Unexpected power plant failures hit Britain’s electricity system hours before Spain and Portugal were plunged into widespread blackouts, it was revealed today.
Control room staff at the National Energy System Operator (Neso) noticed unusual activity on two occasions on Sunday, in the early morning and the evening.
The first incident saw the power frequency shift unexpectedly at 2am due to an outage at the Keadby 2 gas-fired plant in Lincolnshire, reported The Telegraph.
This was followed by the unexplained failure of the Viking Link interconnector, a power cable which runs for nearly 500 miles between the UK and Denmark.
The power frequency shifted again at 6pm but the cause is unknown – and officials at publicly-owned Neso, which manages the British grid, are now investigating.
But Neso said there is no suggestion at this stage that the outages were linked to each other or the system failure yesterday in Spain, Portugal and southern France.
A Neso spokesman told MailOnline: ‘As a prudent system operator we review all generator trips and events on our network as standard practice.
‘We are still reviewing operational events across the weekend. However, it is highly unlikely that these events are connected to each other or related to the events on the European electricity network on Monday.
‘Great Britain’s electricity network was not affected by the power system incident on the European electricity network on Monday.
‘We are working closely with our counterparts across Europe to understand the cause of the power system incident and to offer our support. It is too early to comment further on these events and whilst investigations are still ongoing.’
It comes as thousands of UK travellers are trying to return home today after being stranded overnight because of the widespread power cuts in Europe.
Much of the two countries were brought to a standstill yesterday after the power cut switched off traffic lights and left people unable to access cash machines.
Power is returning to Spain and Portugal today but flight disruption is continuing as many aircraft and flight crew are out of position.
Back in Britain, an Energy Minister said that the power cuts in Spain and Portugal had ‘no effects in the UK’ but the UK Government is monitoring the situation and ‘any lessons learned from this event’.
Kerry McCarthy told the Commons: ‘Well, first of all, I think the whole House will want to send support to Spain and Portugal following the incidents yesterday.
‘There were no effects in the UK but we do continue to closely monitor the situation and any lessons learned from this event.
‘I’m not going to speculate as to the causes of that event but what we need to do is to ensure that our own systems are as resilient as possible.’
Also today, the Home Secretary said that the UK has been looking at how to deal with ‘different kinds of challenges and threats’.
Asked whether the power cut there had triggered a fear that British infrastructure could be affected in the same way, Yvette Cooper told Sky News that the UK has a ‘continued approach’ to ‘resilience’ and ‘security issues’.
She added: ‘We’ve been looking, as part of wider security reviews across the country, how we deal with both resilience and also different kinds of challenges and threats.
‘Some of which can be the traditional security challenges, some of which can be the kinds of resilience – things that we’re talking about in Spain and Portugal – and we obviously support them and the governments there in the work that they’re doing.’
Spanish power distributors said this morning that more than 99 per cent of power has been recovered.
The blackout saw train passengers stranded and millions of people left without phone and internet access after the outage yesterday.
Spain’s grid operator Red Eléctrica admitted today that solar power could be to blame, but it was to early to say for sure.
The Portuguese National Cybersecurity Centre said there was no indication that it was caused by a cyber attack.
It comes just weeks after Heathrow Airport was forced to halt operations for most of a day after a power outage caused by a substation fire.
The airport was closed to all flights until around 6pm on March 21, which disrupted more than 270,000 air passenger journeys.
Energy Secretary Ed Miliband said at the time that the Government will ‘have to look hard’ at the ‘resilience’ for major institutions such as Heathrow.
