Ireland could suffer \u201ca sustained total blackout\u201d if it was targeted by acts of sabotage equivalent to the attacks this week on Germany’s power grid, an Irish engineering expert has warned.<\/p>\n
Associate professor at UCD school of electrical and electronic engineering, Paul Cuffe, was commenting on two incidents in Germany this week.<\/p>\n
German authorities are investigating the two attacks on electricity substations, to determine if they were acts of sabotage.\u00a0<\/p>\n
In the first incident, early on Tuesday, improvised explosives damaged power cables in Brandenburg state, in the east of the country.<\/p>\n
Later that day, in a second attack, unknown perpetrators caused a deliberate short-circuit by targeting overhead power lines at a substation in Bergheim town, near Cologne, in west Germany.<\/p>\n
The attacks came the same day that Germany formally blamed Russia for a \u201chybrid attack\u201d involving an explosive-laden drone at a strategic airport in Leipzig last month.<\/p>\n
Mr Cuffe said the Cologne incident forced five nearby coal-fired generators to go offline, halting their delivery of power into the electricity grid.<\/p>\n
\u201cThese generators had a combined capacity of 4.2 GW; that\u2019s an enormous amount of power, equal to about 80% of the total power consumed in Ireland at breakfast time,\u201d he said.<\/p>\n
\u201cWhile the German grid managed to absorb the loss of these generators without affecting customers, this is still a major and very worrying incident.\u201d\u00a0<\/p>\n
He said there were many historic examples where less severe failures caused grids to collapse into nation-wide blackouts.<\/p>\n
\u201cThe scale of the outage in Cologne represents a scary near-miss for German grid operators,\u201d Mr Cuffe said.<\/p>\n
He said an equivalent attack in Ireland might involve large fossil fuel generators or electricity interconnectors with the UK.<\/p>\n
\u201cTwo targeted sabotage attacks against Irish grid assets in one day could cause severe disruption across the island; a sustained total blackout would be entirely possible,\u201d Mr Cuffe said.<\/p>\n
\u201cGermany was fortunate to withstand the incidents on Tuesday; widespread blackouts are a realistic consequence of this type of sabotage.\u201d\u00a0<\/p>\n
He said grid operators in Ireland don\u2019t run the grid close to its limits and leave plenty of safety margin.<\/p>\n
He said: “They should always be able to withstand the loss of any one of their assets: so if a powerline fails due to a lightning strike, or if a particular generator suddenly goes out of service, they should be able to absorb that without blackouts.”<\/p>\n
The real danger, he said, is if multiple assets fail simultaneously.<\/p>\n
“This makes the prospect of coordinated sabotage against the Irish grid very worrying,” he said.<\/p>\n