Careful with that axed generator, Farage
Why politicians and social media are a toxic mix
On Friday March 20th, a transformer in a substation in outer London got hot. Very hot. Too hot: the oil in it which is used to cool it overheated, and the transformer and its 25,000 litres of oil caught fire, and the substation—with two backup transformers in the same building—was soon alight and its electricity output halted. Unfortunately for everyone who wanted to travel in and out of Heathrow Airport that day, numbering 1,300 flights and 200,000 passengers and an unknown amount of cargo, that substation was the one supplying the entire airport—which has a power demand of about 40-60 megawatts (MW), using an average of 30MWh per hour.
There was a lot of argument about whether Heathrow1 could have switched over to one of two other nearby substations, which the National Grid (in charge of keeping the electricity going) said were still operational and could have supplied the necessary power. But the airport authorities said they couldn’t make the switchover in time: there are lots of systems that have to be turned off and on again in the right sequence.
The obvious suspicion, given world tensions, was that this was an act of espionage or terrorism, as seen in the opening scenes of the second series of ITV’s Trigger Point just over a year ago. It wouldn’t be above the GRU to think “hey, nice scenario!” would it?
However if you’re a certain sort of politician, then your obvious suspicion is that actually Heathrow could have kept going except for The Woke. Or more specifically, because it got rid of all its diesel generators that could have provided backup power in order to be nice to the climate, which actually doesn’t need anyone being nice to it at all.
Step forward Nigel Farage and Richard Tice, respectively the leader and deputy leader of the very right-wing Reform UK. Farage decided, three days after the incident, that Heathrow had “no diesel generator backup. It was removed as part of their drive to net zero.” He tweeted this, and Tice retweeted it:
Politically, this has a lot going for it from Farage’s point of view: arglebargling about Net Zero (the point when net carbon dioxide emissions fall to zero, ie we absorb as much as we emit) is one of Reform UK’s platforms. They’d like a referendum on it, because it’s another topic where people don’t really understand what is on offer and what the benefits and disbenefits are.
The only problem with his tweet: Heathrow does have diesel generator backup, as was reported by the BBC and other outlets the day before Farage’s tweet:
A Heathrow source also told the BBC that they have "multiple sources" of energy at the airport – with diesel generators and "uninterruptable power supplies" in place.
They added that when the power outage happened the back-up systems "all operated as expected".
The systems, however, are not enough to run the whole airport – hence the decision to close it down.
It would be pretty incredible if Heathrow really had 40MW of standby power sitting around in diesel generator form. Suggesting it ever did is indicative of having researched nothing about the subject. And while we’re on the subject, what sort of power sources does Dubai Airport have? Hmm, here’s a press release from 2019 celebrating the installation of 5MW of solar panels. There’s also this from before 2010 which suggests there’s about 8MW of diesel backup. Dubai does handle more throughput than Heathrow (about 5m passengers v 3.2m), but even it isn’t looking to handle all its power needs with chugging engines.
Tice followed up later in the week pointing to a Daily Telegraph article whose headline seemed to back up the Farage claim. “Heathrow feared net zero would threaten its power supply”, the headline reads. Tice tweeted triumphantly that “They knew their vulnerability, but did nothing…”
Except.. the article isn’t about diesel backup generators at all. It’s about the challenge of getting enough electricity to the airport when it’s functioning normally:
The airport had been warned a decade ago that it was overly reliant on very few sources of power to keep it fully functioning.
In June 2023, Mr Milton told MPs that net zero would add to those difficulties as the airport moved towards all-electric ground operations and the use of electricity to liquefy hydrogen to power the next generation of aircraft.
He suggested Heathrow feared its ambition to achieve net zero emissions by 2050, as part of the UK’s decarbonisation strategy, could be undermined by the grid’s ability to provide the power needed.
So this is actually about getting the National Grid to supply more power. There had been delays in upgrading the substation to a higher power rating; possibly because it was built in the 1960s. Nothing to do with diesel generators.
But this didn’t stop people believing it. Hence a reply to me when I tweeted one of the rebuttals of Farage/Tice:
The reference to “biofuel” is because Heathrow has both diesel and a biomass backup generator. The biomass is an addition, not a replacement. And while it might be helpful for net zero (there are lots of disagreements about biomass generators and their contribution), it wasn’t going to be able to produce enough power to keep the airport going either. I pointed this out.
