An unprecedented eight fires in 10 weeks. Who or what is targeting Britain's electricity network?

It started late on the evening of March 20 when a bang broke the reassuring hum at the North Hyde electricity substation near Heathrow Airport. One of the plant's two 'supergrid' transformers – giant pieces of equipment that step down high voltage power so it can be used by nearby homes and businesses – had exploded and set itself on fire.
The blaze spread swiftly through the compound, taking out a neighbouring unit that was still in operation. Within moments, a third back-up transformer also tripped off-line.
In less than an hour, the conflagration caused cascading outages across the local network, severing power to 66,000 homes in the west London area – one of the UK's biggest non-weather related power cuts of the past decade.
Vital cogs in the network, electrical substations shuttle electricity from power stations to the point of consumption. They vary in size, and are generally unmanned.
Yet despite being just one of three supplying Heathrow, North Hyde also cut off vital power to parts of the airport, leaving it unable to guarantee the safety of its flying operations. Europe's busiest aviation hub was closed for more than a day, disrupting over 1,300 flights and almost 300,000 passengers, as well as costing the airlines an estimated £50-100 million in lost revenue. It was an eloquent demonstration of how a single point of failure could bring chaos to a crucial piece of the British economy. And, worse, it wasn't the first serious electricity substation fire in March; it was the third.
Recent months have seen an epidemic of puzzling fires and failures across Britain's electricity network, as unexplained outbreaks have erupted from Exeter in the West Country to Glasgow in Scotland. In the James Bond films, 007's arch enemy Auric Goldfinger had a simple rule of thumb when it came to how many times seemingly innocent mishaps could recur before he perceived a more sinister pattern. 'Once is happenstance; twice coincidence; three times is enemy action,' he said.
Britain's recent experience would certainly satisfy those criteria. There have been five more blazes since the Heathrow fire, making a total of eight in about 10 weeks between the beginning of March and mid-May. 'Normally you'd expect to see one or two fires every few years, not a whole bunch compressed into a couple of months,' says an electricity expert. Their frequency has even led some to speculate that the Bond baddie's aphorism might be right and someone is indeed out to get us. While being careful to point out there is no hard evidence to support it, Philip Ingram, a former colonel in British military intelligence, has suggested the attacks look like something 'straight out of the Russian military intelligence playbook'.
Yet there's also an alternative domestic hypothesis that is no less disturbing. This argues that what we are witnessing is not the product of hostile outside action, but rather decades of shirked capital expenditure and reliance on increasingly antiquated equipment by bonus-hungry executives and financially-driven owners. In this version the enemy isn't some foreign baddie undermining our system, it may be the stewards of the network themselves.
Growing number of fires
The epidemic of blazes started on March 3 when a small substation in West Sussex caught fire, disrupting supplies to about 400 households in the Lancing area. According to the owner, UK Power Networks, a generator installed during repairs might have been tampered with. The fire was extinguished, the police were stumped. No one thought too much more about it. Then, 11 days later on March 15 a second substation blew up in Huddersfield, west Yorkshire, leaving a worker in hospital with serious burns, and cutting off 300 customers. The owner, Northern Powergrid, promised a health and safety investigation, which is still ongoing. Five days after that came North Hyde.
Subsequent weeks saw no let up in the accidents. On March 23, fire erupted at a substation near Nottingham, cutting off power to 200 properties, and leaving the puzzled owner, National Grid, blaming 'third party damage'. On April 29, it was the turn of the Aberdeen Place substation in Maida Vale, west London, to erupt in a pillar of smoke and flame when a transformer exploded. While the blaze didn't cut off power supplies, it ignited some nearby flats, burning out four, and causing some 80 residents to be evacuated.
Next came Glasgow where, on April 30, a substation caught fire in Taransay Street just behind the BAE warship yard in Govan, where the firm is building Type 26 frigates for the Royal Navy. Around 500 properties were cut off, including the yard itself. On this occasion two unnamed teenagers were arrested, who are due to appear in court this month on a charge Police Scotland said was connected to 'a wilful fire'. On May 11, witnesses reported a 'huge ball of flames' rising above a street close to Exeter city centre as another substation blew up, leaving 281 homes without power and requiring 25 people to be evacuated.
