Power outages that last more than three days are “unacceptable”, Kwasi Kwarteng has told MPs.
Grilled by the House of Commons Scottish Affairs Committee on Tuesday morning (18 January) about late November’s Storm Arwen, which left some households without electricity for more than a week, the secretary of state for business and energy said the response to such disasters must improve.
“In this day and age, power outages of more than three days should be unacceptable: we can’t sugar coat that. We can do a lot better.”
But the minister rejected criticism by members of the committee that the government’s response to the storm had been too slow.
After revealing that his first contact with the Scottish government had been on the Tuesday following the Friday that the storm hit northern parts of the UK, Kwarteng said a response could only be formulated once the “full impact” of the damage was clear.
“That can take a day or two. We could have done things quicker, but the response was reasonable.”
And he criticised the distribution network operators’ (DNOs) communications efforts in the wake of the storm, which Kwarteng added had been a “big problem”, albeit less in Scotland than in the north of England.
“There were clearly issues not only with customers of DNOs but the information that companies were directing to us.”
The secretary of state also said there would have to be long-term thought about ensuring networks have sufficient backup generator capacity in the event of disasters like Storm Arwen.
But he rejected a suggestion that the resilience of the electricity network to a storm like Arwen should have been stress-tested by Ofgem.
“It is very difficult for a regulator to stress test extreme weather: I don’t see how Jonathan Brearley and his team in Ofgem could have stress-tested Storm Arwen, a one-in-50-years event.”
Kwarteng said investment in the Scottish electricity network is greater per household than in the south of England and that undergrounding cables, like happens in much of London, is not a cost-effective solution in more sparsely populated areas like rural Scotland.
“I’m not sure going to full underground cabling is the answer but there are ways we can make infrastructure more robust,” he said, pointing to reports of how wooden transmission poles had “bent like matchsticks” during Arwen.
Guy Jefferson, chief operating officer at SP Energy Networks (SPEN), said he was “disappointed” that some cut off customers had received “inaccurate” restoration times in the wake of Arwen.
The network had been “definitely guilty” of being “over ambitious” in the reconnection times it had sometimes offered customers, he said: “We had the best intentions at the time but recognise the difficulties that might cause for people making alternative arrangements.”
Jefferson said SPEN had “played a little safer” with indicated times in the past, which had left it open to criticism from people who stayed away from home longer than needed to be.
Mark Rough, director of customer operations at Scottish and Southern Electricity Networks, said communication had been delayed by the difficulties field staff had faced getting access to damaged parts of the network, which had hindered their ability to assess the extent of the damage.
He also defended the company’s focus on restoring connections rather than providing generators, arguing that the latter would have diverted resources from necessary repairs.