Heathrow total shutdown

[Raymond Lin]

My friend's mother-in-law's flight from Rio is going to Madrid.

I wonder how long it will take for them to patch it enough to get it up and running.

 

[Diddums x]

Also surprised there isn't a redundant connection for Heathrow

There will be a redundant connection, perhaps multiple. The thing is a bang like that won't just switch over automatically, investigations need to take place first to find out why it went bang, and that fault removed from the system, or you risk simply popping another transformer or substation. It'll be a manual process and will go very slowly, get it wrong and you can take the entire airport offline for months.

Idk if this backup generator would have been big enough to power the whole place though, would have to be a pretty big backup...

I've only worked in two buildings which were entirely generator backed, one was a datacentre for JP Morgan and the other was for Deutsche Bank. Each one had an entire floor for the generators, and another floor for the battery and UPS systems.

He’s in India. I guess it depends on if he likes the food.

And the toilet paper.

You'd think a campus as critical as a major airport would have two on-premise substations, at opposite ends of the site, each being fed an MV feed from a completely separate section of the grid... Surprised that's not the case. I appreciate that north hyde is a pretty big sub, but if you look at its area, Heathrow is right on the southern border, there should easily be a feed from a sub to the south of the airport as well.

It'll have a lot more than two. Here at the Natural History Museum, we have 6.

The entire airport....gosh. That's a logistical nightmare for everybody.

It won't be the whole airport, only parts of it. The problem is that the airport functions as a whole, remove one or two parts and it's done.

 

[Jokester]

Drunk Russian captains are getting a real hazard these days.

 

[tlrBeta]

There's no reason other than cost or poor planning that backup generators can't power the whole site. At our treatment works (water sector) we have multiple megawatts of generation capacity which can run the whole site at almost full output if the incoming power is lost.

It's money - it's my understanding it's a crazy amount of money to have this stuff on standby.

I can't imagine how much money would be needed to have backup for an airport beyond critical infra.

 

[Firestar_3x]

The fact that a critical bit of national infrastructure is so poorly secured is absolutely comical.

 

[squerble]

The fact that a critical bit of national infrastructure is so poorly secured is absolutely comical.

You wouldn't call it comical when the airport charged airlines higher fees to cover the enormous cost of having enough generation power, which would be passed into your ticket prices. As a few good posts above have shown, there will be backup power but only for very critical systems.

 

[Lima]

Was due to be flying to US with Mrs at lunch time. Holiday cancelled…. Already processed the refund on BA which is good. Still sucks though.

 

[squerble]

Was due to be flying to US with Mrs at lunch time. Holiday cancelled…. Already processed the refund on BA which is good. Still sucks though.

We're flying out of Heathrow in a few weeks to Miami for a cruise. We fly the day before as we otherwise wouldn't be able to get to the ship on time - if this had happened, our whole holiday would be gone too as we'd miss the ship. I dread to think how long it'd take to sort all the refunds out.

 

[Firestar_3x]

You wouldn't call it comical when the airport charged airlines higher fees to cover the enormous cost of having enough generation power, which would be passed into your ticket prices. As a few good posts above have shown, there will be backup power but only for very critical systems.

My comment isn't about providing backup power generation for everything at Heathrow, its about having a poorly secured facility and single point of failure for the entire airport, the load should be split between multiple substations.

Also the airport is due to suffer a £25 million loss per day for the shutdown, guess who that cost is going to be passed onto?

 

[alchal]

The fact that a critical bit of national infrastructure is so poorly secured is absolutely comical.

The entire UK is insecure where national security is concerned.

 

[Jokester]

The entire UK is insecure where national security is concerned.

Indeed.

I’m surprised though that a major national asset like Heathrow only has one grid connection, though I guess their contract with the grid will have penalties for particular outages so they don’t really care if travellers are impacted.

 

[Subliminal Aura]

On site back up generators

PMSL That's hilarious ... Who designs this stuff

 

[danlightbulb]

It's money - it's my understanding it's a crazy amount of money to have this stuff on standby.

I can't imagine how much money would be needed to have backup for an airport beyond critical infra.

Without getting into excessive detail and argument, I don't think the cost is as much as people are imagining. Yeah it would be several million but that's not excessive for something as important and revenue generating as Heathrow.

I googled how much power Heathrow uses and its 155 GWh/year. That's equivalent to 18 MW instantaneous power use. The link says about half of that is the airport itself with the other half being the various other businesses that are also located on the Heathrow site. So lets assume the airport would need 9 MW of backup power if you could cut off the ancillary businesses in the event of an emergency.

Providing backup generators for 9 MW isn't really a big deal. I mean, sure its not small, but its not stupidly big either. These generators can work by auto switching when the incoming supply is lost.

 

[Freefaller]

Really like what?

The grid is ridiculously reliable and we're almost certainly talking about a catastrophic transformer failure taking out adjacent breakers which is quite hard to defend against when they're off the same super grid connection.

I can't mention the sites specifically - but think nuclear, also think communication infrastructure for national security etc...

 

[PlacidCasual]

My comment isn't about providing backup power generation for everything at Heathrow, its about having a poorly secured facility and single point of failure for the entire airport, the load should be split between multiple substations.

Also the airport is due to suffer a £25 million loss per day for the shutdown, guess who that cost is going to be passed onto?

You and two friends with air rifles and 50cc motorbikes could bring the grid to its knees in 20 minutes if you so desired. It's not feasible to make an already incredibly resilient system much more so..

 

[Minusorange]

If it was Russia who did this, what happens next ?

 

[marin]

I have worked on many backup power systems for data centres and hospitals - often have dual mains incomers, battery backup protection and multiple generators depending on the size of the system and how critical it is to maintain power.

You would have thought that the mains incomers would have come from separate substations and the control system would have done an automatic switchover, failing that the generators should have kicked in but maybe they are only on essential systems such as air traffic control and runway systems.

 

[Freefaller]

I have worked on many backup power systems for data centres and hospitals - often have dual mains incomers, battery backup protection and multiple generators depending on the size of the system and how critical it is to maintain power.

You would have thought that the mains incomers would have come from separate substations and the control system would have done an automatic switchover, failing that the generators should have kicked in but maybe they are only on essential systems such as air traffic control and runway systems.

A friend used to be an ops manager at an airport, he said they have backup but only for critical systems and only long enough to bring everything to a safe close / evacuation / secure everything. How long he didn't say, but I guess it's not enough to allow the airport to keep running.

I'm guessing Heathrow loses £millions per hour when things like this happens.

 

[rhobbyh]

If it was Russia who did this, what happens next ?

A cheeto in the white house will tell us we dont hold any cards whilst a gormless redneck sidekick tells us to say thank you

 

[Freefaller]

I wonder with the expansion of Heathrow going ahead whether they will accept the proposal of a power plant within the airport premises?