Engineer. Historian. Beer-Drinker. Publican's Friend. Hi-Fi Anorak. Technocrat. Patriot. Improving Husband. Feminist. “The Attenborough of the Relay Room”
London
Joined November 2011
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We are not the BEST commissioning engineers on the British power system, but we are in the top two 💁🏻♂️
!⃝ 𝗧𝗵𝗶𝘀 𝗰𝗹𝗮𝗶𝗺 𝗶𝘀 𝗱𝗶𝘀𝗽𝘂𝘁𝗲𝗱 𝗯𝘆 𝗼𝗳𝗳𝗶𝗰𝗶𝗮𝗹 𝘀𝗼𝘂𝗿𝗰𝗲𝘀 ⚡️👆🏻
Down in Dorset for a cheeky little sync repair. Fag paper of gap on a MVAA21 contact. Unusual. No need to adjust it. Just used a spare contact instead. All good now 👍🏻
Had a fantastic afternoon with @edcporter and @ModoEnergy filming their Transmission podcast at this spectacular 400 kV indoor substation in London. Keep an eye out on their YouTube channel for our Christmas special 🎬😉
This is perhaps 85%+ of my day job. Although I’m an authorised commissioning engineer and authorising engineer, the bulk of my work is maintenance and defect resolution. Which is important and deeply satisfying
What if Britain’s grand infrastructure plans are holding back the growth they promise?
Perhaps lasting prosperity starts with something less dramatic: properly maintaining the existing systems?
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Appalling that we are unable to use all this renewable energy. We have to get better, faster and more agile at delivering essential infrastructure in GB. We have to value and recognise engineering skills and make our nation’s children dream of becoming engineers. Not panjandrums
The country has had years to throw a few more circuits up over the border. Western Link helped. But it’s still not enough. Wind farms ought to have been deferred until more wires in place or signed up under different terms, in my view
This is a hand-operated 25 kV catenary OLE sectioning disconnector at a London station. I’m please to see it securely locked 🔐 👍🏻 But that label is unacceptable. I can’t imagine it gets operated very often as any engineer I know would order a new label first. These things matter
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Need to point out that it’s synchronously connected to England & Wales, AND numerous asynchronous links going in at pace. Western Link in service for many years, EGL1 and EGL2 underway. But I support new nuclear in Scotland 🏴 Like rest of GB, we’ve buried our heads instead 😭😭
Torness and Peterhead are both going to close in the next few years
@neso_energy is planing an experiment with the Scottish grid, to run it without any large synchronous generation
This has never been done on a grid of that size anywhere in the world. It might work. But it might not. There's no plan B...
This is good advice and worth a read and heed. Personally, I’ll head to a transmission substation. One with plenty of tea and a good comfy chair. I appreciate only a tiny minority can do that. But I suspect we may be needed anyway, to get the rest of you back to normal 🙏🏻
Nobody ever gets interrupted. In the
British media it’s always “plunged into darkness”. I guess breaking a circuit in 100ms ish is a rapid enough de-energisation to be a plunge, but these dramatic phrases have been used for years. It’s a very British way of writing
Simulating a persistent feeder fault (rare in practice) on a 132 composite feeder. For this I always use my Bhosale Box ofc. Note the re-energisation attempt bang on 15s and the trip on close is what you’d see for a real fault. Then lockout. Nothing more to see after that ⚡️⏱️☺️
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#BlackStart has been called Electricity System Restoration (ESR) since about 2019 in GB. Many still use the old term
Considering there is really little chance of war or a cyber attack causing a 3-day UK shutdown, I would suggest the government has finally been told there is a likely electricity grid failure coming this winter.
The link describes what could happen if the grid trips. Only 60% of power will likely be restored in 24 hours. It could take 5–7 days for power to be completely restored. In the worst case, it could be 14 days.
theblackoutreport.co.uk/2023…
