LONDON (Reuters) -Britain will set up a taskforce to boost the resilience of its energy grid after a substation fire cut power to Heathrow Airport and shut it down for almost day, the government said on Tuesday.
The blaze broke out at the facility in March forcing Heathrow Airport, Europe’s busiest airport, to cancel and delay flights, exposing weaknesses in Britain’s grid.
The government said the energy security and resilience taskforce, chaired by energy minister Ed Miliband, will coordinate upgrades to infrastructure and emergency response protocols across the country.
It will also oversee audits of asset management, fire safety standards and restoration procedures, and ensure critical national infrastructure operators have robust business continuity plans.
“The energy resilience strategy will embed resilience into the design of the future energy system by taking a holistic approach to identifying the key opportunities available to the sector and setting a clear ambition for system resilience,” the energy department said in its response to an independent review commissioned to identify lessons from the incident.
The government also said it would publish a long-term energy resilience strategy in 2026 as part of its clean power transition, aiming to reduce risks of cascading failures across sectors such as transport and telecoms.
The fire that shut Heathrow was caused by the UK power grid’s failure to maintain an electricity substation, a report in July said, adding that the fault behind the fire had been found in 2018 but was not addressed.
(Reporting by Sam Tabahriti; editing by Sarah Young)
