Earlier this month, UK commuters across England and Wales were left in the dark and in chaos after a serious power cut affected rail and road services.

The cause, according to the National Grid was a “problem with two generators” and the consequences of that problem have led to an investigation by the energy regulator Ofgem.

Now that may not sound so unusual, but this is in fact the very first time Ofgem has ever launched a formal probe into the cause of a power cut in Britain, This in itself highlights two key points: one just how large scale the disruption was and two, just how important constant power supply is for the modern world.

So, what went wrong?

Fundamentally the power outage is being blamed on a single lightening strike that, as The Telegraph reports, triggered an off shore wind farm and a gas power station to simultaneously but independently go “off grid”. At the time, the National Grid did not have the required levels of “backup” power needed to cope with a loss of power at the scale that losing these two generators created.

Another way of looking at this, is to say that the National Grid did not have an adequate disaster recovery plan in place. In a recent post, we discussed what actually counts as an IT disaster in the modern world and it seems like that same question needs to be asked in this context too…

Energy experts have already noted that the UK’s increasing reliance on renewable energy means there is a need for new infrastructure such as better battery systems, in order to cope with power outages in the future.

In other words, the National Grid needs to revisit and update its disaster recovery plans in order to reflect how their business and wider industry has changed over time. This is something every IT and electricity dependant business should do, because what counted as a disaster three years ago, might be a minor blip today and what solved the problem in the past, may only scratch the surface now.

In short, staying up to date and on top of your business-critical infrastructure is vital and luckily, that’s where our team of experts can help. Not only can we help deliver a disaster recovery plan that makes sure you’re in a position to get up and running again in the event of a crisis, but we can also support you with the right backup solutions and network infrastructure to try and limit a disaster occurring in the first place.

As the saying goes, prevention is far better than the cure and we’re sure the National Grid would agree. Talk to us about backups, generators, uninterrupted power supply and disaster recovery planning today.