Monthly Archive for May, 2008

There were widespread blackouts across the UK on Tuesday, as the National Grid implemented “Demand Control” to prevent the frequency of the electricity supply from slipping.

There appears to have been a loss of around 3,400MW of generator capacity on the grid as two major power stations shut down within a matter of a few minutes, followed by up to 5 additional “generating units” going off-line. The BBC has a good summary, with The Register providing a more technical report.

For those with mission critical in-house IT facilities, this underlines the need to ensure that UPS systems are able to cope with brownouts and voltage drops, and stand-by diesel generators with fuel resupply agreements are in place to ensure long run times during such an outage. The capital and operating expense associated with such hardware is why most companies outsource such critical IT hosting requirements.

Spot energy prices soared following the news, as you can see below:

Spot energy prices

As an aside, if supply to the National Grid was constrained for longer, it would be interesting to see if datacenter facilities switched to using their on-site generator capacity as their primary power source until the crisis was over, to avoid paying such increased power costs.