Aug 10, 2019
National Grid faces fine after power outage
Britain's energy market regulator has threatened National Grid with a possible fine after nearly a million businesses and homes in England and Wales suffered power cuts on Friday evening, causing severe disruption to transport at the start of the weekend getaway. Ofgem has the power to fine energy companies up to 10 per cent of their turnover if they are found to have been at fault. Energy analysts at EnAppSys had previously identified the Little Barford gas-fired power station in Cambridgeshire, owned by the German power company RWE, and the Hornsea offshore wind farm, owned by Danish utility Orsted, as the cause of the outage. RWE said its Little Barford site had experienced a technical fault on Friday afternoon, but was back in action and ready to be called upon by National Grid to generate power later that night. Gareth Miller, chief executive of Cornwall Insight, a consultancy, said on Twitter that the last time two power stations failed at the same time was in 2008, when hundreds of thousands of homes in England lost power.
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