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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

#141

Post by Symbiote »

seabass-labrax wrote: post #128
Symbiote wrote: post #57

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I think it's likely the Elizabeth Line branch is suspended because the stations are closed, and the stations are closed because there's no power to the buildings.

The Elizabeth line is fully electrified, so why wouldn't the issue be power to the trains themselves rather than the stations?

Other trains are running on the main line through the area. It's 25kV electrification, there's plenty of distance between feeder substations.

National Rail say [1] "An unadvertised shuttle service is running from Heathrow Terminals to London Paddington to ensure customers and colleagues can leave the airport" so trains can and are running, they just don't want flight passengers to go to the airport.

[1] https://www.nationalrail.co.uk/service-disruptions/heathrow-...

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

#142

Post by oliwarner »

speakeron wrote: post #103
oliwarner wrote: post #43

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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...

Yeah I munched the maths but yours is 10 years old!

The 2022 version of that sustainability report puts their annual bought in electricity at 272,610 MWh, 747 MWh per day.

My wonky maths aside, it's amazing how much energy they've saved. In your link, the switch to LEDs alone saw a 20% total power reduction. I'm sure I've seen electric vehicles there so I'm surprised this number is still apparently in freefall. Perhaps they're doing more local generation (eg) PV

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

#143

Post by seabass-labrax »

Symbiote wrote: post #141
seabass-labrax wrote: post #128

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The Elizabeth line is fully electrified, so why wouldn't the issue be power to the trains themselves rather than the stations?

Other trains are running on the main line through the area. It's 25kV electrification, there's plenty of distance between feeder substations. National Rail say [1] "An unadvertised shuttle service is running from Heathrow Terminals to London Paddington to ensure customers and colleagues can leave the airport" so trains can and are running, they just don't want flight passengers to go to the airport. [1] https://www.n…

Ah, thanks, that makes sense.

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

#144

Post by Symbiote »

AnimalMuppet wrote: post #132
seabass-labrax wrote: post #124

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Even if the airline let you, why would you travel to Manchester ? That's half a day and a £100 train fare away from London. There's still Gatwick, Stansted and Luton in 'London', plus Cardiff, Birmingham and Bristol as alternatives. If money were no object even Amsterdam Schiphol or Brussels would make for a faster journey than Manchester!

Hey, clueless American here. I confess I have no idea how far apart things are in the UK. "Closer than in the US" is all I've got.

It's very reasonable, and I wouldn't hesitate to do this if it was a business trip.

Many flights have been diverted to Manchester, partly because airlines with flights to Heathrow also have flights from Manchester, but are less likely to have flights from the other London airports.

Manchester Airport railway station is 2 minutes walk from the airport's main entrance, I think using a covered walkway, or maybe it was underground. Going to London takes 2¾ hours with one change, trains run every 20 minutes.

It would be more convenient to be diverted somewhere a bit closer, but on the scale of an intercontinental flight it's not a big deal.

> Cardiff, Birmingham and Bristol as alternatives ... even Amsterdam Schiphol or Brussels would make for a faster journey than Manchester!

Cardiff Airport to London takes 3 hours by train, Bristol Airport about 2½ hours, both are less frequent. Amsterdam is four hours by train, Brussels is around 3 hours.

Birmingham (BHX) and East Midlands (EMA) are the only airports closer to London in travel time than Manchester.

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

#145

Post by implements »

traceroute66 wrote: post #29
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.

> 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…

> I suspect you will find its not a single point of failure either. It’s 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.

Hayes (North Hyde) is a few miles NE of Heathrow, but Laleham (similar sized) is only a few miles South - I’d would have assumed both served as fully redundant supplies for the airport, given it’s critical national infrastructure.

(The old BBC Television Centre in London had three independent supplies, I believe)

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

#146

Post by belter »

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.

JFK 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-eb883...

https://www.gao.gov/assets/gao-23-105203.pdf

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

#147

Post by bookofjoe »

Symbiote wrote: post #53
FartyMcFarter wrote: post #46

Earlier quoted context omitted.

That link isn't working currently, and when I checked it earlier it was referring to an outage which started late yesterday night. So I'm not sure it was relevant.

According to the news reports, the fire started at roughly 23:30.

UTC? ET?

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

#148

Post by Symbiote »

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.

They build datacentres in/near London and also elsewhere in the country.

Here's one example map: https://www.colo-x.com/data-centre-database-map/

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

#150

Post by bee_rider »

megamix wrote: post #95
traceroute66 wrote: post #37

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Heathrow is a significant part of the UK economy Is it, really ? From Heathrow's own website[1], so we can expect figures on the "generous" side: "Heathrow Airport is expected to contribute approximately £4.7bn to the UK economy " This incident started somewhere around midnight and is currently estimated to be resolved by 15:00. So let's round that up to "one day". £4.7bn divided by 365 is £12.8m Compared to say, t…

Does that count only the actual airport? It doesn't count the potential business travellers contributing to the economy in different ways. Like if half of the financial sector were due to arrive at Heathrow, where would that be in the analysis? Just to downplay the importance of Heathrow through numbers is a bit absurd.

If half the financial sector is in the plane somehow, and they decide “oh, the airport has a power outage, better crash into the ocean instead,” that might make a major difference. More likely they will go land at a different airport or delay their travel, depending on there they are in the process.

It’s just delays, not destruction.

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