12 ms·
Seems like a national security issue if there’s a single point of failure a few miles away that can take down one of Europe’s largest airports and global air tr
by blindriver 2y ago
Seems like a national security issue if there’s a single point of failure a few miles away that can take down one of Europe’s largest airports and global air travel.
- rich_sasha 2y agoThis was my first thought. My second thought is, UK infra is crumbling so bad, this is really most likely just business as usual...
- gambiting 2y agoIt's all been privatized and they don't care about anything other than maintaing profits so of course we're seeing the effects now. It's also why every single water provider in the UK is dumping raw sewage into our rivers and when the government tries to make them fix it they cry about how that will eat into their profits and how it's unfair.
- blitzar 2y agoGetting bailed out by the government because you ran it into the ground is the plan when you buy one of these assets.
- ta1243 2y agoPrivitise the profits, socialise the losses. Makes perfect sense. Also makes sense to pay for enough brainwashing to enable this.
- Devilspawn6666 2y agoNope... The UK electricity grid is nationalised - it's run by the National Energy System Operator (NESO).
- gambiting 2y agoThe top level grid - yes. Regional operators are private. https://weownit.org.uk/public-ownership/energy https://weownit.org.uk/public-ownership/energy
- traceroute66 2y ago> The UK electricity grid is nationalised That is only a very recent change though, 1 October 2024[1]. Before that it was very much privatised, 1990–2024[2]. Technically in the background I suspect you will find very little has changed since October 2024 since (a) not enough time has passed (b) things like TUPE means you will end up with most of the same people doing the same things under a different logo, at least for a little while until changes get phased in. [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/National_Energy_System_Operator https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/National_Energy_System_Operato... [2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/National_Grid_(Great_Britain) https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/National_Grid_(Great_Britain)
- andrewinardeer 2y agoThis crossed my mind. Was it an adversarial foreign nation state undertaking sabatgoe a la French train network on the opening day of the Olympics?
- evgen 2y agoFew people actually include necessary infrastructure into their threat model and almost no one is willing to pay the cost of building effective redundancy into the system. I could probably shut down any airport in the world with a few late-night firebombs tossed into the right substation. And no, it is not a national security issue. There are three other airports in the London region, plus RAF Norholt and RAF Kenly inside the M25 ring.
- smashah 2y agoHeathrow is a significant part of the UK economy, what is with the dismissive attitude? I don't imagine an american being so dismissive about JFK being taken offline.
- evgen 2y agoA significant part of the economy perhaps, but 'national security threat' is a somewhat higher bar IMHO. LHR has a role of convenience, but not necessity. If JFK was shut down for a day or two and had limited operations for another week it would be inconvenient but would barely register in the national economic stats. I am on a flight heading out of Heathrow on Sunday for work travel and have booked an alternative out of Gatwick just in case. Inconvenient, but not a massive problem. What will be telling here is how quickly things adapt to the disruption. I expect to feel more impact from the loss of power to businesses in the surrounding area that are involved in air shipment than in the flight disruptions (e.g. cold chain logistics and inventory management for just-in-time processes that warehouse near the airport.)
- traceroute66 2y ago> What will be telling here is how quickly things adapt to the disruption. Most people won't have to. The substation area covers 62,000 properties, but only 4,800 are actually without power as a result of the incident. In addition they are expecting restoration of power by 15:00 same-day.[1] [1] https://powertrack.ssen.co.uk/powertrack#QQ0573 https://powertrack.ssen.co.uk/powertrack#QQ0573
- hackerbeat 2y ago[flagged]
- benterix 2y agoIt might well be, but you don't have any proof of that. In Lithuania it took months of investigations to catch the culprits, analyze all evidence and make that statement. I can imagine in the UK it can take even more.
- hackerbeat 2y ago[flagged]
- dylan604 2y agoIn the US, they use the tactic of electing a president. I'd rather have no power for a few hours
- Calwestjobs 2y agoFinishing investigation is not point in time when people knew it was Putnam.
- Nextgrid 2y agoThe UK is very good at sabotaging itself in order to enrich corporations/shareholders/politicians/oligarchs. No foreign influence necessary.
- Calwestjobs 2y agoFor Brexit - facebook and cambridge analytica got fined.... that is not UK sabotaging itself. US tools are very successful in UK because UK uses same freaking language as US does.
- Nextgrid 2y agoI wasn't talking about that at all - I was talking about bending over backwards when it comes to corporations or any kind of moneyed interests. We've pissed away shit tons of public money into shareholder pockets and all we've got left is insolvent infrastructure companies (whether it's water or sewage or transport) we now have to bail out with even more public money.
