| By Akshat Rathi For the past few months, I've been working on a story for Bloomberg Green that was set to reveal this week one of the biggest bottlenecks to the clean energy transition. Then, on Thursday night, it blew up. Not my story, but the very thing I was reporting on. London's Heathrow airport had been shut down after a transformer had exploded, causing a blackout and leading to more than 1,000 cancelled flights and hundreds of thousands passengers stranded around the world. Transformers do one thing: change the electrical voltage. And without the right ones in the right place, the grid cannot work. The reason I've been obsessed with them is that there is currently a severe shortage of transformers around the world. The absence of the device is causing delays for all kinds of grid projects, from renewable deployment to artificial intelligence data centers. (Read the full feature story here.) No one has yet revealed what caused the explosion, and the UK government has ordered an investigation to understand how such incidents can be managed in the future. Nonetheless, the catastrophic failure has taken industry veterans by surprise. "I can't remember a transformer failing like this in my 30-plus years in industry," said John Pettigrew, chief executive officer of National Grid, which operates the substation where the transformer was on fire. On Sunday, Heathrow — Europe's busiest airport — announced that everything was back up and running. It was even allowing extra flights to resolve the backlog created by the shutdown.  Smoke from a fire at North Hyde Electricity Substation near London Heathrow Airport in London on March 21. Photographer: Jaimi Joy/Bloomberg On Monday, a National Grid spokesperson confirmed that two out of the three transformers at the substation that caused the blackout were out of commission. The explosion had caused the third one to fail, but it was far enough away that the company was able to restart it after minor repairs. The cost of the Heathrow shutdown to the airline industry is expected to be more than £60 million ($78 million), according to Andrew Light, a consultant and former senior executive at British Airways owner IAG SA. Large power transformers rarely cost more than a few million dollars. When will the substation be restored fully? National Grid declined to give a date, but the likelihood of a quick fix is low. "There is a lead-time of over a year for a new transformer of this size," says Conor Murphy, vice president of engineering at grid-technology firm NovoGrid. This is the first story in a series called Bottlenecks. Each story will explore the many things — some quite unexpected — that are holding back global efforts to our clean, electrified future. The key to tackle climate change is to electrify as much of our energy use as possible and generate that electricity while producing the fewest greenhouse-gas emissions. Both steps are necessary. While some countries and companies are taking a step back on their carbon-cutting goals, few are withholding on electrification. The rise of AI, along with heat pumps and electric cars, is creating new bottlenecks. The impact is especially hard in North America and Europe, which for decades have seen flat or declining demand for electricity. Now supply chains have to be rejiggered to not just fix broken or aging equipment, but to build for growth. There are many solutions as our story explores, though no silver bullet. "It's going to be a long battle," says Benjamin Boucher, senior analyst for Wood Mackenzie. "It's not something that can be solved in the next five years." Read the full story on Bloomberg.com. | 
No comments:
Post a Comment