The National Energy System Operator has today published its full report into the North Hyde substation fire.
Commenting on behalf of the Academy, Paul Taylor CBE FREng, Royal Academy of Engineering Trustee, said:
“The North Hyde Substation Review shows why a culture of proactive maintenance is so important, not waiting until we have a local failure which can have wider cascades of consequences. The scale of these impacts will only increase through the interconnectedness that comes from greater electrification and digitalisation.”
“We are investigating what we can do to enable better, proactive management of these issues including the role of asset health monitoring, informed by our National Engineering Policy Centre project on Ageing Infrastructure, which will report in the autumn.”
“We know this is critical for wider resilience, which we need to change our approach to. The Academy’s review of the National Security Risk Assessment methodology called on all organisations, in industry and government, to consider how their risk assessment processes translate into action and prepare them for a broad range of impacts.”
“Emergencies create opportunities to learn lessons, the insights they provide must be considered in other contexts, so we increase the resilience of the UK as a whole.”