Heathrow total shutdown

What they need are more pylons. Gotta see a Miliband.

Is flammable oil the only coolant available in this technological age?

At the moment yes. It is why we still use SF6 in circuit breakers even though it is highly damaging to the environment as it is simply the best for the job.

The mineral oil has a few jobs inside a transformer, not just taking heat away from the cores. But being subject to arching in the tapchangers, so electrical breakdown. You also cannot afford to have any moisture inside a transformer due to the damage it can do to the windings. There aren't many substances that can do all of these things.
 
To be fair to Heathrow it seems like they've actually got things restarted pretty quickly considering the scale of the issue, listening to the Heathrow CEO explaining that they have 3x sub-stations and a backup transformer but getting all systems back up, running and tested takes time.
 
Surely this has to be the shortest A380 flight ever!

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It’s crazy how many social media system power engineers experts are sat at home doing nothing, but type what should have been done / installed.
 
The backup diesel generator was also burnt down.

What a stupid place to put your backup in the same place as the primary power source. I guess it was built in the 70's or 80's where risk assessments never existed.

Then again we do seem to be backwards Britain now. Reminds me of this pumping station that was built to prevent the flooding of the A421 that got flooded.

 
What a stupid place to put your backup in the same place as the primary power source. I guess it was built in the 70's or 80's where risk assessments never existed.

Then again we do seem to be backwards Britain now. Reminds me of this pumping station that was built to prevent the flooding of the A421 that got flooded.


It is and it isn't. It depends on the location of any transformers, switches and panels.
I've got my back up generators spread across our sites away from any subs though. Means multiple generators, smallest 60kva, largest 300.
 
It’s crazy how many social media system power engineers experts are sat at home doing nothing, but type what should have been done / installed.


Probably a good number of us have worked on or reviewed data centre power designs here. I can confirm we explored power redundancy to grid level and didn't have the same single point of failure as seen here.
 
Probably a good number of us have worked on or reviewed data centre power designs here. I can confirm we explored power redundancy to grid level and didn't have the same single point of failure as seen here.

Forum full of people from technical backgrounds and he's shocked people know how power distribution works.
 
Probably a good number of us have worked on or reviewed data centre power designs here. I can confirm we explored power redundancy to grid level and didn't have the same single point of failure as seen here.
Stop the discussion everyone, please submit your qualifications to @SDK^ prior to commenting or don't comment at all.
Forum full of people from technical backgrounds and he's shocked people know how power distribution works.

Calm down !
I was referring to 'social media' not here :)

I'm 25 years working for National Grid and it's very interesting how people provide their insights/comments on how things 'should be done'
 
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