London’s Heathrow Airport has been forced to close temporarily after a fire in a nearby electricity substation. More than 1,300 flights have been suspended and thousands of passengers left stranded.
Substations take high-voltage electricity from pylons and transform it into the lower voltages you use at home. This happens in a transformer filled with oil to insulate the electricity. In this case, it appears that more than 20,000 litres of this oil caught fire.
The closure of one of the world’s largest airports due to a failure of just one electricity substation underlines how important it is that critical national energy infrastructure – pylons, substations and so on – keeps functioning. This is only becoming more important as demand for electricity increases, thanks to transport and domestic heating switching to lower-carbon electrified alternatives – notably electric cars and heat pumps.
