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A report from the GB National Energy System Operator (NESO) on the recent blackout at Heathrow Airport has sobering news for sectors, like freight distribution networks, that are among the UK’s 13 Critical National Infrastructure (CNI) sectors.
These sectors (with freight within the transport sector) are described by the National Protective Service Authority as “critical elements of infrastructure whose loss or compromise could severely impact the delivery of essential services or have significant impact on national security, national defence, or the functioning of the state”. However, the report says CNI sites are not known to electricity networks and they are not treated differently from any other customer in having supplies restored.
NESO said “there is currently no explicit cross-sector requirement on CNI operators to ensure CNI resilience to power disruption, or to set standards of energy resilience”. In fact, electricity system and network operators are prohibited through their licence conditions from discriminating between customers, “which means that a CNI operator is not treated any differently in terms of connection, service, or restoration from any other domestic or commercial customer”. What is more, “energy network operators are not aware whether customers connected to their networks are classified as CNI”.
It said, “In light of the increasing criticality of energy to all other CNI sectors, this is a gap” that should be addressed.
The NESO review highlighted the criticality of energy to CNI, “and the significant value that could be realised in bringing together cross-sector parties to build relationships, and, ultimately, form a shared understanding of energy resilience”.
It recommended that For every CNI site, incident management protocols should explicitly include plans around loss or impairment of energy supplies. CNI or essential service sites should consider diversifying their electricity connections so that the loss of one supply point does not impact the entire site, and they should be able to switch load quickly between supply points.
The NESO report adds, “while the 13 identified CNI sectors each provide crucial services, some sectors are also interdependent, and energy is a common dependency across all sectors”. A new CNI Knowledge Base is collecting and structuring CNI data and will map cross-sector dependencies, but the Cabinet Office, which is leading the process, reported it is not currently known how long the mapping will take, “as it relies on full contributions from all lead government departments, and significant voluntary input from CNI operators”.
The NESO report found that the initiating cause of a fire at the west London substation serving Heathrow and other areas was moisture ingress to the transformer – something that had first been noted in 2018. Among other issues the substation, which dated back several decades, did not meet recent design standards on fire protection.
The report also found that instead of having a ring-main, the on-site network at Heathrow required hours of reconfiguration to allow it to operate using power from other in-feeds.
