Power cuts have extended for some customers to more than a week, and industry experts and government alike are unwilling to accept that networks could not have done better, despite the unprecedented weather.
They are clear that if storms on the magnitude of Storm Arwen become more commonplace, networks will have to up their game.
Completely unacceptable
More than one million homes and businesses lost power as a result of the storm, and while the majority of customers were reconnected within a few days, a few thousand were left without power for more than a week.
Network operators have been vocal about the sheer level of damage caused by the storm – Electricity North West, one of the worst affected distribution network operators, described the devastation to its power networks as “unlike anything we’ve ever seen”.
But now that most customers have been reconnected, questions are starting to be asked about whether the storm really was unprecedented, or whether networks were just not prepared enough.
Either way, Business Secretary Kwasi Kwarteng told the BBC a week after the storm that the time taken to reconnect customers was “completely unacceptable”.
Dermot Nolan, the former chief executive of Ofgem says that if he was still heading up the regulator, he would be unclear as to why networks have been unable to reconnect all customers quicker, despite their protestations about conditions.
“What confuses me is seven or eight days seems a lot of time – eight days strikes me as being very unusual,” he says.
After the stormiest winter in 40 years in 2013, Ofgem ruled that DNOs must improve both their communication and their ability to deal with the “tail end” of connections.
On both fronts Nolan believes the networks had made good progress, which does indicate that Storm Arwen was unusual.
“This seems to have been different. Maybe there are good explanations to this.”
However, Nolan stresses that whatever unusual weather conditions Storm Arwen may have brought, networks will not be allowed to hide behind them.
“It’s very hard to say a week later, we still have thousands off and don’t blame us. That’s something that they would have known would have been unacceptable and they should have had plans to deal with that.
“It’s just not on. It’s not as if this is a new issue.”
Nolan believes that the review which will be conducted by Ofgem is likely to result in penalties for one or two companies.
Here Utility Week examines the areas where questions are likely to be asked:
Resilience of the networks
Network operator engineers have been universally praised for their efforts to reconnect customers in extremely difficult conditions.
But one of the key areas that will come under scrutiny by Ofgem, and which has already been highlighted as an area of concern by government is the resilience of the network, both to existing weather and any potential changes in the future due to climate change.
The Energy Networks Association (ENA) says there are already specific requirements in the RIIO-ED2 price control around climate change resilience, and network operators have already carefully considered the impact of future weather on the system.
“As part of industry’s response to DEFRA’s call for climate change adaptation reporting, in conjunction with Met Office and using the latest data available, we undertook a study of the likely impacts of climate change and how that would impact on the management and operation of gas and electricity assets and networks,” a spokesperson for the ENA says.
“This confirmed our thinking on the priority hazards and allowed us to understand the likely impacts as the planet warms.
“The information from the Met Office report allowed DNO’s to feed into their ED2 submissions.”
Network operators were also tasked with undertaking a survey of network vulnerabilities after the 2013 storms, and yet despite both studies, the ENA indicated during a BEIS Select Committee session that the scale of the damage was down in part to the unusual northerly direction of the wind.
Such an explanation was met with short shrift by the Select Committee Chair Darren Jones MP.
“It does seem to me that we ought to be prepared for wind coming in multiple directions.”
He added that the £730 million that DNOs have spent on resilience over the last five years “doesn’t sound like a lot of investment from my perspective”.
Nolan believes that DNOs may well respond to calls that they must improve by saying that they will need to invest more and be allowed to do that by Ofgem.
Former senior partner for networks at Ofgem Maxine Frerk says that the clear steer the government has given over what standard is expected is actually helpful, as it will allow networks to start asking questions about how they will achieve that and what kind of investment it will require.
Call times
One area which was highlighted in Ofgem’s review of DNO performance after the stormy winter of 2013 as needing improvement was communication, but this appeared to have broadly improved, says Nolan.
“Communication this time seems to have been not good. I thought that had broadly been improved since then and DNOs have generally done well, so I’m surprised that communication was poor this time,” he says.
The ENA’s director of regulation, Paul McGimpsey, acknowledged that communication could have been better and will be a central focus of the DNO’s own reviews of the storm.
“I do appreciate that our communications with customers have perhaps not been what they could have been during this event,” he said to the BEIS Select Committee.
Customers were reportedly waiting up to two hours on the first day of power cuts to speak to their network through the 105 number, with calls up more than 300% according to the ENA.
82,000 calls per day were handled via 105, with 16,000 calls managed per hour at peak times.
DNOs were able to reduce call times to between ten and fifteen minutes by drafting in assistance from network operators from other parts of the country and “other utility companies”.
The ENA says the “Power cut? Call 105 number” has improved communications for customers in severe weather events as well as more generally, but Frerk says she was never convinced that a national number would have much of an impact on the quality of communications.
If networks were able to reduce call waiting times by sharing call centre staff then she says this could be looked at as a model of how to improve communication moving forwards.
“We are only going to get more storms. If was something that they managed to make work for the first time then absolutely make that more formalised.”
Kwarteng has indicated they must do better, telling the House of Commons during a debate five days after Storm Arwen: “The storm hit and the companies did not have the communication networks, the call centres or the people there to deal with the situation,” he said.
“There was an issue with communication on the weekend, I am sad to say. There was a huge surge in demand and not enough infrastructure—there were not enough people in the call centres— to deal with the situation.”
Accurate communication over reconnection times
In the Commons, Tory MP John Lamont said SP Energy Networks (SPEN) has “serious questions” to answer about its “failure” to provide accurate information to residents about reconnection times.
This issue is not unique to SPEN, nor this storm, and stems from networks giving the most optimistic scenario to customers of being reconnected when the high voltage network is reinstated.
However, once back up, further faults are often then detected on the low-voltage network.
Frerk says that this problem is well known to networks, and they should be assuming that further faults will be detected when giving information to consumers.
“That was one of the lessons that came out of the 2013 storms. People wanted to know accurate information. And I know the networks don’t always know, but they are naturally optimistic and want to do well.
“But really, the importance of being clear upfront of what the worst-case scenario could be should be coming out in the comms.”
More accurate information, or at least a change to slightly more pessimistic connection predictions, would also encourage networks to engage earlier with other organisations to provide support.
One of the criticisms from Storm Arwen is that it took a number of days for Local Resilience Forums, which co-ordinate support for householders without power, to be up and running in response to information from networks.
But achieving this would “need a whole cultural shift around ‘the worst thing we can do is give people false hope’”, says Frerk.
Other interventions and support
While networks are ultimately responsible for the length of power cuts, MPs in the worst affected areas felt that the government should have done more sooner to support householders.
The government faced calls to bring in the army to do door-to-door welfare checks days before they were eventually mobilised.
Frerk does believe that more thinking should be going on around community-level resilience by all parties, not just networks.
“I’ve always thought that if we made sure that there was one place in each community that had a generator and could act as a hub then at least you are doing something to think about providing a base in other kinds of emergency situations such as floods.
“Are there things that the networks can be doing to make sure there are places people can go to be safe? But that comes back to the comms.
“If they were saying from the beginning people are going to be off for over a week, we need the army in, then the government would have done something.”
The army is unlikely to be made available after storms other than in exceptional circumstances but the challenge of communicating and supporting customers is only going to get harder for networks.
In 2025, BT is shutting down its PSTN network. This network currently allows ordinary plug-in phones to work without an electricity connection, which is why such phones are included in support packages by DNOs.
Once it is switched off, all calls will be made over the internet and will therefore require electricity.
The eight-day power cuts of Storm Arwen may be able to provide networks with valuable insights of how to communicate with customers who don’t have landlines and whose mobiles are flat.