And finally, the Aberdeen Place substation in Maida Vale caught fire again, this time in the high voltage section run by National Grid. The blaze caused what the owners described as a 'power blip', disrupting supplies to several underground lines. The worst affected – the Bakerloo Line – was out of operation for six hours.
At Crocker's Folly, a Lebanese bar in Maida Vale, they are still grumbling about the fires at the substation; a blank brick building that faces the restaurant across the quiet leafy street, whose purpose is only signalled by the yellow 'Danger of Death' notices on its walls. In an adjoining compound, you can still see the fire-blackened equipment, and men in high-vis jackets buzz around, seemingly engaged in making repairs.
'It was a real pain for us because they closed the road off for days after the first one so we couldn't open for customers,' says one of the staff, who thinks the station's owners still owe residents a proper explanation after two blazes in as many weeks. Was there foul play or was the equipment faulty? There's been talk of something being set on fire and thrown into the compound on April 29. But UK Power Networks hasn't been drawn: it simply says that an investigation is ongoing. 'It's a bit worrying if it's just going to keep catching fire,' the waitress says.
In fairness, the electricity companies have been no more forthcoming in other cases. For instance, after the Exeter explosion, which took place just round the corner from the Royal Devon and Exeter Hospital, National Grid spoke vaguely of 'third party damage' and promised an investigation, while after the Nottingham blaze, the company apologised for a 'small electrical fire', while thanking customers for 'bearing with us as our teams work to restore supplies as quickly and safely as possible'.
Granted, there's an understandable reason for their reticence: Britain has around 57,000 large (33 kilovolt or over) substations spread across the transmission and distribution networks – out of a total of more than 500,000. These are all unmanned, defended only by CCTV and sensors, and hence vulnerable to vandalism or other malign interference. But at a time of tension between Russia and the UK, the resulting informational void has invited speculation about Kremlin-backed sabotage.
Oleksandr Danylyuk is one who sees the hand of Moscow behind recent events. 'It has the feel of a well-organised conspiracy – checking out resilience and vulnerabilities and whether they elicit diplomatic protests,' he says. An associate fellow of Britain's Royal United Services Institute, and an expert on Russian 'multi-dimensional warfare' against the West, Danylyuk is not alone in worrying about Kremlin-sponsored aggression.
Last November, MI6 chief Richard Moore said Russia was conducting a 'staggeringly reckless' sabotage campaign in Europe, while the head of MI5, Ken McCallum, accused the Kremlin of seeking to create 'sustained mayhem' on British streets. In a report published in March this year, a US think tank, the Centre for Strategic and International Studies, noted that the number of Russian attacks in Europe almost tripled last year to 34 known incidents, of which around a fifth were against critical infrastructure targets, such as electricity grids, undersea cables and energy pipelines.
This doesn't mean the streets need to be swarming with Russian saboteurs, Danylyuk points out. The GRU, Russia's military intelligence unit, often recruits locals or non-Russians for the purposes of deniability. Late last year, two young British nationals, Dylan Earl, 20, and Jake Reeves, 23, pleaded guilty to setting a fire at a warehouse in east London on behalf of the Wagner Group, a Russian state-funded private military company that is seen as an arm of the Kremlin.
Danylyuk also sees the official veil of silence as entirely consistent with a Russian hybrid campaign. (After the North Hyde blaze, the former Russian president Dmitry Medvedev even goaded the Government, saying he was 'looking forward to Russia being blamed for the Heathrow fire', and adding: 'What are you waiting for, Starmer?') Hybrid attacks on critical infrastructure fall uncomfortably close to the line of outright war, and politicians are consequently wary about reacting in case they inflame an already tense situation. 'There is no appetite in Western European governments to tell people about things such as sabotage when you are not really ready to do anything,' Danylyuk says.
