18
OPINION
A powerful shot
in the arm
Chris Wellfair, Projects Director,
Secure I.T. Environments Ltd
www.siteltd.co.uk
Why the recent power cut affecting
the south-east of the UK should be
a wake up call for every company
Friday 9th August was an embarrassing day for the National
Grid. When the power cut struck that evening, it threw the
road and rail transport system into chaos, including traffic
lights. It was reported by the Guardian, “About 500,000
customers in Wales, South West England and the Midlands
were affected and 300,000 customers in South East England
were left without power, the local distributors said. A further
110,000 in Yorkshire and North East England were affected,
alongside about 26,000 in north-west England, according to
the electricity distributors in those areas.”
The root cause of the problem was apparently two
generators failing. The failure of both at the same time
led to the frequency on the network dropping below 49Hz,
which in turn caused other parts of the network to shut
down. Distribution network operators reported that demand
availability was restored by 6:30pm, but the problems didn’t
end there. Euston station in London was closed for a time
due to high numbers of passengers, and despite power being
available trains had to be ‘reset’ by engineers, meaning rail
services remained impacted for hours.
The shot in the arm
Any data centre manager would have had their heart skip
a few beats that afternoon. Soon after checking whether
everything was OK with their sites, many have subsequently
told me about the other thoughts that ran through their
mind at the time.
“When was the last time we ran thorough tests and
maintenance across all of our power infrastructure?”
Most will privately admit that translates to, “If we’d been
affected, would we be in the clear? Were our testing and
maintenance processes up to scratch?” We all know why
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