Why didn’t they refer to the change? Because they didn’t change. And isn’t it odd that it should be the Heathrow one? Well, no. Substations catch fire quite regularly, because there are 330 of them, some are quite old, and oil has a tendency to go hot and wrong. You only have to do a quick search for “substation fire” and you’ll turn up reports showing that about one per month requires the solicitations of the fire brigade. So no, it’s not odd at all that the Heathrow one decided that this was its time.
Vote for me, I’m insidious
So anyway, there are the facts of the matter. But Farage, of course, had that tagline of “The truth about this disaster is being withheld.”
This is one of the biggest problems with social media: all the incentives, especially for politicians, are bad. Tell ridiculous lies! Hint at evil coverups! Nobody’s going to come for you. Community Notes will take days to catch up, if they ever do. The quote tweets and screenshots and replies will all bounce off. Your manifest errors can be pointed out in the House of Commons—which you’re not attending—and it makes no difference.
I did write about this in Social Warming, in the context of politicians’ social media followings generally, and the 2019 election in particular. What’s most notable, if you study the number of social media followers that politicians have, is that those who are most extreme have the largest number of followers. And, conversely, those with the fewest followers tend to be the most centrist.
Bill Brady, the Yale University researcher who examines how ‘moral outrage’ spreads on social networks, told me that “There’s no doubt that politicians, whether implicitly or explicitly, are aware of this general idea that if you post moral and emotional content, it can help diffuse through a network.” (He co-authored a paper in 2019 looking at tweets from Donald Trump, Hillary Clinton and the members of both houses of the US Congress: it found that ‘moral-emotional’ messages gained more retweets and visibility.) “There’s no doubt that these campaign managers are savvy to that and it can help get their messages spread.”
There was a classic example of this during the 2019 election, as I wrote:
At the end of November 2019, in the run-up to the UK’s third general election in four years, a man stabbed and killed two people on London Bridge in a terror attack. It transpired that he had previously been convicted of serious terrorist offences in 2012—when a Conservative-led coalition government was in office—and yet released six years later without a parole board assessment. “Why?” asked the opposition Labour candidate Yvette Cooper.
Priti Patel, the Home Office minister and Tory parliamentary candidate, tweeted her response: “Because legislation brought in by your government in 2008 meant that dangerous terrorists had to automatically be released after half of their jail term. Conservatives changed the law in 2012 to end your automatic release policy but Khan [the killer] was convicted before this.”
As you may have guessed…
Patel was wrong: the courts had many types of sentence available that could have prevented automatic release. And Khan had been given a sentence in April 2013 (under the coalition), following the passage of the 2012 law change, which confirmed release halfway through his sentence.
But being wrong made no difference. Patel’s statement sat on Twitter, attracting thousands of retweets and an entire ecosystem of angry responses. There was no way to kill the untruth.
And this is the problem. Social media plus politicians is an eternally toxic mix, because there’s no brake on them. They can tell untruths, knowing or unknowing, and there’s no reason to think it will cost them, because they can ignore it and move on, leaving anger and annoyance in their wake.
The obvious example is currently sitting in the White House—though this time around it’s the vice-president and defence secretary who are leaping on to social media (principally X—perhaps JD Vance’s Insta is all puppies and flowers) and lashing out at people with the most ridiculous set of untruths about the Signal calamity.
I wish I could come here and tell you that there’s one simple trick to stop politicians from blurting nonsense—worse, mendacious nonsense—on social media: that there could be a buzzard that would swoop down and pluck either them or the offending tweet and bear it off into the sky. Or that the perpetrators would feel so shamed by quote tweet dunking that they’d give up.
Unfortunately, it’s the opposite. Where conventional media used to offer a bottleneck that prevented the worst of this getting much traction (mindful, of course, of the fact that it was the BBC which continually gave Farage a platform from which to espouse his views), now there’s nothing. It’s all going to get worse. Sorry.
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Annoyingly for me I keep mistyping it as “Healthrow”
Did anyone get the Pink Floyd reference?!
Maybe ‘Social Warming’ needs to be upgraded to ‘Heating’, ‘Simmering’ or ‘Boiling Over’