Heathrow

So, Heathrow goes dark. Not because of a cyberattack, a drone incursion or a freak weather event – but because a bit of oily old infrastructure caught fire. Yes, in the 21st century, Britain’s busiest airport – a linchpin of global travel and the national economy – was crippled by a transformer leak and a blaze at an electrical substation. Not a direct hit from a hypersonic missile, but something that could’ve been triggered by a dodgy fuse, some bad wiring, or – more worryingly – someone with a can of petrol and half a grudge, or a KGB 'tourist' on his way to Salisbury.

And what caused the fire? Transformer oil – the sort used to cool high-voltage equipment that still underpins our national grid. Flammable, messy, and straight out of the 20th century. It's as if we're trying to modernise the country while still relying on Victorian plumbing.

Let’s be clear: the issue isn’t just that the oil caught fire – it’s that flammable liquids are still part of critical infrastructure in 2025, with no suppression, no fallback, and no excuse. Airports have diesel backup generators for power loss – which is quaintly reassuring – but if the substation itself goes up in flames, that’s game over. Flights grounded. Passengers stranded. Security compromised. Heathrow was left as vulnerable as a server room with no firewall.

Now, some might say that a transition to renewable energy would’ve prevented this – but let’s not get carried away. The fire wasn’t about the source of the electricity. Wind and solar still need to be fed into the grid, and they still rely on substations, transformers and the same bottlenecks. So no, switching to renewables wouldn’t magically prevent this sort of fire.

But here’s the rub – a renewables-based grid is naturally more decentralised and distributed. It doesn’t lean so heavily on single points of failure. It builds in resilience almost by design, with local generation, battery storage, and smart switching. In a modern, renewables-rich system, Heathrow wouldn’t be depending on one vulnerable substation with a bath of flammable oil bubbling away inside. It would have layers – fallback, redundancy, autonomy. In short, it would be able to ride out this kind of event, not collapse because of it.

And here’s the clincher: grid reform is needed anyway. We cannot hit net zero, no matter how many wind turbines or solar farms we build, unless the electricity grid is completely overhauled. That means smarter distribution, upgraded substations, responsive local generation, and yes – replacing outdated, oil-filled transformers with systems that don’t go up like a chip pan when things go wrong.

And let’s not forget Heathrow’s third runway. If we’re going to pour billions into expanding an already strained and over-centralised transport hub, then the supporting infrastructure has to come up to scratch. You can’t double the traffic and still rely on kit that belongs in a 1970s substation. Expansion without resilience is just hubris with planning permission.

And if you're Vladimir Putin – watching from your bunker with his coterie of ex-KGB cronies – this was a gift. Not because he caused it, but because now he doesn’t have to. What better propaganda victory than to see a key Western airport crippled by its own crumbling infrastructure and decades of underinvestment? Why bother hacking the grid when we’re doing such a fine job sabotaging ourselves with false economies and ageing kit?

The government, of course, will promise a review. They always do. But if that review doesn’t end with a root-and-branch overhaul of national infrastructure resilience, starting with transformer tech, then it’s not worth the paper it’s printed on. That means stripping out oil wherever possible, decentralising the grid, building in redundancy, and ensuring that no single fire can shut down a hub that handles tens of millions of passengers a year.

This isn’t about renewables vs. fossil fuels – it’s about whether our national systems are fit for purpose. Right now, Heathrow’s power supply looks like something that would struggle to keep a retail park running. It’s embarrassing. And dangerous.

We’re lucky this time. It was probably a fault, or a leak, or thermal runaway. But next time? It might not be. And if we’re still dousing flames with buckets while the airport shuts down, then frankly, we deserve what’s coming.

Wake up, Britain. Our enemies won’t need to bring us down – not when our infrastructure is doing it for them.

Just as an amusing aside - I was listening to the early morning news yesterday and the hazards of live reporting came to the fore. The reporter on site, who was obviously making it up on the fly, said; "Planes will have to land and take off from somewhere else." How would you get a plane at Heathrow to take off from somewhere else without dismantling it and moving it by road?