Ireland’s electricity, water and telecom providers may expect the report card on their response to Storm Éowyn to say: “You did your best in face of unprecedented circumstances.”
But they are in for a rude awakening, as far as climatologist Peter Thorne is concerned.
Probably Ireland’s worst ever storm, blowing in on Friday, January 25th, left hundreds of thousands of people without power, water, heat, cooking options, internet, phone services and transport to varying degrees for days on end.
Loss of electricity knocked out other essential services. It was a harsh lesson on how the modern home, business and farm depends on electricity.
Thorne is non-committal on whether climate change worsened the supercharged jet stream over the Atlantic, resulting in record wind speeds at one spot on the west coast, at Mace Head in Connemara, peaking at 183km/hour.
[ Over 108,000 homes still without electricity a week after Storm ÉowynOpens in new window ]
“We need to rethink the grid and make it a lot more resilient. It’s vulnerable to power outages and this is only going to increase,” says Thorne.
“We’re not resilient to today’s climate,” he says, regardless of whether Éowyn was more or less likely due to human influence.
As chairman of the Climate Change Advisory Council’s adaptation committee preparing Ireland for what’s expected from a disturbed climate, Thorne highlights vulnerability in the supply of electricity which has knock-on consequences for water and telecommunications.
[ As it happened: Power cuts and widespread destruction in wake of Storm ÉowynOpens in new window ]
He dismisses the excuse that this was an “unprecedented” moment because in a reasonable worst-case scenario this should have been anticipated.
“You are always going to get something unprecedented. That is the nature of the beast,” he says.
He believes utilities should be resilient enough to withstand wind speeds of 200km/hour “given what has happened in history”.
Compounding matters is the risk of undermining public support for mitigation – the reduction in carbon emissions,Thorne says.
“In the ‘electrification of everything’ – heating, cooking, transport – we can’t afford to have days, weeks, offline.”
Having wrestled for 24 hours with a phone signal but no internet, he says the telecoms sector is “fundamentally unprepared for an incident of this kind”.
Utility providers say no network in the world can withstand gusts of 180km/hour; utilities cannot be fully climate-proofed. In that scenario, they ask: What is realistic from a cost perspective?
Resilience issues aside, they responded to Éowyn with sustained, highly co-ordinated action in the face of much adversity.
Power
Well in advance, Met Éireann issued a “4D warning” to key players gathered under the National Emergency Co-ordination Group (NECG), says Peter O’Shea, ESB’s head of corporate and regulatory affairs.
With red alerts for the entire country this storm would be different, dangerous and cause damage and devastation.
“That’s how it turned out. An unprecedented storm caused unprecedented customer losses and significantly more damage on the network than experienced previously,” says O’Shea.
The 768,000 customers left without power, perhaps, best illustrates worsening storm trends.
It resulted in almost double the numbers of customers losing supply compared to previous record storms (Darragh, Ophelia and Darwin).
Our population is far more diversely located than in the UK and Europe, meaning more network per customer than other countries by factor of two to three. Ireland’s legacy of one-off rural housing means we have 165,000km of distribution lines – four times the EU per-capita average.
The costs of ‘undergrounding’ would be enormous. Backup generators, batteries and other forms of energy storage can help in making us more resilient, particularly in rural areas
— Dr Barry Hayes, UCC
“While that adds to the cost of building and maintaining networks, it also increases risks the network faces during stormy weather and makes restoration more difficult, especially in sparsely populated areas,” O’Shea adds.
Tulla in east Clare illustrates the logistical challenge. Drone footage revealed vast tracts of land there had entire tree populations flattened with multiple line breaks where 60km of overhead lines serve 150 customers, one of whom is 20km from the village’s substation.
This is a particular issue in rural Ireland where the electrical distribution network is made up almost entirely of overhead lines exposed to the weather.
“In cities, more of the electrical infrastructure is underground, so we don’t have as many outages,” says Dr Barry Hayes, specialist in electrical power systems at UCC.
ESB Networks dispatched repair crews to fix damaged overhead lines. Prioritisation is given to where the network serves the largest numbers.
[ Electrification is Ireland’s missing climate linkOpens in new window ]
The best solution would be to move the distribution network underground, Hayes says.
“[But] in Ireland this is very expensive to do since we have a relatively low population density and a geographically scattered population,” he says.
“The costs of ‘undergrounding’ would be enormous. Backup generators, batteries and other forms of energy storage can help in making us more resilient, particularly in rural areas.”
At an estimated €100 billion, the move would be prohibitive for customers already enduring the highest prices in Europe.
Storms cause localised power outages because of damage they do to the distribution system, explains Dr Paul Cuffe of UCD School of Electrical and Electronic Engineering. These assets, which are owned and operated by ESB Networks, bring electricity from the backbone transmission grid (operated by EirGrid) out to the homes and businesses that need it.
[ Storm Éowyn leaves battered Irish golf courses counting the costOpens in new window ]
“These distribution circuits act like local and regional roads whereas the transmission grid is akin to our national motorway network,” says Dr Cuffe.
