Earlier this month, the Energy Emergencies Executive Committee (E3C) unveiled Government-backed plans to strengthen Great Britain’s power network and make it more resilient to outages in future.

Business and Energy Secretary Andrea Leadsom has confirmed that the action plan from the E3C report will be implemented in full to help prevent (and manage) future power disruption events by: assessing the need for improvements to the governance, monitoring and enforcement processes for large and smaller generators; reviewing the pros and cons of requiring the National Grid Electricity System Operator (ESO) to hold additional back-up generation; supporting essential services owners and operators to put in place more robust business-continuity plans; and rolling out new communications processes to ensure that the general public receives regular updates during any future disruptions.

The E3C report was requested by Ms Leadsom after the power outage of 9 August, which affected over 1 million customers.

The report focuses on the areas of highest impact before, during and after the incident; and while power was restored to disconnected customers within 45min, the knock-on impact to essential services such as rail lasted for several days.

The E3C is made up of representatives from across industry and government, including BEIS, Ofgem, ESO, distribution and transmission network operators, generators and suppliers, and gas distribution network operators. Alongside the E3C report, Ofgem has published the conclusions of its own investigations into the incident last August.