Utility Week

10 | JANUARY 2022 | UTILITY WEEK Electricity Analysis Riding the storm Storm Arwen caused unprecedented damage – and left thousands off supply for more than a week. So are DNOs being scapegoated, or should they have been better prepared? S torm Arwen wreaked more damage on the electricity network than any other storm over the past 15 years, with wind speeds topping out at 98mph and sustained winds of 60mph causing damage to over- head wires and substations alike. Power cuts extended for some customers to more than a week, and industry experts and government are unwilling to accept that networks could not have done better, despite the unprecedented weather. They are clear that if storms on the mag- nitude of Storm Arwen become more com- monplace, networks will have to up their game. More than one million homes and busi- nesses lost power as a result of the storm, and while the majority of customers were reconnected within a few days, a few thou- sand were le€ without power for more than a week. Network operators have been vocal about the sheer level of damage caused by the storm – Electricity North West, one of the worst affected Distribution Network Opera- tors (DNOs), described the devastation to its power networks as "unlike anything we've ever seen". But now that most customers have been reconnected, questions are starting to be asked about whether the storm really was unprecedented, or whether networks were just not prepared enough. Either way, business secretary Kwasi Kwarteng told the BBC a week a€er the storm that the time taken to reconnect customers was "completely unacceptable". Dermot Nolan, the former chief executive of Ofgem, says that if he was still heading the regulator, he would be unclear as to why networks have been unable to more quickly reconnect all their customers, despite com- panies' protestations about conditions. "What confuses me is seven or eight days seems a lot of time – eight days strikes me as being very unusual," he says. A€er the stormiest winter in 40 years in 2013, Ofgem ruled that DNOs must improve both their communication and their ability to deal with the "tail end" of connections. On both fronts Nolan believes the networks had made good progress, which does indicate that Storm Arwen was unusual. "This seems to have been different. Maybe there are good explanations to this," he says. However, Nolan stresses that whatever unu- sual weather conditions Storm Arwen may have brought, networks will not be allowed to hide behind them. "It's very hard to say a week later, we still have thousands off and don't blame us. That's something they would have known would have been unacceptable and they should have had plans to deal with that. "It's just not on. It's not as if this is a new issue." Nolan believes that the review which will be conducted by Ofgem is likely to result in penalties for one or two companies. Here Utility Week examines the areas where questions are likely to be asked. Resilience of the networks Network operator engineers have been uni- versally praised for their efforts to reconnect customers in extremely difficult conditions. But one of the key areas that will come under scrutiny by Ofgem, and which has already been highlighted as an area of con- cern by government, is the resilience of the network, both to existing weather and any potential changes in the future due to cli- mate change. The Energy Networks Association (ENA) Photo: ENWL

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