A fire plunged Heathrow Airport into darkness. The nearby data center has been buzzing. Why?

A new gleaming data center is less than half a mile from the electric substation and last week the fire knocked Heathrow Airport into the darkness. On that day, the data center’s own power was also reduced. However, since the battery and backup generator are designed to start immediately, no one will notice it.

Meanwhile, Europe’s busiest airport officials spent nearly 18 hours rerunning their terminals and runways, causing global travel delays and highlighting the vulnerability of UK infrastructure.

Energy experts say one word can be used: money to explain the comparison between energy experts.

“The data center industry is relatively young. They are more suitable for the cost of catastrophic failures,” said Simon Gallagher, managing director of the UK Internet Services. He said most airports in the world, including Heathrow, are reluctant to make the large investments needed to build a total backup system.

Even at Heathrow’s airport, which officials described as the same power usage as small cities, could potentially create a strong enough backup system to keep operating during catastrophic power failures, Mr Gallagher and other engineering experts said.

But that could cost $100 million and could take years to get in place. So far, most airports have chosen not to invest.

“It depends on the cost-benefit analysis,” Gallagher said. “At this moment, there seems to be an assumption that it costs too much.”

Airport

Heathrow agency officials quickly pointed out after Friday’s incident that the airport has backup power for the most critical system: runway lights and a traffic control safety system for the tower. If the plane needs to land that day, it can do it safely.

But the airport cannot power the rest of the huge and complex facilities: huge terminals, shops and restaurants everywhere, moving sidewalks and escalators. Cut out of the grid and don’t have the ability to move the bag to the claim area, or use it for the ticket counter or bathroom.

Heathrow Airport, which was first opened at the end of World War II, has expanded and updated over the past few decades. The result is a pieced together, including newer cables and newer cables and a system with increasing demand for power.

“The grid is old,” said Najmedin Meshkati, a professor of engineering at the University of Southern California. “For aviation, for grids and other safety-critical systems, the larger they get, the larger they maintain.”

What Heathrow does not have is a backup generator that can provide 40 megawatts of power during peak hours to maintain normal operation.

Instead, on Friday, the airport engineers had to manually reconfigure the switch at another substation to temporarily re-replace the available power supply to Heathrow Airport. This took several hours, and since the airport’s systems were always powerless, it took more time to restore them and then a round of tests was performed.

Substation

The main source of electricity for the airport is the Hyde North substation, about a mile away, owned and operated by the National Electric Power Company, the private power company responsible for the area.

Two transformers of the substation were fired off-line. The cause is still under investigation, but police said Tuesday they found “no evidence of suspicious activity.”

State Grid CEO John Pettigrew told the Financial Times that the region “has no capacity” after the fire. Energy experts say this is correct: Where actually lacking power is often developing countries and war zones.

However, once Heathrow’s connection to the North of Hyde was cut off, the challenge was to leverage the adequate power of the region. Airport CEO Thomas Woldbye told the BBC that he was proud of his efforts to convert its system’s employees on Friday to use the electricity from two nearby substations.

But Heathrow will now assess whether to install “if we can’t believe that the surrounding grid is working the way it should” or whether to install “different resilience”. Heathrow Airport did not respond to a request for comment about the story.

Data Center

Leaders of the airport may want to check out their corporate neighbors in the north.

United Park Data Facility operated by ARK Data Center is only a six-minute walk from the substation in North Hyde. Internally, computers run 24 hours a day, powering core cloud services and artificial intelligence for modern banking, business, research and government operations.

The company’s CEO Huw Owen said its electrical supply was interrupted when the fire broke out. But complex sensors detect losses in power and transfer them immediately to batteries that are like uninterrupted power systems for personal computers. This gave the facility’s generators time to spin, and they quickly took over.

“It’s a well-trained, well-known process,” Owen said in an interview. “It’s this mentality that makes resilience and the motivation to keep everything absolutely at the forefront and center of our world.” Mr Owen said that while expectations may never be needed, the company has installed expensive generator backup systems. The permit application prepared for the company in December described the possibility of a power outage “extremely rare”.

“This would require catastrophic regional failures on the grid or supply stations and could affect not only the site, but the surrounding London area,” the abstract notes. “As a result, grid connections are considered highly reliable, as shown in the grid reliability letter provided by the application (calculated as 99.999605%).”

Decide

“I don’t want to see Heathrow dropping on Friday as much as the way it’s going to be,” Prime Minister Keir Starmer told the BBC after the fire.

But how to avoid the future?

The challenge of upgrading electrical upgrades to places like Heathrow is how to pay for it when high energy costs limit consumer budgets. In the past, airport investments were often passed to customers in the form of higher airline fares.

Electric network resilience consultant Mr Gallagher pointed out that new airports in places like Dubai are built and it is a backup that can keep terminals open. There are also some older airports, such as Schiphol in Amsterdam, that have upgraded their facilities with large generators.

But if the management of Heathrow’s agency wants to follow suit, they will need to accept a lot of investment to prevent crises that may not happen again in years, experts say.

“It’s much easier to build it from day one than to try to remodel,” Owen said of Heathrow and other old airports. “They were able to start resilience at these sites like me, but now they’re going to have to remodel and I’m building it from day one.”