The main problem with the sabotage theory is a lack of hard evidence. While suspicions of vandalism hang over several of the fires, only in Glasgow has anyone been arrested. Elsewhere, the police have played down talk of organised sabotage.
For instance, in the interim report into the still unexplained Heathrow incident by the National Energy System Operator (Neso), the state-run authority that controls the entire grid, the Met's counter terrorism unit was quoted as saying it 'found no evidence that the incident was suspicious in nature'. The final report is due by the end of June. There is also no sign of cyber attacks on substation control systems; the best way to shut down the entire facility and thus maximise the chaos from a single attack.
Despite his earlier conjecture about foul play, Col Ingram is now wary of pointing the finger at Moscow, although he doesn't exclude its involvement. 'Experts I have spoken to with access to very sensitive areas say they have no evidence of anything untoward going down,' he says. Instead, he has come to believe the fires may be more a case of cock-up rather than foreign conspiracy. 'My primary view is that old infrastructure and poor maintenance – or the lack of maintenance – may be responsible for a lot of what we are seeing,' he observes.
A perverse incentive
Perhaps the most striking fact buried in Neso's interim report into the North Hyde fire was the sheer age of the equipment involved. The 275 kilovolt (kV) transformer blamed for the blaze was one of two installed when the substation was itself built in 1968, and manufactured by Hackbridge and Hewittic, a British brand name that disappeared in the early 1970s.
Such venerable lifespans aren't out of the ordinary in British substations. Other vital devices such as circuit breakers (that cut off the power in the case of a fault) and switches (which route the current through the substation) also last for many decades. But transformers are a vital cog, enabling power to be stepped up to 400 kV so it can be transported over long distances without undue loss and then stepped back down to the 230 volts we use in our homes. Without them, the network simply couldn't function at all.
A large part of the currently installed base was commissioned from the 1950s to the early 1970s – the last time Britain invested heavily in the network as it completed its electrification. Manufactured with a design life of around 40 years, these old transformers proved much more long-lived than expected. 'Basically, they were fantastically robust and once you had got them bedded in through the 1980s, the grid people really knew how to keep them running,' says one electrical engineer who formerly worked for National Grid.
Then, in 1990, came a further incentive to eke out old equipment. The new privatised transmission and distribution ventures spun out of the Central Electricity Generating Board (CEGB) and the boards found themselves in a world where regulators not only set prices; they determined how much companies could spend on replacing worn out electrical gear. Margaret Thatcher's administration had decreed the system should reward companies for being efficient, so if they could do it for less than the watchdog's capital expenditure (capex) 'allowance', they got to keep the difference.
This new privatised system sliced up the network between transmission companies – responsible for running the 400 kV and 275 kV supergrids – and distribution companies (DNOs) that run wires to people's homes. Initially, most were listed on the stock market, but over the years, like much of British infrastructure, they were snapped up by specialist investors. For instance, UK Power Networks, the DNO that owns the Maida Vale substation, is owned by funds connected to Li Ka-shing, the Chinese billionaire, while Northern Powergrid belongs to Berkshire Hathaway, the investment vehicle of Warren Buffett.
As one might expect, these financially-driven owners responded to the regulatory incentives. Over the past decade, they have generally underspent their allowances for replacing equipment, banking the extra income and helping to make electricity transmission and distribution business one of the highest margin sectors in the country. Between 2014 and 2021, for instance, transmission companies undershot their replacement capex allowance by 28 per cent, according to Ofgem data, while for DNOs between 2016 and 2023, the figure was 12 per cent. Recent analysis by Common Wealth, a Left-of-centre think tank, estimates they collectively spent just £1.5 billion annually last year on replacing equipment against an approved budget of £2 billion.
Some see this system – which splits the resulting 'gains' between the companies and their customers – as a perverse incentive to skimp on capex. By setting broad rules which require companies to deliver outcomes such as network performance targets while letting them decide how (and if) to spend the allowance, Ofgem may think it is empowering companies to be more efficient. But insiders point to a culture of 'asset-sweating' that has left most substations with primitive analogue control systems, ancient concrete gantries, and a lack of modern monitoring gear designed to forestall outages. 'It's a systemic issue: the companies won't spend money on things that bring them no extra revenue, even if having those things would be good for the network as a whole,' says one, who thinks the lack of monitoring equipment contributed to the massive North Hyde outage.
