Storm Arwen: Power Outages — House of Commons, 2021-12-06
Topic: Energy
Questions: To ask the Secretary of State for Business, Energy and Industrial Strategy to make a statement on the current situation regarding power outages cause by Storm Arwen.
Gregory William Hands (Conservative, Centre-right): Let me deal with each point in turn. It would not be fair to say that yesterday was a photo opportunity. The Secretary of State visited the armed forces, engineers, local residents, the relief centres and so on. It was most definitely not a photo opportunity, but an opportunity, as I discovered in County Durham on Wednesday and in Aberdeenshire on Friday, to thank those who had responded. Engineers had come from Northern Ireland and the Isle of Man to assist and we felt that it was right to go and thank them for their efforts. The Secretary of State is on a call at the moment with the Prime Minister and the head of Northern Powergrid On the response, the point here is that the mutual aid system is in place between the distribution network operators. The right hon. Member will know from his time as Secretary of State the importance of the mutual aid system—the NEWSAC, or North East South West Area Consortium, system—whereby different companies across the United Kingdom provide help to each other when a storm comes in. That is why engineers can be deployed right the way across the country. That is the most effective thing, because restoring power involves quite dangerous, health and safety-intensive work to restore overhead power cables, and those are the people one needs to be able to do the job. The right hon. Member says it took a week to bring in the Army, but it is for the local resilience forum to say what the needs are locally. As soon as the local resilience forum in Aberdeenshire and that in Durham gave us the call, the Army was deployed very quickly indeed. He talks about investment, and I mentioned earlier that £60 billion has been invested in the network over the last eight years I learned at first hand on Wednesday in County Durham and on Friday in Aberdeenshire about the particular nature of this storm. There was the unusual wind speed and the fact that, rather than the prevailing south-westerly winds, the wind came in from the north-east, which makes a big difference for the power network. There was also the nature of the icing and the accumulation of icing on cables, which was a particular part of the storm. One of the engineers I spoke to in Durham on Wednesday described how he had experienced this particular set of circumstances only once before in his 35-year career in the industry Finally, on climate crisis, the right hon. Member is right: of course, there will be similar events like this and more of these events in the future. That is why we need to do everything we can—for example, with our net zero strategy in October—to make sure this country becomes more resilient to these kinds of events. We are currently doing the joint consultation with Ofgem on the future system operator, and that is exactly the kind of response that we need: a net zero strategy for how we equip the country overall, plus in particular how we make sure that the grid becomes more resilient to these kinds of events in the future.