switched to use vegetable oil instead.
Here is the heathrow net zero strategy document:
https://www.heathrow.com/content/dam/heathrow/web/common/documents/company/heathrow-2-0-sustainability/futher-reading/Heathrow%20Net%20Zero%20Plan%20FINAL.pdf
See section 8, they are considering de-dieseling the emergency generators.
Also, as an aside, on your cruise ship and even cargo ships, by law, the emergency generator is run once per week, checking starting and basic running. Once per month, it is actually switched over onto the switchboard to ensure it can supply its rated load. By law.
And another thing, a bit more related, do jet aircraft have just one generator? Thought not.
It appears Sadiq Khan was advised of the poor condition of transformers in the North Hyde substation in 2022.
https://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-14523119/firefighters-major-update-heathrow-airport-met-police-cause.html
“has been running at 106.2 per cent of capacity”
This needs more discussion. What’s the normal capacity?
All transformers are deigned based on heat rating. Most will run at 110% for a long time without issue providing the ambient temperature iOS lower than design.
The average age of Transmission transformers in the UK is around 45 years. The oldest still running was manufacture in 1933. There are about 10 of the transformers that have heating issues. The one that exploded was likely down for replacement but just too hard to change because it is in a critical application.
You cannot have all resources devoted to NetZero and still maintain your existing equipment. And the amount of equipment that needs to be maintained will increase 3-fold over the next 20 years if the UK makes any progress toward NetZero.
Thanks for the information, Rick. I learn something new around here every day! 🙂
Acquiring new transformers could be a problem in the U.S., according to a commission on EMP a few years ago, that said we were looking at long lead times to replace critical infrastructure and suggested the U.S.start working on correcting the problem at a cost of about $3 billion. Which seems rather cheap considering the essential nature of having enough electrical infrastructure to keep things running.
Maybe we could use some of that wasted EPA $20 billion that Trump is trying to claw back and put some of it into building grid infrastructure.
I don’t know if the UK situation is similar, but I suspect it is. Do they have to buy new transformers from China?
Running at 106% would mean a constant stream of alarms to the SCADA operator monitoring this part of the system. Did they silence or inhibit alarms? And a “backup” system that “runs along side the grid” isn’t a backup system at all. Absolute foolishness to remove provenly reliable diesel backup generation running on a simple ATO switch. And there are fools here trying to hand wave it away as the net zero failure it is. Shameless drones.
I hope this is the catalyst to wake up the Net Zero crowd.
North Hyde substation houses transformers and switchgear, no power is generated there and there really isn’t much combustible material on site:
https://www.google.com/maps/@51.4996402,-0.4112212,190m/data=!3m1!1e3?authuser=0&entry=ttu&g_ep=EgoyMDI1MDMxOS4xIKXMDSoASAFQAw%3D%3D
They might have installed backup batteries since that picture was taken, and judging from the strength of the fire and the time it took to put it out I strongly suspect that to be the case. I seriously doubt that all the airport facilities, the terminals and especially air traffic control would not have diesel generators that kick in when the power goes out, a biomass plant would take too long to get up to temperature. I can’t see why they would shut the entire airport down for a substation fire which is two miles away and not the only power source for the airport. There is a whole lot we are not being told.
Large tanks of hot oil make impressive bombs when there is an internal fault.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-yYGoCPRHgg
Correctly installed transformer bays will have large blast walls and often fire sprinkler protection. The concrete bund around the transformer is required to be filled with crushed rock to hold oil that can flow from a ruptured dank to stop it from spreading fire.
Thanks, Rick. Learned another thing I didn’t know! 🙂
How can a fire wall fail? Did they forget the rebars?
Luckily that crap failed on such a large scale and with fairly harmless results. Over 200000 stranded airline passengers is certainly annoying, now imagine a large hospital having the same type of “green” backup system failing…
While Heathrow claims to be on a pathway to Net Zero, Airbus and Boeing can’t keep up with demand for new conventional fuel jet airliners.
Airbus has given up on its near-term plans for a hydrogen fueled airliner by 2035. Boeing never really had a plan for a hydrogen fueled airliner.
Sustainable aviation fuel (SAF) is supposed to play a large part in Heathrow’s plans to reach Net Zero. But no one has a clue how to economically produce the huge volumes of SAF needed to replace conventional jet fuels.
In any case, every pound spent on Net Zero in the UK is done at the expense of a reliable energy future, and therefore at the expense of a reliable economic future.
Oopsie.Somebody in the approval bureau wasn’t an engineer.
Net Zero is total lunacy, but come on guys he is just another halfwit politician talking crap!
This was nothing to do with Net Zero. The main airport equipment is fully backed up and was not impacted by the failure anyway.
What happened was that a large Grid substation serving some terminal buildings failed, and the size of the energy requirement for those buildings meant that dual provision was not deemed cost effective. That would have resulted in failure no matter what geneation technique was ussd…
Biomass as in kitchen scraps or clear-cut forests in North America?
I knew that net zero objectives and Ed Miliband the net zero lunatic and zealot had to be the culprit. I bet the investigation will blame everyone else but him.
Bloomberg has this article on the Heathrow incident:
https://www.bloomberg.com/opinion/articles/2025-03-21/heathrow-shutdown-highlights-dangers-of-a-single-point-of-failure