Heathrow Airport Closure: Resilience and Security

Lord Mackinlay of Richborough Excerpts

Wednesday 26th March 2025 Lords Chamber

[Lord Hunt of Kings Heath (Lab)]

My Lords, my understanding is that, in Heathrow’s view, the supply was insufficient to ensure safe and secure operation. Therefore, it proceeded to reconfigure its internal electricity network to enable the resumption of full operations, utilising the other two external supply points. This required hundreds of systems to be safely powered down and then safely powered up, with extensive testing. The Kelly review will analyse all the relevant material concerning the robustness and execution of Heathrow’s crisis management plans and the airport’s response. The review that my right honourable friend the Secretary of State has commissioned from Ofgem will be looking at the issues of energy, the power outage and what lessons we have learned. We will have discussions with Heathrow to make sure that the terms of reference give us a comprehensive picture.

[Lord Mackinlay of Richborough (Con)]

My Lords, it has become apparent over the last couple of days that Heathrow had submitted evidence to the environment committee of the House of Commons regarding the overrating of power requirements in that area, saying it felt that the net-zero pathway was not helping that. We are adding EV charging and heat pump requirements to the network on a daily basis, but not really doing the proper jigsaw puzzles to make this work. Ultimately, the responsibility has to be with Heathrow Airport for not having a back-up supply. I note that data centres in that area, which are hugely energy hungry, have back-up, and they never go out of power.

[Lord Hunt of Kings Heath (Lab)]

My Lords, I am sure those are things that need to be looked at and reviewed by Heathrow, and more generally in relation to the grid and network connections, which I think is part of the question the noble Lord raised. We recognise that, in moving to clean power, we need to strengthen both the grid and the network locally. We will be looking at these matters. We have had reports from the National Infrastructure Commission recently. NESO’s work and advice have led to the Clean Power 2030 Action Plan, which sets out proposals on how we are going to reform the grid and expand it to meet some of those issues.