A net zero campaign chief has warned that "people will die" if major electrical outages and substation fires become a common occurrence in Britain.Thousands of commuters were thrown into chaos after an electrical substation fire in Maida Vale brought London Underground to a standstill.FULL STORY HERE.
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00:00Thousands of commuters were disrupted after an electrical substation fire, which brought London Underground to a standstill.
00:06So apparently high-voltage electrical cables in North London caught fire, causing a power blip, and although it lasted seconds, it caused hours of chaos.
00:14But why are these events happening?
00:16We're joining us now in the studio, the director of Net Zero Watch, Andrew Monford.
00:21Andrew, what is going on? Some people are trying to equate it to what happened in Spain.
00:26Has it got nothing to do with that at all?
00:28It has essentially got nothing to do with Spain at all.
00:32Grids get faults all the time.
00:35The question is, then, is the fault contained in a relatively small area or does it spread across the whole country and take your whole grid out?
00:43That's what's happened in Spain.
00:45What we're seeing in the UK is that we are getting more faults, but they are still being contained in a relatively small area.
00:55So the precursor of this that I think is quite interesting is the Heathrow fire a few weeks ago, where it caused absolute chaos, but was contained within a relatively small area.
01:07This time we've had another fault in a larger area.
01:11So it seems to me that we have a problem that our grid is quite fault prone.
01:18I think the reason for that is that essentially all the money that needs to be invested in grid infrastructure is going to build new infrastructure for Net Zero.
01:30So we're building new cables from Scotland down to England to bring in the power from the wind farms, but we're not replacing all the old infrastructure.
01:40That could be dangerous.
01:41Yeah, absolutely.
01:42I think we are going to see a big problem in the next few decades in that we have allowed all the transformers and all the wiring across what we have already to get very old.
01:55And essentially that is going to put a new pressure on spending.
01:59And I think Mr. Miliband is going to have a problem here because, you know, he wants to spend big money on extending the grid.
02:07But in fact, we need to look rather urgently at the existing grid.
02:12And I mean, we've had these fires, so flights were horribly disrupted, weren't they?
02:17So yesterday the tubes were a nightmare.
02:19I was caught up in the middle of it.
02:21But what could happen, Andrew?
02:23We could have potentially injury.
02:26If a fire gets big and out of control, we could have injuries.
02:30Yeah, absolutely.
02:30And also when power goes out, you know, it can be life threatening in itself.
02:36I mean, when in Spain, when the whole grid went out, people died.
02:39Because, you know, they had a home medical kit, which they then couldn't supply anymore.
02:45Now, you know, that could happen here.
02:46At the moment, our grid hasn't suffered, you know, a complete blackout like they did in Spain.
02:52But if these faults go on happening and we go on adding renewables to our grid, which will destabilize the grid,
03:00then perhaps we might have a blackout too, and then people will die as well.
03:05So, yeah, the whole direction of travel is really quite disturbing.
03:09And, you know, I think, yeah, people will die eventually.
03:12But the actual issue was only for a very short space of time.
03:17So why did it cause such a major problem?
03:20So when you get a fault on the grid, the question is, how easy is it to contain it?
03:26Now, if you have a lot of renewables on the grid, then it's rather difficult to contain it.
03:32Essentially, you can lose your whole national grid in the space of a couple of seconds.
03:36Now, in the UK, we seem not to have had that problem so far.
03:40In about 2019, there was a blackout in much of the east of England when a wire was hit by lightning and it took out a power station and it took out a major wind farm.
03:52And, you know, we lost a lot then.
03:55That could happen again.
03:56It could be bigger again.
03:58We just don't know is the answer.
04:01So, yeah, it's a big problem.
04:03All right.
04:04Andrew Monford, thank you very much.