- traceroute66 2y ago> Seems like a national security issue if there’s a single point of failure No. Its not. Its the fact that the decades of under-investment in power distribution infrastructure is coming home to roost. Its no secret there's little to no "fat" in the UK grid system. Hence it has difficulty coping with black-swan events such as this. Anyone who buys datacentre space in London knows the reason prices have gone through the roof in recent years. Its becasue the grid simply cannot get the extra capacity to where it is needed. And this is before energy prices started rising due to the UK's electricity being mostly dependent on gas (previous governments having sold off gas-storage facilities to build houses on the land instead). That's why its also a pain in the backside to build new banks of EV fast chargers anywhere in the UK. Getting the power there involves long, protracted, discussions with the grid followed by payments of large amounts of money and a written promise to the grid that you agree to load-shedding at any time if necessary. I suspect you will find its not a single point of failure either. Its just that Hayes is a high-demand area, so see above for lack of excess capacity .... if one site goes boom, the other will struggle to take on 100% load.
- apetresc 2y agoYou keep saying “No it’s not” and then describing exactly what most people would call “a single point of failure” and “a national security issue” in a lot more words.
- traceroute66 2y ago> You keep saying “No it’s not” and then describing exactly what most people would call “a single point of failure” and “a national security issue” in a lot more words. What are you on about ? Its not a national security issue. Full stop. There are many other airports in the London area and elesewhere in the UK. Heathrow is a civilian airport, not a military one. 99% of air cargo to the UK does NOT come to Heathrow. Its not a single point of failure either. Sure, for those TEMPORARILY affected it might feel that way. But businesses with contingency plannign will simply invoke their DR plans and go elsewhere ... flights will divert, people will WFH instead of going the offices, people will have to travel to a supermarket a little bit further away. Also, regarding "single point of failure", see this website[1]... 62,000 customers affected but only 4,800 without power[1]. Not quite a SPOF then is it ! Also, you want guaranteed N+1 resilience at grid level, who do you think is going to pay for that ? Most people would be happy with the grid sorting out its capacity issues at N level, one thing at a time my friend. [1] https://powertrack.ssen.co.uk/powertrack#QQ0573 https://powertrack.ssen.co.uk/powertrack#QQ0573
- izacus 2y agoHeathrow isn't the only airport near London so redundancy is already built
- SideburnsOfDoom 2y agoYes and no. The vast majority of commercial flights what would have landed at Heathrow today won't be landing at a different London airport instead. There isn't spare, redundant capacity for that. Instead the flights will be cancelled. https://www.thelocal.dk/20250321/sas-cancels-flights-from-nordic-countries-to-london-after-heathrow-fire https://www.thelocal.dk/20250321/sas-cancels-flights-from-no... https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/articles/cly6e24q8glo https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/articles/cly6e24q8glo
- izacus 2y agoBut that's not a national security concern. That's just an annoyance. For national security London and UK can scramble several other airports for important flights.
- SideburnsOfDoom 2y agoIf by "national security issue" we mean "can the UK move military aircraft and important people" then no, Heathrow isn't key at all. There are other airbases and airports. If we mean that a long outage would have economic impact and is hard to find the capacity elsewhere, then yes. As per grandparent post "take down one of Europe’s largest airports and global air travel".
- izacus 2y agoYeah well, not everything that annoys people and loses bussinesses money is a "national security issue", no matter how far the US overton window shifted on that matter.
- TheOtherHobbes 2y ago
- oliwarner 2y agoHaven't they seen Die Hard 2?! /s Grid power is hard. Even with local generation failovers for air and ground safety systems, Heathrow is massive and uses a lot of power (1-2MWh/day). It's hard to route around that sort of demand. I don't disagree that this is something that shouldn't happen, but that's what we say for almost every preventable grid failure. I think this is a national inconvenience rather than a security issue though. There are short-term alternatives which will be used.
- LargoLasskhyfv 2y ago> Heathrow is massive and uses a lot of power (1-2MWh/day). That number doesn't seem that high, compared to a single high-speed train running at about 300kph or above. Or lets say all of the London Tube/DLR. Seems like nothing, actually.
- p1mrx 2y agoYeah, that can't be right. You can tow a 100 kW generator (2.4 MWh/day) with a pickup truck.