“Distribution circuits are usually overhead lines, and these are prone to storm damage: trees can be blown into contact with conductors, or poles can collapse, amid other hazards, and these will cause sudden electrical disturbances.”
Some EirGrid transmission circuits were out of service during and after Storm Éowyn but “the transmission system remained secure and stable ... This is as a result of significant reinforcements made over the last few years” a spokesman said.
The ESB was one of first transmission system operators in Europe to start building up resilience in response to storms and climate change, the compay’s asset manager Robert Tucker says.
They share best practice in working groups with European and US counterparts, as shown by how power was restored to 600,000 customers by Tuesday.
“ESB Networks is investing multiple billions of euro in maintaining and enhancing service levels and resilience,” he adds. A €20 million programme is carrying out a trial of data gathering and condition monitoring technologies around climate adaptability.
[ Tough choices must be made on the climate crisisOpens in new window ]
To reduce the number and duration of unplanned outages, it is concentrating investment in automation and control, Tucker adds. It is also replacing many of its 2.2 million wooden poles with more durable ones; using light detection and ranging (LIDAR) devices for helicopter and drone patrols and scaling up “self-healing” automated equipment to return supply sooner to storm-affected customers.
Water
Damage sustained to water and wastewater infrastructure was not significant, Uisce Éireann says. Loss of electricity, however, resulted in loss of water to more than 200,000 customers.
The utility has more than 8,000 “assets” including water treatment plants, wastewater treatment plants and pumping stations; all requiring electricity.
“Many of our large plants have permanent generators in place which automatically kick in when power is lost. Not all sites, however, are suitable for connecting to generators due to location, size or configuration,” a spokesman says.
For the remainder, mobile generators are deployed as required after loss of mains power. They also source additional generators from contractors. Working closely with the ESB, it deployed generators at hundreds of locations, providing water to some 300,000 people at peak – while shifting them to the worst-affected areas, notably the northwest.
Protecting Ireland’s water infrastructure is a big priority, its spokesman says, especially from more frequent and severe storm events. Their impact is “continuously reviewed and lessons taken from this to ensure we can increase resilience”.
Telecommunications
In parts of Connemara, residents searched for pockets of phone coverage in the wake of Storm Éowyn outages, with motorists pulling up at the sides of roads to avail of scarce coverage where they could find it, including on one stretch near Carna that one local called “the golden mile” of communication.
By Tuesday, Eir’s voice and broadband services had been restored to more than 236,000 homes and businesses, while 800 mobile sites were back online – 22,300 were still without broadband, a spokeswoman said.
Ireland’s main provider of fixed-line and mobile telecommunications services – with some two million customers – focused on repairing fibre breaks. It concentrated on “addressing transmission link faults and damage” to it’s ourcore network, “working to get power restored to critical network and mobile sites via the ESB, deploying generators, clearing trees from critical sites and making dangerous plant safe”.
Eir has been building additional long-term resilience and contingencies including backup power sources across all 1,250 exchange sites; adding static generators at more than 250 critical sites; more than 60 mobile generators, alongside battery backup on most of its mobile sites. It is transitioning from a copper-based network to a more resilient fibre network.
“These systems assist to mitigate the impact of power cuts, which are the primary causes of outages ... Significantly fewer customers were out of service than might otherwise have been, and there was a quicker restoration of service for others,” the company says.
National Boardband Ireland says there was extensive damage to all infrastructure networks, “including NBI’s, which is often located in the most rural and remote locations”.
We cannot rely on emergency response alone. Preventive investment in grid resilience is the only sustainable solution
— Sean Kelly MEP
The company’s primary focus was on identifying and repairing major fibre breaks. By Wednesday, due to a combination of localised power outages and fibre breaks, 18,882 premises were still offline.
Thorne acknowledges “grid infrastructure is coming” along with more distributed generation to enable areas to retain power despite storms, though much work is needed at household and community level.
Use of up-cycled EV batteries “inside the kill switch in homes” offers the opportunity to provide 40 kilowatt-hours – three to four days' power supply.
“But very many people in society cannot afford to think like that. In adaptation planning, we need to help those who can’t afford it,” Thorne says.
With dramatic reduction in battery costs, he says they should be located in communities, allowing “microgrids” to operate independently.
Ireland’s electricity system, built for a 20th-century economy, “is no longer adequate to meet demands of a 21st-century society increasingly reliant on digital infrastructure and electrification”, says Fine Gael MEP Sean Kelly.
“We have failed to deliver grid upgrades needed over the last two decades. Our system must be capable of accommodating high volumes of renewable energy and electrification, while being resilient to the growing threat of extreme weather events caused by climate change,” he says.
The exceptional efforts of ESB Networks ensured most customers were reconnected as quickly as possible, he says.
“However, we cannot rely on emergency response alone. Preventive investment in grid resilience is the only sustainable solution.”
Advanced warnings from Met Éireann proved to be timely and at the right level, suggesting critical infrastructure was insufficiently resilient.
That issue is likely to top the agenda when the NECG and Government departments review Éowyn, forensically analysing the response and what needs addressing before another more ferocious storm hits Ireland, sooner rather than later.
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