Podcast 68: Heathrow airport shutdown – a lesson in resilience

The recent fire at an electricity substation shut Heathrow Airport for 24 hours, causing chaos in the skies and across international airports. In doing so, it highlighted the broader critical condition of the UK’s major infrastructure and its lack of resilience. “Just in time” and “just enough” have replaced secure, ready and prepared.

The incident at Heathrow prompted calls for inquiries, in the search to find someone to blame – not the more obvious economic regulator of the airport, the CAA, but instead the National Energy System Operator (NESO). The key lesson to be learned from this is that robust systems are needed to support modern requirements, including from all the new data centres that depend on continuous electricity supply, before such failures become normalised. To ensure the future stability of the economy, proactive measures need to be taken to reinforce these essential systems, prioritising investment and innovation that can cope with the evolving demands of our modern society.

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