Ireland could face ‘total blackout’ after coordinated power grid sabotage, expert warns

The attacks came the same day that Germany formally blamed Russia for a “hybrid attack” involving an explosive-laden drone at a strategic airport in Leipzig last month. File picture

Ireland could suffer “a sustained total blackout” if it was targeted by acts of sabotage equivalent to the attacks this week on Germany's power grid, an Irish engineering expert has warned.

Associate professor at UCD school of electrical and electronic engineering, Paul Cuffe, was commenting on two incidents in Germany this week.

German authorities are investigating the two attacks on electricity substations, to determine if they were acts of sabotage. 

In the first incident, early on Tuesday, improvised explosives damaged power cables in Brandenburg state, in the east of the country.

Later that day, in a second attack, unknown perpetrators caused a deliberate short-circuit by targeting overhead power lines at a substation in Bergheim town, near Cologne, in west Germany.

The attacks came the same day that Germany formally blamed Russia for a “hybrid attack” involving an explosive-laden drone at a strategic airport in Leipzig last month.

Mr Cuffe said the Cologne incident forced five nearby coal-fired generators to go offline, halting their delivery of power into the electricity grid.

“These generators had a combined capacity of 4.2 GW; that’s an enormous amount of power, equal to about 80% of the total power consumed in Ireland at breakfast time,” he said.

“While the German grid managed to absorb the loss of these generators without affecting customers, this is still a major and very worrying incident.” 

He said there were many historic examples where less severe failures caused grids to collapse into nation-wide blackouts.

“The scale of the outage in Cologne represents a scary near-miss for German grid operators,” Mr Cuffe said.

He said an equivalent attack in Ireland might involve large fossil fuel generators or electricity interconnectors with the UK.

“Two targeted sabotage attacks against Irish grid assets in one day could cause severe disruption across the island; a sustained total blackout would be entirely possible,” Mr Cuffe said.

“Germany was fortunate to withstand the incidents on Tuesday; widespread blackouts are a realistic consequence of this type of sabotage.” 

He said grid operators in Ireland don’t run the grid close to its limits and leave plenty of safety margin.

He said: "They should always be able to withstand the loss of any one of their assets: so if a powerline fails due to a lightning strike, or if a particular generator suddenly goes out of service, they should be able to absorb that without blackouts."

The real danger, he said, is if multiple assets fail simultaneously.

"This makes the prospect of coordinated sabotage against the Irish grid very worrying," he said.

• Cormac O'Keefe is Security Correspondent.