Electricity System Resilience (S&T Committee Report)

Lord Harris of Haringey Excerpts

Tuesday 3rd November 2015 Lords Chamber

[Lord Harris of Haringey (Lab)]

My Lords, I declare an interest regarding the work that I am currently doing with the Electric Infrastructure Security Council. I congratulate the noble Earl, Lord Selborne, and the Science and Technology Committee on producing an interesting and extremely important report. The report is interesting for me because when I was very young, more than 30 years ago, I was deputy director of an organisation then called the Electricity Consumers’ Council. It used to produce all sorts of papers on electricity supply questions that were no doubt deeply irritating to the noble Lord, Lord Tombs, who is not in his place today but who then led the electricity supply industry as chair of the Electricity Council. This was, of course, pre-privatisation.

One of our concerns was the financial burden borne by consumers of what then seemed like an excessive margin of overcapacity. If I recall correctly, the margin was something like 40% over maximum likely demand. The late Lord Marshall of Goring, whom the noble Lord, Lord Howell, just referred to, described that as a strategy of belt, braces and string as regards protecting the country from power outages. However, the pendulum has now swung very far the other way, with, as the report says, capacity margins of potentially 3% or 4%. It is no longer belt, braces and string but a wish and a prayer. I therefore welcome the central conclusion of the report that the Government must play a greater role in managing the electricity system. However, I will focus on one very narrow part of the report, which I would have liked to be much larger, although I am sure that the pressures on the committee made it much more difficult to do that. That is the focus on what happens if, or perhaps when, something goes seriously wrong. I am talking here not about a short-term power outage but a catastrophic failure—one that goes on for more than a short period.

Chapter 4 talks about the threats to the resilience of the electricity system. It identifies four areas: technical failures; extreme weather, including flooding; terrorism—both physical attack and cyberattack—and space weather. Not included of course is earthquake, which is fortunately a very low-probability event in the UK. Therefore, when the report talks about a variety of technical failures—the fires at Ferrybridge, Ironbridge and Didcot—and the precautionary shutdown of four nuclear reactors at Hartlepool and Heysham, these incidents all call into question the capacity margins now available. Let us consider those technical failures coupled with other things that might happen.

There is extreme weather and flooding. Christmas two years ago saw storms that resulted in 750,000 households being without power and, as the report notes, the incidence of severe weather is likely to rise as a result of climate change. Then there is threat of physical attack—such as the IRA’s planned attack in 1996 to cut off the electricity supply to London—or cyberattack. For serious and sustained disruption to take place, clearly there would have to be multiple attacks, which we know terrorist groups have in the past envisaged or contemplated. Perhaps it may be beyond them at the moment, but one should certainly consider that possibility.

On the cyber side, as the Institution of Engineering and Technology has pointed out, the UK electricity system is heavily reliant on ICT systems, and that reliance is increasing, with more and more automated systems increasing the vulnerability. The IET also warns—I am well aware of this from the interest I have taken in security over the years—that foreign states and others have been identified as probing the systems that underpin our critical national infrastructure. Imperial College, as quoted in the report, highlighted the vulnerability of SCADA systems and the reliance on legacy unsupported software platforms. My noble friend Lord O’Neill talked about the reassuring absence of complacency in looking at these issues and recognising that these threats are real and significant. I am pleased that there is no complacency, but the very fact that there is a reassuring lack of complacency indicates that these matters must be taken very seriously, which concurs with the private discussions I have had. Let us therefore be quite clear that there would be catastrophic consequences in the event of something significant happening.

I should just mention the risk of adverse space weather or solar storms. I think the noble Lord, Lord Hennessy, suggested that this was perhaps less likely than some of the other risks. Such solar storms can generate geomagnetically-induced currents into power systems. In 1859, solar flares were so intense as to produce red, green and purple auroras all round the world. At that time it made the telegraph systems go haywire and fail catastrophically, with spark discharges that gave telegraph operators electric shocks and set telegraph paper alight. That was in 1859; our reliance on electrical systems is rather greater now than it was then. More recently, in 1989, a geomagnetic storm knocked out power in large sections of Canada. These are things that happen which could have catastrophic consequences.

