Traffic lights and train networks were hit by the outage in August lewis pennock/PAThree energy companies have agreed to pay out £10.5 million over Britain’s worst blackout in a decade. Orsted-backed Hornsea One Ltd, the owner of the world’s largest offshore wind farm, and RWE, which owns Little Barford gas plant, will each pay £4.5 million in “voluntary redress”, the regulator has said. Both plants failed within seconds of a lightning strike to the national electricity grid on August 9, leading to blackouts that cut off a million homes and caused chaos on rail networks. Ofgem found that the combined loss of the two large plants and the automatic disconnection of a series of small power plants caused a rapid drop in the frequency of the national power grid, triggering further small plants to automatically disconnect. “These combined…

Source: The Times January 03, 2020 09:00 UTC