Troops deployed as 15,000 homes still without power six days after Storm Arwen

Thousands of homes across the north of England and Scotland faced their sixth night without power on Thursday, as the armed forces joined the effort in one of the areas worst-hit by Storm Arwen.

The UK government deployed 134 soldiers and marines to the mountainous Grampian region of Scotland to help reach about 4,000 homes. Defence secretary Ben Wallace said the soldiers would “conduct door-to-door checks on people in their homes”.

More than 15,000 households were still without power on Thursday afternoon in Aberdeenshire and Perthshire in Scotland, parts of Wales as well as Cumbria and Northumberland in England.

Engineers have struggled to repair the extensive damage after high winds and heavy snow brought down electricity lines and initially cut off power to almost 1m homes in the UK.

The Met Office said gusts of more than 100mph were recorded across the Grampians at the weekend. Business secretary Kwasi Kwarteng said the storm had caused the biggest disruption since 2005.

The lengthy outages have led to criticism over the handling of the crisis with Ofgem, the energy regulator, promising to review the resilience of the country’s electricity network and the emergency responses of the operators which own the local distribution networks. The emergency has also increased concerns over the resilience of the grid in the face of climate change.

Kwarteng acknowledged that lessons had to be learnt given predictions that global warming would make severe storms, such as Arwen, more common. “We have to be prepared for similarly extreme difficult weather conditions in the future. We have to make sure that our system is resilient in that eventuality,” he said earlier this week.

Andy Manning, an economic regulation expert at Citizens Advice, said improvement was also needed in terms of “communication with customers and how people in vulnerable circumstances are looked after”.

Tricia Thomas, chair of Grange-over-Sands town council in Cumbria, said the aftermath of the storm had been “devastating” for local residents. “Communications with the powers that be have been dreadful, in particular with the electricity company,” she told the Financial Times.

Britain’s energy network operators have defended their response, stressing that Arwen had been “an exception and not the rule”. The repair work needed, they said, had been unusually labour-intensive and complex, with multiple points of the grid damaged in the affected areas.

Ross Easton, director at industry trade body Energy Networks Association, said the “intensity of the storm has been such that it has created so much damage . . . this is not something we have experienced before”.

Executives said the unusual direction of the winds, which were northerly, increased the damage. Trees that were “typically ‘weather-hardened’ to winds from the south in this case were exposed,” said Scott Mathieson, network planning and regulation director at ScottishPower. “We cannot emphasise enough the extent of the tree damage — small forests have been wiped out just south of Torness for example,” he added.

Britain’s network has a good record of resilience, with historic overall reliability of supply high. Nevertheless, the crisis will increase scrutiny of the local distribution network companies, including SP Energy Networks, owned by utility ScottishPower, Berkshire Hathaway-controlled Northern Powergrid, and Scottish and Southern Electricity Networks, owned by SSE.

Energy networks are in effect monopolies and Ofgem limits how much they can charge consumers through their energy bills to pay for maintaining and upgrading their infrastructure via a “price control” framework.

The sector has in recent years come faced criticism from consumer groups, such as Citizens Advice, over the profits the companies have been allowed to make with network charges typically accounting for a fifth of an average bill.

Easton defended the industry’s record, noting that £151m was spent on resilience last year, bringing the total investment to £733m since 2015. He said the funds had been spent on areas such as technology, including increased automation to help speed up reconnection of customers. Investment had also gone into felling trees that were too close to power lines.

Ofgem’s latest performance summary, for 2019-2020 shows all distribution network operators were ahead of targets on unplanned customer interruptions. Over the five-year period to 2020, customer interruptions fell 19 per cent, while the duration of the interruptions reduced by 15 per cent.

In terms of total expenditure, however, the report said the majority of operators had spent less than the regulatory allowance over the same period. On average, investment was 19 per cent below the regulatory target on replacement and refurbishment of equipment, according to Ofgem.

But the report also found the sector had overspent on so-called “network operating costs”, which includes fixing faults, cutting trees and maintenance.

This week the UK’s local network owners submitted their final business plans to Ofgem for the next five-year regulatory period starting in 2023 with all six looking to increase investment. Martin Young, an analyst at Investec, said the focus for all the companies would be “the three ‘R’s of reinforcement, resilience and reliability”.

Ofgem declined to give any detail on what its review of resilience would entail. It said in a statement that once power had been restored to every household, it would look into “how the storm has been handled, including the resilience of Britain’s power infrastructure for extreme weather, and the speed of the networks’ responses”.