The report acknowledges the importance of these threats, but what about these low-probability events which would have a very high impact? How well prepared are we as a nation to deal with them? It is a characteristic of complex integrated systems that we now have, such as the United Kingdom’s critical national infrastructure, that a combination of low-probability events coupled with those integrated systems may produce a catastrophic domino effect—a catastrophic failure—which becomes more likely rather than diminishingly rare in prospect. It might be one of the threats already discussed or a combination, or it might be some incident or issue not previously encountered. However, let us consider what might happen and how ready we would be to respond as a nation.

Most vital services have contingency plans in place to deal with power outages; most have emergency or standby generators. Usually—although not always—they work. The reason I add that caveat is that I am well aware of the incident a few years ago when some overenthusiastic workmen cut through a cable in Victoria Street, cutting off the power to New Scotland Yard. When the Metropolitan Police said, “This isn’t going to be a problem—we have two back-up generators and, what is more, every day somebody checks that the fuel gauges are still working”. They had not taken into account that both fuel gauges were faulty, and in fact they did not have sufficient fuel. Fortunately, the Metropolitan Police has a back-up control room that is not in New Scotland Yard, and the issue was rapidly rectified.

However, even assuming that the standby generators are functional and working, they have fuel to last only 12 or, at most, 24 hours. What if the high-impact event leads to a widespread outage that lasts longer than that? What plans are in place then? How will the consequential domino effects be managed? Who, for example, will take responsibility for arranging and prioritising the distribution of emergency fuel to the standby generators? Who will have priority, and who will determine that priority? Will it be the emergency services, the hospitals, the water industry and the sewerage system, food warehouses or supermarkets? Eleven years ago, MI5 warned that Britain was four meals away from anarchy—that is just as true now as it was then. Our systems are based on the assumption that if something goes wrong, it will be rectified in most areas within 12 hours. That is not necessarily the case.

The report talks about the importance of the single emergency number, but that will not help very much because our landline telephones will not work without mains electricity and our mobiles will run out of charge. If there is no power to pump water underground, in London the pipes underneath the ground will probably collapse because in many cases they have not been repaired since the Victorian era, and without water going through them the ground pressure will cause them to collapse. Therefore, even if the power is restored, water supplies will remain disrupted. Without power, the sewerage system cannot function and, without being too graphic, the contents of the sewers are likely to solidify and will not be easily cleared. Food refrigeration cannot work without power, and supermarkets relying on just-in-time distribution will run out of stock. We are not equipped in this country to run our medical services without electrical power.

Therefore my questions to the Minister are the following. We are told in the report that the Secretary of State has been involved in exercises on these issues. For how long was it assumed in those exercises that the power would be off, and over how widespread an area? With local authorities already having made budget cuts of up to 40%, and with more to come when the CSR is published later this month, how resilient are the contingency plans for managing this sort of emergency? Do the authorities have a prioritised list of service providers that will need emergency fuel to keep their standby generators going? What arrangements are in place to distribute emergency fuel under such circumstances? How will food supplies be maintained? What steps are in place to ensure that water and sewerage systems continue to function, and how will communications be maintained to a no doubt increasingly panicked population with no power to maintain telephone systems, charge mobiles or power televisions or radios?

Individually, these threats may have low probability; each threat might be a once-in-50-years event, but any one of them could have a high, not to say devastating, impact. Our chances of avoiding all of them over the next few years are not necessarily as reassuring as one might hope. The nature and complexity of integrated systems and an increasingly power-reliant and ICT-reliant world mean that we ultimately depend on those services and that we are all the more vulnerable.

The report warns us that the Government must play a bigger role in managing the electricity system, given the narrowing of capacity margins. Can we be reassured also that the Government are actively preparing for the handling of a significant outage that turns out to stretch beyond 24 hours?