Parade of Probes Underway to Pin Blame for Britain’s Blackout
The lightning strike that triggered Britain’s biggest blackout in more than a decade has also spawned a flurry of investigations by groups ranging from the government to railway operators.
National Grid Plc’s preliminary report published by the regulator Ofgem on Tuesday indicated that lightning was the initial cause for the Aug. 9 event. That quelled some of the early blame in the national press that the blackout was due to the variability of wind farms, a symbol of the country’s increasingly diversified electricity system.
Lightning strikes cause faults on the transmission network throughout the year, but usually don’t set off the chaos seen earlier this month, according to Keith Bell, professor of electrical engineering at the University of Strathclyde.
“Provided network protection operates correctly, no generation should be lost from the system as a consequence of such faults,” Bell said. “One main question now is exactly why protection or control equipment at the two generators responded as they did and caused the loss of generation.”
Over the coming weeks, a wave of probes are set to get to the bottom of what exactly happened and who is to blame. Here is a roster of who’s involved and what’s coming:
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