Brussels urges action on EU blackout threat

EU states should sign up to European Commission reforms on the internal market for energy if they want to avoid the kind of blackouts seen in November last year, Brussels said Tuesday (30 January), trying to steer a middle way between advice and alarmism.

“I wouldn’t say today there exists the risk of a blackout,” energy commissioner Andris Piebalgs said. “But some issues must be addressed, actions must be taken at EU level so that human error cannot trigger a blackout causing small suffering for 15 million European citizens.”
More than 15 million people in France, Germany, Belgium, the Netherlands, Italy and Spain lost electricity for a few minutes on 4 November last year, after a worker at German firm E.ON switched off a high-voltage line to let a ship pass below, causing a domino effect of power overloads.

E.ON has since admitted blame and could face legal action – stopping a toaster for five minutes in a French home is no big deal, but stopping, say, a giant paper-making machine at a factory in Germany can take several hours to restart and cause hundreds of thousands of euros in loss.

A fresh report into the November cuts by the Union for the Coordination of Transmission of Electricity (UCTE) paints a worrying picture of an E.ON man with his finger on the switch, but with inadequate security standards to keep him in check and no system to warn operators in other EU states of what he is doing.

EU Observer