Events at Heathrow Airport earlier this year served as a dramatic reminder of just how critical reliable power is for complex operations. More than 270,000 journeys were disrupted when a fire at the North Hyde electrical substation led to a widespread power outage, shutting down Europe’s busiest airport for an entire day. While passengers had to rebook flights and airlines scrambled to restore schedules, the implications were felt far beyond airports, and the lesson was clear: resilience in power supply is vital.
The importance of power resilience for all businesses
Posted on in Blog
The day Heathrow stopped
The incident
On 21 March, the fire knocked out power not just to Heathrow but to nearly 67,000 customers in the area. The impact was immediate and severe but the National Energy System Operator’s interim report initially stated the cause of the blaze to be unknown. Since then, however, a report by the National Energy System Operator (NESO) has put the blaze down to a ‘catastrophic failure, which could have been prevented if maintenance advisories had been implemented.
Heathrow relies on three substations and maintains emergency backup power through diesel generators and batteries, yet even these systems can only support essential operations like landing equipment and runway lights. Power was restored seven hours before any flights resumed, but Heathrow’s operational complexity meant the airport remained shut. Flights did not take off until thorough safety checks on critical systems were completed, illustrating just how reliant modern operations are on both raw power and robust recovery processes.
Why power resilience matters
For data centres and any tech-driven operation, uptime is everything. Downtime means lost revenue, interrupted services, reputational harm, and in some sectors, legal or safety consequences. The Heathrow outage highlights several issues every business should consider:
- Single points of failure: the incident shows how one substation fire took down a whole airport. Similar vulnerabilities can exist in institutions that haven’t implemented adequate redundancy.
- System complexity and recovery: even with backup systems in place, switching from a failed source to a secondary supply can involve complex decisions. Heathrow’s emergency power kept safety systems running, but switching all operations to alternative substations took precious time.
- Interdependencies and communication: restoring power quickly is only part of the recovery process – critical systems may require layers of checking and verification before operations can restart.
The role played by data centres
Ensuring operational resilience in our data centres demands a focus on redundancy, regular testing of backup systems, and clear communication. We reduce risks by employing multiple power feeds, redundant transformers, and on-site generation with automatic transfer switching. However, many legacy on premise environments still have shortcomings in these areas. Routine testing is vital to confirm that backup systems are ready to support critical loads when necessary. This involves scheduled failover exercises for generators, UPS units, and transfer switches, along with comprehensive documentation of both failover and recovery procedures to help our teams respond calmly and efficiently should an incident occur. Furthermore, understanding system dependencies and establishing straightforward restoration measures – such as checklists and effective communication protocols – can greatly ease recovery during periods of disruption. By working closely with local grid operators and energy suppliers we have clear restoration timelines and sharing transparent updates helps ensure downtime is kept to a minimum when timing is crucial.
The bigger picture
By learning from high-profile failures, we become better at protecting our own operations and those of our clients, and Heathrow’s ordeal was a sharp warning that even the best-prepared organisations can face prolonged outages. On this basis, for businesses reliant on continuous operations, it is never too soon to ensure that business-critical IT infrastructure and workloads are protected by resilient power provision and backup systems.
The growing demand for power to support cloud computing, AI, and digital services, combined with the UK’s ageing power grid and limited energy capacity in key regions, presents a significant challenge – one that has even delayed some new data centre projects and expansions. Despite these obstacles, we have successfully secured the necessary power to support our existing infrastructure with no hesitation about planning future construction. With data centres strategically located in two of the UK’s most economically active regions – the north west (MCR1 and MCR2 in Manchester) and the south east (FRN1 in Farnborough with planning permission secured for FRN2 on the same site) – we are well-positioned to meet the needs of our clients.
Talk to us
Want to discuss your power resilience strategy or discuss the migration of your IT infrastructure and workloads off premise? Get in touch to discuss your requirements.