- zimpenfish 2y ago[0] suggests (without a useful link and my searching has not found one) that Heathrow is doing 460GWh annually. Presumably[1] that equates to 1.25GWh daily (which could be where the 1-2MWh/day came from - a simple unit error)? [0] https://www.bloomberg.com/opinion/articles/2025-03-21/heathrow-shutdown-highlights-dangers-of-a-single-point-of-failure https://www.bloomberg.com/opinion/articles/2025-03-21/heathr... [1] I know precisely nothing about power consumption of large systems but dividing the annual figure by 365 seems plausible.
- oliwarner 2y agoYup I think I missed a comma when originally reading the sustainability report. They buy-in an average of 747 MWh a day (2022). The point I was stumbling to try and make was that Heathrow is dense. Just under a GWh a day delivered to a 1200ha site isn't going to get a natural diversity of supply, especially compared to a rail system does.
- crazygringo 2y agoWhy would it be a national security issue? Military airports are working fine. National security doesn't rely on civilian airports. And communications networks aren't disrupted or anything. This isn't enabling terrorism. It's absolutely a huge economic issue. Economic-political. But I'm not seeing a national security angle here.
- hn_throwaway_99 2y agoWhile I agree that saying this is a big national security issue is overstating it, if an adversary can cripple you economically because you have a few single points of failure, that is a national security issue
- ziddoap 2y ago"[...] national security is widely understood to include also non-military dimensions, such as the security from terrorism, minimization of crime, economic security, energy security, environmental security, food security, and cyber-security." https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/National_security https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/National_security Large-scale issues that impact the economy are typically under the "national security" umbrella. It's a term that uses the broad definition of "security". Whether this incident qualifies, I don't know, but "national security" is definitely not just about military stuff. Just like how "food security" isn't about physically protecting food from damage.
- paganel 2y agoWhile I agree with you, this is a huge issue with the term "security" and what it means to "provide security" as a government, because at some point almost everything can be labeled as a "national security threat" if it happens to be against the political desiderata of any one controlling said governments at a certain moment in time. I feel like this sort of "security reflex" only got worst after 9/11, it was already there before even before that point but starting with Bush jr. it cascading into lots and lots of non-military related areas.
- 2y ago
- belter 2y agoIt's not looking good and the other alternative airports in the UK are at full capacity: "Heathrow Doesn't Know When Power Will Be Back, Days of Disruption Expected" - https://www.newsweek.com/heathrow-airport-fire-counterterrorism-police-called-report-2048459 https://www.newsweek.com/heathrow-airport-fire-counterterror... If the entire transformer is lost, procuring replacement transformers for substations can take from several months to years. Insulation failures are relatively common in older power substations. It seems someone should have done a better job preparing disaster recovery scenarios for Heathrow. Edit: BBC reporting "some power" restored on a "interim basis" as the power company is now using a different substation. It would be curious if the increased effort on other substations would then cause further power failures...A bit like the postmortems of global cloud providers, where taking a node out, causes increased stress on other nodes...
- quickthrowman 2y agoOne would hope the utility would have a spare transformer or two sitting around, I guess that’s not guaranteed tho. MV and HV transformers have extremely long lead times like you said.
- blibble 2y agothe utility are expecting to go back on at 3pm... (edit: and are back)
- belter 2y agoYeap: https://www.nationalgrid.com/incidents https://www.nationalgrid.com/incidents
- basisword 2y agoWhat would you suggest as a backup? Supposedly they have generators/redundancy but the place requires so much power that that can only maintain critical functions (I guess ensuring incoming flights can still land and taxi in the mins after the power loss).
- crote 2y agoOne potential solution is to add a connection to a second substation. For example, Laleham is a few miles south of Heathrow, and can be fed without sharing any infrastructure with North Hyde. I doubt it's worth the additional expenses, though. Transformers exploding like this is extremely rare, and the main reason this one has such an impact is because the firefighting effort required the other two transformers to be shut down. Investing in better physical separation between the individual transformers is probably a way more effective investment.
- richardwhiuk 2y agoThere’s also the issue that if one trips, it’ll like cause havoc with the other one.
- belter 2y agoJFK had similar issues and it's easy to see, still has the same single point of failures: "Power outage cancels, diverts flights at Kennedy Airport" - https://apnews.com/article/new-york-city-power-outages-eb88322b4643bc179641694b715fbb56 https://apnews.com/article/new-york-city-power-outages-eb883... https://www.gao.gov/assets/gao-23-105203.pdf https://www.gao.gov/assets/gao-23-105203.pdf
- graemep 2y agobut its expensive to fix single points of failure so lets just hope for the best.