UK orders investigation into Heathrow power outage
March 24, 2025
UK energy secretary Ed Miliband has commissioned the independent National Energy System Operator (NESO) to “urgently investigate the power outage incident that impacted Heathrow Airport and the surrounding area,” causing a temporary closure of the entire airport last Friday. Initial findings are expected to be reported within six weeks.
The investigation – described by The Department for Energy Security and Net Zero as intended to “build a clear picture of the circumstances surrounding this incident and the UK’s energy resilience more broadly – will be conducted with independent national regulatory authority Ofgem.
“Heathrow is a massive airport that uses the energy of a small city, so it’s imperative we identify how this power failure happened and learn from this to ensure a vital piece of national infrastructure remains strong,” commented UK transport secretary Heidi Alexander. Miliband added that the government is “determined to do everything it can to prevent a repeat of what happened at Heathrow”.
Lessons learned from Friday’s specific incident will inform the government’s ongoing ‘Plan for Change,’ aiming to bolster the country’s energy security, with a separate Cabinet-led ‘resilience review’ due to conclude this Spring.
Flights from Heathrow were resumed late on Friday (prioritising repatriation and relocation of aircraft), with Heathrow Airport CEO Thomas Woldbye confirming that “business as usual” was resumed within 24 hours. “The level of work and detail to get a business the size of a city to this point within such a short turnaround is a credit to the teams who were involved and the resilience plans we have in place,” he wrote on social media, adding that it was “inevitable that an incident of this magnitude would affect [the airport’s] operations”.
Although the airport does have backup systems (which worked as expected), “they are not sized to run the entire airport,” he confirmed. As reported by the BBC, transport Heidi Alexander also clarified that “the backup supply is designed to protect the critical key systems within the airport and not to provide power to the whole airport”.
Additionally, although counter-terrorism officers from the Metropolitan Police have been leading the investigation into the cause of the fire, the incident is not being treated as suspicious.
