North Hyde Substation Outage Review: Government Response
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The Minister for Energy (Michael Shanks)
In March 2025 the Secretary of State for Energy Security and Net Zero commissioned the National Energy System Operator to undertake a comprehensive review of the incident at North Hyde electricity substation. The review was to identify lessons and recommendations for the prevention, and management of future power disruption events, and lessons for Great Britain’s energy resilience more broadly. NESO published its review report on 2 July 2025.
The Government response to NESO’s report sets a clear implementation plan to make progress against NESO’s recommendations. We will build on this implementation plan through our commitment today to publish an energy resilience strategy in 2026. The strategy will set out the Department’s strategic priorities to ensure a secure and resilient energy system, now and in the future.
Energy resilience strategy:
On top of taking immediate action to address learnings from the North Hyde incident, it is critical that we also consider how the risk landscape is evolving rapidly and growing more complex. The Government’s clean energy superpower mission will drive a sector-wide transformation, offering a critical opportunity to further embed security and resilience into system design, strengthening energy reliability.
The energy resilience strategy will address sector-specific challenges across the entire energy system, like those identified following the North Hyde incident. It will set out this Government’s ambition to build power sector resilience across society, including the critical sectors that rely on energy to deliver our critical services, and it will create a framework to embed resilience across the energy system now and in the future.
North Hyde implementation plan:
The North Hyde implementation plan has been developed in collaboration with the energy resilience group—a partnership between Government, the regulator and industry. This ensures a joined-up approach to energy resilience, emergency response and recovery—will set out specific actions to enhance resilience across the three pillars of NESO’s review:
Resilience of energy infrastructure;
Response and restoration of energy infrastructure; and
Enhancing the resilience of critical infrastructure to energy disruption
The majority of actions will be delivered by the end of 2026 and will bolster the energy industry’s prevention and preparedness for exceptional events, reducing the likelihood and impact of energy disruption. While improvements will be made, no energy system can be totally immune from disruption, which is why, in tandem, these actions will support other critical national infrastructure sectors—just as transport—in enhancing their own resilience to such events, as far as is reasonably practicable.
The newly established energy security and resilience taskforce, chaired by the Minister of State at the Department for Energy Security and Net Zero and comprising senior energy sector representatives, will oversee and assure the implementation of these actions.
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