Heathrow chief executive Thomas Woldbye has said the airport switched its power supply “as fast as we possibly could” after the fire at a nearby substation last month.
During a meeting of the House of Commons transport committee yesterday (Wednesday), MPs were told that the fire-hit North Hyde substation in Hayes was one of three sources of power available to the airport.
Woldbye (pictured) said: “We did take advantage of the two remaining substations as fast as we possibly could.”
More: Heathrow resilience concerns were raised before shutdown
He said the process would take “hours” even when planned because “maybe 1,000 systems” need to be shut down for it to be completed.
Before switching supply, he said, the airport first tried to get “a little bit of certainty on where the situation was going and whether we could get power back faster or not”.
He added: “When it became clear that we couldn’t get that assurance, we took that decision as early as we could and airlines were kept informed all along on our deliberations and why we took those decisions and what our objectives were in terms of getting operations back as fast as possible.”
Eliane Algaard, operations director of Scottish and Southern Electricity Networks (SSEN), said: “There were two additional intakes fully available throughout the incident and these two connections had the ability to supply power to Heathrow.
“At the moment, Heathrow is currently operating from those two intakes. At the moment they are not electing to take intake from North Hyde.”
Alice Delahunty, president of UK electricity transmission at National Grid, said: “Network resilience does rely on the ability to reswitch and reconfigure to take supplies from different places, so when we talk about three parallel inlets being there and two being available, I think it’s a question for Heathrow as to how they access the remaining two inlets that were available throughout.”
Woldbye said he would like to give a “sincere apology” to the 300,000 passengers whose journeys were affected by the day-long closure, adding: “I offer my deepest regrets.”
Outlining the reason for closing the airport, he said: “When we cannot operate the airport safely, then we cannot operate the airport.”
He added: “If we hadn’t done that, we would have had thousands of passengers stranded at the airport and a high risk of personal injury.
“There were gridlocked roads around the airport, 65,000 houses and other institutions were powered down and traffic lights didn’t work, so the risk of having tens of thousands of people stranded at the airport would have been a disastrous scenario and that was agreed by airlines on the day.”