Simon Gallagher, founder of UK Network Services, said Heathrow could have had enough power from one live substation during the outage, but it would have taken hours to reconfigure the airport's network. He acknowledged National Grid’s point that there was sufficient capacity but stressed Heathrow's challenge in adjusting to use that power in time. Report by Covellm. Like us on Facebook at http://www.facebook.com/itn and follow us on Twitter at http://twitter.com/itn
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00:00There's a substation about a mile away called North Hyde and that has a big piece of equipment
00:05called transformers and there's three of them. One of them faulted and went on fire. That happens.
00:10Unfortunately it damaged the one next to it which was in essence its standby, its backup.
00:16When that happened power was lost to the whole area. About 60,000 people are connected to that
00:21substation including one Heathrow airport. So at that stage Heathrow lost power. They've actually
00:28got three of their own substations on the site itself, two of which are fed from this North Hyde
00:35substation that was out of action. But that does mean there's one substation remained live, at least
00:40one substation remained live through the whole event and I think that's what the debate through
00:45today has been. On one hand National Grid have quite rightly said well there's enough capacity
00:50at one of your substations to power the whole airport and Heathrow also rightly say well yes
00:55that's true but it does take us hours and hours to reconfigure our whole network to
01:00use that power. So like all these things there's truth on both sides.