OPINION:
One of the world’s busiest airports closed for 24 hours last week after a minor fire broke out in a nearby electrical substation. Friday’s outage at London Heathrow Airport caused havoc for international travelers, diverting nearly a dozen flights from Washington Dulles and New York’s John F. Kennedy airports over what ought to have been a nonevent.
Passengers expect mission-critical facilities to have systems in place to prevent blackouts, but Heathrow’s backups were insufficient. Its management only cared about winning plaudits for addressing climate change.
Airport officials tout the “Renewable Guarantees of Origin Certificates” and seals of approval slapped on the property while bragging, “we are taking steps to generate more of our own renewable power on site,” in its 2024 sustainability report.
The crown jewel in that push was the facility’s “groundbreaking sustainable energy center” that opened a decade ago. It heats and powers Terminals 2 and 5 with advanced biomass-fueled generators — but only when the normal electrical grid is functioning.
Biomass is the embroidered term describing the highly inefficient process of burning wood chips to create electricity. It has been a favorite power source since our cave-dwelling ancestors were warming themselves with campfires.
This venerable technology is now considered green thanks to the fuzzy environmental math that says torching the byproducts of lumber harvesting has lower “life cycle” carbon-dioxide emissions than the alternatives. Never mind that incinerating a log is a far less efficient process than the comparatively modern technique of burning coal or diesel fuel.
Reform U.K. Party leader Nigel Farage pointed to the embrace of the least efficient power sources for the disaster. “Heathrow Airport had no diesel generator backup. It was removed as part of their drive to net zero.” Net zero is the drive toward zero carbon dioxide emissions by some arbitrary future date.
Heathrow’s 2022 net zero plan announced: “Stand-by generators currently operate using diesel as they need an independent power source to maintain resilient operations … We are investigating renewable-based alternatives that can still meet the stringent performance criteria for such a safety critical airport asset.”
Except the biomass generators and solar panels can’t compete with the output of diesel. London’s backup system did keep several critical functions alive, but there wasn’t enough juice to take care of the passenger terminals. The result was ruined vacation plans and business trips for a quarter-million people. Flights resumed at normal levels on Sunday.
Recent power trouble at Los Angeles International Airport and Kennedy Airport only resulted in partial or brief disruptions, but a downed power line near Baltimore-Washington International Airport caused an outage earlier this month halting travel for about three hours.
In 2023, the Government Accountability Office outlined the need for airports to install a secondary electric substation to guarantee power in the event of a London or BWI-style incident. After seeing embarrassing news coverage elsewhere, Pittsburgh International created the first airport microgrid able to run everything with on-site natural gas. Another U.S. airport has 10 diesel generators and enough fuel to maintain operations for three weeks.
That’s what’s possible when officials are committed to serving the public. Climate fantasies merely distract busybodies into wasting scarce resources on retrograde ideas like keeping the lights on with windmills and wood-fired stoves.
If Europe’s busiest airport can’t be powered off-the-grid, how much more ridiculous for places like England and California to ban internal combustion and require every car to be constantly plugged into sockets that may or may not work.
Net zero and climate change fanaticism are recipes for chaos.
Please read our comment policy before commenting.