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Frequent power outages in the Southeast – A sign of things to come?

Mars · 2025-03-28T08:53:08Z

We recently went down to visit family and friends in the Southeast, mainly in Sussex and Kent, and was surprised by how many people had stories about power outages. Our family in East Sussex had just returned from a trip abroad to find their power had been off for three days, without any prior warning. Everything in their freezer was ruined, and their energy company sent them £90 in compensation. But the bigger issue is that this wasn’t a one-off. Since then, they’ve been experiencing at least two outages a week, ranging from 10 minutes to half an hour, and one of these power cuts has already killed their fridge. At first, I thought this was an isolated issue, but then we visited other family in Kent who have the same problem... regular, short outages of 10-15 minutes. Even when I was out playing golf with my father-in-law and his friends, the topic came up again. Both of them, also living in Sussex and Kent, reported the same issues. So, is anyone else experiencing this across the UK? We're in the Welsh borders, and our supply is constant. No dramas... yet. For me it’s concerning that these power cuts are already happening when we haven’t even begun scaling up the electrification of heating properly and at a time of year when electricity demand isn't even that great. If the grid is struggling now, what happens when we add more heat pumps, EVs and battery storage into the mix? Is the infrastructure actually ready for this transition?

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Electricity, Tariffs, Monitoring, Electrics & Providers

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Majordennisbloodnok

(@majordennisbloodnok)

Famed Member Moderator

Joined: 5 years ago

Posts: 2199

31/03/2025 10:06 am

Well, I'm slap bang in the middle of the area we're discussing and there are a few extra insights worth mentioning.

Firstly, when we moved into our house about 10 years ago we could expect a couple of power cuts each year. UKPN appeared to get a bit fed up of fixing the outages and so have carried out some proactive work locally (particularly rerouting of some vulnerable cables) so the outages are far less likely now.

Secondly, a colleague of mine at work can expect power-related issues at least monthly and often weekly. The issue for him is green belt planning policies mean housing development is non-existent in some places and very intensive in others and his house is in one of the latter. The sheer pace of development in his village (rapidly becoming a town) means a small part of UKPN's network is being stretched very thin and far quicker than UKPN can keep up with in the short term. This contrasts with my house which is in an area where there is pretty much no new development and so the UKPN service is pretty stable.

As a result, what @editor's friends and family are experiencing is not a norm across the whole region; there are big variations between the best and worst experiences and I'm sure there are significant local reasons for that.

105 m2 bungalow in South East England
Mitsubishi Ecodan 8.5 kW air source heat pump
18 x 360W solar panels
1 x 6 kW GroWatt battery and SPH5000 inverter
1 x Myenergi Zappi
1 x VW ID3
Raised beds for home-grown veg and chickens for eggs

"Semper in excretia; sumus solum profundum variat"

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Transparent

(@transparent)

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Posts: 3458

31/03/2025 11:25 am

That's a useful observation @majordennisbloodnok

I'd be interested to know whether the contractors who are installing the LV supplies to the new housing in your friend's village are UKPN themselves,
or an Independent Distribution Network Operator (IDNO).

Here's Ofgem's list of licensed IDNOs as of Feb'25

The third column is the Company Registration Number.

It is unfortunately the case that the major housing construction companies are increasingly using IDNOs,
for the following reasons:

use thinner cables to provide a bare minimum 8kW or so per dwelling (ultra-diversification)
direct-bury cables instead of using ducting with access-covers
use single-phase cables to the Service Fuse point in each dwelling
the LV network gets sold on to a 'for profit' estate management company

Thus when a householder wants to later install a heat-pump and an EV charge-point, they are required to pay the Management Company to excavate the cable and install one with greater capacity (3ph).

Invariably the Management Company has 'links' to the Developer, who hence receives long-term revenue from the cabling reinforcement work.

On the DNO's maps the site is marked as being maintained by an IDNO.

The text in the middle of this section reads:

The IDNO responsible for this embedded network has installed LV underground cables
outside the IDNO site boundary, and they are not shown on this asset record.

I reported this during the construction phase, and the DNO sent engineers to check.
Although cable ends were still visible, it wasn't possible to see from where they originated.

These situations aren't uncommon;
I could choose from hundreds of sites to illustrate the issue.

The LV installer's name has been obscured in the above graphic, and they no longer operate as an IDNO.

The licensing of IDNOs is reducing network resilience.

Save energy... recycle electrons!

😢

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