The result is an increasingly aged network. Of the roughly £70 billion (in 2023-24 prices) of assets on transmission company balance sheets, around £30 billion, or 40 per cent, dates from before 1975. This creates a creeping fragility. 'This old gear can't last forever,' says Mathew Lawrence of Common Wealth, adding that when companies are challenged about skimping on capex, they say: ''Ah, but we will catch up when it's really needed'. It's like a football manager who loses his first five games saying he'll win the next seven.'
One nagging vulnerability lies in the oil that transformers use for insulation. A former CEGB engineer warns that any ingress of water can reduce the insulation properties and increase the risk of electricity arcing and fires. Such contamination inevitably becomes more likely with age. Another is that old plants often lack modern safety features, for instance the North Hyde plant had no concrete blast walls separating the transformers – something that has been required since the 1970s, but substation owners aren't required to retrofit. So when plants go bang, the damage will be worse.
'Dirty power'
To many electricity insiders, it seems no less bizarre talking about the recent fires as an existential threat as it does about foreign sabotage. Not only does the system continue to function, there are no obvious signs of deterioration. In Neso's latest annual transmission review, for instance, so-called loss of supply incidents actually fell in number over the past five years, although the aggregate amount of electricity lost was greater. Typical is the view of Simon Gallagher of UK Networks Services, a consultant: 'The networks are performing better than they ever have.'
But for all the upbeat talk, there is also a sense of foreboding. Until now, the network's assets have aged against a backdrop of declining usage, easing the pressure on hard-pressed substations. Britons consumed just 318 terawatt hours of electricity last year; 23 per cent less than the peak year of 2005. Now, as Keir Starmer's administration presses on towards net zero, usage should start shooting up again as sectors like motor transport and domestic heating shift from fossil fuels to electricity. Other power-hungry applications such as AI are coming too. By 2030, Neso anticipates demand will have grown by almost a third to 411 terawatt hours.
The increment to supply that will be needed will come from renewables, such as wind and solar. These create other concerns, such as 'dirty power' – a phenomenon linked to intermittent renewable generation sources where, instead of operating at a stable 50 hertz, the power supply's frequency jumps around and becomes irregular. 'There is no escaping the fact that dirty power imposes a far greater burden on network equipment like transformers,' says one electricity expert. There are also concerns about demand spikes from electric vehicle charging putting old transformers, switchgear and cables under heavy strain.
But the biggest worry is that an avalanche of equipment failures will expose the near impossibility of replacing old and broken kit. Years of thin orders have long killed off firms like Hackbridge and Hewittic, which built the transformers that burnt in the North Hyde fire. Now, despite a chronic shortage of such equipment, the few survivors have been slow to ramp up production, and Britain is years away from developing solid state transformers that are necessary, in the opinion of Martin Kuball, professor of physics at Bristol university, to create a grid that is safer and more resilient. The UK has just one plant making old style units – GE Vernova – based in Stafford. The average delivery time for a step-up transformer is currently around 200 weeks in the US.
And that's before you get to the structural problem of finding the time slots and engineers to install the new equipment you might need. Given the need to keep power always running, access to the transmission and distribution networks is tightly controlled. So restricted are 'system access slots', during which the grid operator permits owners to take substations offline for maintenance and upgrades, and so sparse the ranks of highly skilled engineers to oversee them, that observers wonder how the network could ever deal with a bulge in maintenance – given all the upgrades that net zero will require.
Could the recent transformer fires be an advance warning of a wider wave of failure? No one knows. 'It's hard to tell when equipment like this is going to start failing,' says Tim Stone, an infrastructure and energy expert. 'What I fear is that it could resemble Ernest Hemingway's description of going bankrupt in the way it happens – first slowly then suddenly.'

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