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London's Heathrow Airport announces complete shutdown due to power outage

cnn.com

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Re: London's Heathrow Airport announces complete shutdown due to power outage

#101

Post by hypeatei »

michh wrote: post #94

Funny, how we're all suddenly privy to highly classified information. Yesterday, if you'd have publicly shared this one substation is enough to take down Heathrow for an entire day, you'd have been disappeared by the British spooks for sharing extremely sensitive information threatening national security and you'd probably end up behind bars for over a decade. Today, we all just know because it happened to catch fire…

Taking out any power infrastructure is going to cause significant problems, no? I don't think that's a national secret in any country.

I get it, all modern intelligence apparatus is draconian but this take doesn't really make sense IMO.

Re: London's Heathrow Airport announces complete shutdown due to power outage

#102

Post by FreebasingLLMs »

michh wrote: post #94

Funny, how we're all suddenly privy to highly classified information. Yesterday, if you'd have publicly shared this one substation is enough to take down Heathrow for an entire day, you'd have been disappeared by the British spooks for sharing extremely sensitive information threatening national security and you'd probably end up behind bars for over a decade. Today, we all just know because it happened to catch fire…

[dead]

Re: London's Heathrow Airport announces complete shutdown due to power outage

#103

Post by speakeron »

oliwarner wrote: post #43
blindriver wrote: post #10

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.

Haven'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 secur…

> Heathrow is massive and uses a lot of power (1-2MWh/day)

It's 3 orders of magnitude more: 1-2GWh/day.

https://www.heathrow.com/content/dam/heathrow/web/common/doc...

Re: London's Heathrow Airport announces complete shutdown due to power outage

#104

Post by vixen99 »

crazygringo wrote: post #50
blindriver wrote: post #10

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.

Why 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.

Whether mere incompetence from those whose job it is to check such installations for failure or bad actors, other 'bad actors' will have gained a useful indication of how vulnerable Britain’s infrastructure is to attack. It's reckoned > 290K passengers have flights cancelled or diverted and ensuring chaos for days.

Re: London's Heathrow Airport announces complete shutdown due to power outage

#105

Post by michh »

hypeatei wrote: post #101
michh wrote: post #94

Funny, how we're all suddenly privy to highly classified information. Yesterday, if you'd have publicly shared this one substation is enough to take down Heathrow for an entire day, you'd have been disappeared by the British spooks for sharing extremely sensitive information threatening national security and you'd probably end up behind bars for over a decade. Today, we all just know because it happened to catch fire…

Taking out any power infrastructure is going to cause significant problems, no? I don't think that's a national secret in any country. I get it, all modern intelligence apparatus is draconian but this take doesn't really make sense IMO.

There's "significant problems" and there's taking out *the* most important airport in the country. Yes, there are other airports but this one matters most. Both in terms of (inter)national perception and in terms of real damage to the economy.

From an US perspective it'd be like taking out JFK, LAX and ATL at the same time. But even then, it doesn't really compare.

Re: London's Heathrow Airport announces complete shutdown due to power outage

#106

Post by [deleted] »

windward wrote: post #58
LatteLazy wrote: post #41

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The problem is they’re all maxed out. So if one closes unexpectedly the others can’t just pick up the slack because they have no room…

So the solution to avoiding a few days of a LHR-sized gap in airport throughput is to build a permanent LHR-sized surplus?

[deleted]

Re: London's Heathrow Airport announces complete shutdown due to power outage

#107

Post by belter »

blibble wrote: post #83
belter wrote: post #62

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It'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-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 substa…

the utility are expecting to go back on at 3pm... (edit: and are back)

Yeap: https://www.nationalgrid.com/incidents

Re: London's Heathrow Airport announces complete shutdown due to power outage

#108

Post by everfrustrated »

pjc50 wrote: post #89
traceroute66 wrote: post #29

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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 th…

So .. why are people trying to build new datacentre space in London rather than somewhere a bit further away and less expensive? Easier to put the datacentre near the power and run some fiber rather than the other way round, surely? The expense is unpleasant, but the money has to come from somewhere, and the user paying is easier to justify than all the other bill-payers collectively or the taxpayer.

The UK has a weird National Grid system whereby the cost of electricity is the same nationwide (except Scotland)

So datacenters build in London as the connection/electricity price is same as building in rural areas and they'd obviously prefer being closer to users in London.

Re: London's Heathrow Airport announces complete shutdown due to power outage

#109

Post by milleramp »

belter wrote: post #93
lo_fye wrote: post #87

Is the power outage due to the fire? If so, what was the fire due to? How far back do we need to go on this? the Big Bang?

Old oil transformer. The insulation breaks down in old transformers. It happens sometimes. No need to involve Russian conspiracy theories at this point in time... :-) "How to Prevent Substation Fires": https://www.oilbarriers.com/blog/suppress-substation-fires/ https://youtu.be/2np745xyQ7o

Probably, but definitely check for bullet holes. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Metcalf_sniper_attack

Re: London's Heathrow Airport announces complete shutdown due to power outage

#110

Post by basisword »

blindriver wrote: post #10

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.

What 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).
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