A new shimmering data center is less than half a mile from the electrical substation in which a fire immersed Heathrow airport in the darkness last week. The power of the data center has also been cut that day. But nobody who entrusted themselves would have noticed, thanks to a Battery Bank and backup generators designed to start instantly.
In the meantime, it has taken officials of the busiest airport of Europe close to 18 hours to bring the terminals and the slopes into operation, causing global travel delays and underlining the vulnerability of British infrastructures.
It is a surprising contrast that energy experts say can be explained largely by a word: money.
“The data center industry is relatively young. They are more in tune with the cost of a catastrophic failure,” said Simon Gallagher, CEO of Uk Network Services, who advises customers the resilience of their electrical networks. He said that most of the world airports – including Heathrow – have not been willing to make large investments necessary to build total backup systems.
Even in an airport of the dimensions of Heathrow, which officials described as an equivalent in the use of energy for a small city, it is possible to create backup systems quite robust to maintain normal operations during a catastrophic energy insufficiency, said Gallagher and other engineering experts.
But it could cost up to $ 100 million and it will probably take years to implement. So far, most airports have chosen not to invest.
“It depends on a cost-benefit analysis,” said Gallagher. “At the moment, there seems to be a prerequisite that would cost too much.”
The airport
Heathrow’s officials quickly underlined after Friday’s accident that the airport has backup energy for its most critical systems: the lights of the catwalks and the safety control systems for the trafficking of the tower. If a plane should land that day, he could have done it safely.
But the airport had no way to feed the rest of the temptular and complicated structure: the vast terminals, full of shops and restaurants, movements of catwalks and mobile stairs. Cut from the grid, there was no power to move the bags to the complaint area or for the counters of tickets or bathrooms.
Open for the first time at the end of the Second World War, Heathrow has been expanded and updated over the decades. The result was a patchwork of older and more recent cables and electrical systems that transport an ever -growing question of energy.
“The grid is old,” said Najmedin Meshkati, a professor of engineering at the University of Southern California. “For the aviation, for the grid and for other critical safety systems, the more the most important maintenance becomes.”
What Heathrow does not have are backup generators who could provide the 40 megawatts of power required in the top times to maintain normal operations.
On Friday, Friday, the airport engineers had to manually reconfigure the switches in another subostation to temporarily redirect the power available for Heathrow. It took hours and, since the airport systems had been sitting without energy, it took even more time to restart them, followed by testing of tests.
The subostation
The main energy source of the airport is the Hyde North Sostation for about a mile away, owned and managed by National Grid Electricity Transmission, the private energy company responsible for the area.
Two of the transformers of the substation were brought offline by the fire. The cause is still under investigation, but the police said Tuesday that he had not found “no test” of suspicious activities.
John Pettigrew, CEO of National Grid, told the Financial Times that there was no “lack of capacity” in the area after the fire. Energy experts said that it is correct: the places where there is a real lack of power tend to be developing developing and war zones.
The challenge, however, was the use of the wide power in the area once the Heathrow connection with Hyde North has been interrupted. Thomas Woldbye, CEO of the airport, told the BBC that he was proud of the employees who worked until Friday to change their systems to use the energy from two nearby subsits.
But he said that Heathrow would now evaluate whether to install “a different level of resilience if we cannot trust that the grid around us is working as it should”. Heathrow did not respond to requests for comment for this story.
The Data Center
Airport leaders may want to examine their neighboring neighbor in the north.
The Union Park data structure, managed by the Ark data centers, is six minutes walk from the North Hyde subostation. Inside, computers run 24 hours a day, fueling cloud services and artificial intelligence that are at the center of modern banking, commercial, research and government operations.
Huw Owen, CEO of the Company, said that his electricity was interrupted when the fire broke out. But the sophisticated sensors detected the loss of power and have moved instantly to batteries that work in a very similar way to an unprocessed power supply system for a personal computer. This gave the generators of the structure the time to turn and soon took over.
“It’s a well -tried and well -known process,” Owen said in an interview. “It is this mentality that resilience and maintenance of everything is absolutely at the center of our world.” Owen said that the company has installed the expensive backup system of the generator despite the expectations that may never be necessary. A demand for authorization prepared for the company in December described the possibility of a current interruption as “extremely rare”.
“It would require a catastrophic regional bankruptcy on the grid, or at the refueling power plant and probably would have an impact not only on the site but in the surrounding area London”, observes the summary. “Consequently, the grid connection is considered highly reliable as demonstrated in the reliability letter of the grid provided with the application (calculated as 99.99605%).”
The decision
Prime Minister Keir Starmer told the BBC after the fire: “I don’t want to see an important airport like Heathrow who goes down to the way he did on Friday”.
But how to avoid it in the future?
The challenge in making electrical updates to places like Heathrow is determining how to pay it when the high energy costs put a strain on the budget of consumers. In the past, airport investments have often been transmitted to customers in the form of higher ticket prices on airlines.
Gallagher, consultant for the resilience of the electrical network, observed that new airports have been built in places such as Dubai with the type of backup that could keep the terminals open. And some older airports, such as Schiphol in Amsterdam, have updated their structures with large generators.
But if the direction of Heathrow wants to follow the example, the experts say, they will have to accept that it requires a great investment to prevent a crisis that may not happen again for many years.
“It is much easier to build it from the first day than to try to retrospect things,” said Owen from Heathrow and other old airports. “I am able to instigate resilience in those sites like me, but now they will have to retrofit, while I built it from day 1.”