German utilities call for crisis electricity reserve following Berlin outage
Clean Energy Wire
Following Berlin’s power outage caused by an arson attack that left tens of thousands of households without electricity for five days, Germany’s municipal utilities are calling for a national crisis reserve of mobile generators and heating systems. These should be dispatched in an emergency to restore the electricity supply within 24 hours, argued industry lobby group VKU.
“The attack on Berlin’s electricity supply has shown: Our energy networks are vulnerable,” said Ulf Kämpfer, VKU president and mayor of Kiel, in a press release. “There is no 100 percent security from such attacks. However, we have to do everything we can to limit the damage, and to restore supply as quickly as possible.”
On 3 January, an arson attack damaged high-voltage cables near a combined power and heating station, triggering a blackout in southwest Berlin which temporarily left 45,400 households and 2,200 businesses without power. The attack increased the focus on supply security, with grid operators saying they were taking measures to protect vital infrastructure, and utility group BDEW calling for easing obligations to publish sensitive details on energy infrastructure to make it more difficult for malicious actors.
The VKU said the emergency reserve would enable the creation of temporary “island electricity grids” independent from the main supply system. These could be run by emergency power generators, which mostly run on diesel, combined heat and power plants, and gas turbines that could be activated with “a single phone call”. The association stated that this emergency reserve should have a combined capacity of several hundred megawatts.
“A more decentralised energy supply based on renewable energies, storage facilities and combined heat and power, as well as private and municipal contingency options (for example storage facilities, emergency power, heat sources) can significantly mitigate the effects of outages,” VKU said. The group also called for investigating the need for additional redundancies and “grid meshing”, which refers to making grids more interconnected so that if one line fails, electricity can still flow through other routes.
The municipal utilities said that the creation of an emergency reserve will be expensive and that the government should shoulder the costs. “Resilience is not purely a technical task for network operators, but a responsibility for the state as a whole. Every individual is also well advised to take precautions themselves,” said Kämpfer.
