3FOOD

Third Industrial Revolution Consulting Group
draught and dry conditions. Consequences of climate change for buildings and infrastructure
will certainly differ from region to region, but there is some certainty that Luxembourg has such
vulnerabilities.
Electric power infrastructure, in particular, can be exposed to a number of extreme weather
events and some vital infrastructure components may be subsequently compromised, causing
highly detrimental impacts to countries such as Luxembourg. Specifically, high-voltage
transmission circuits and associated substations are often identified as critical assets, given long
lead times for obtaining replacement power equipment (e.g., substation transformers can take
up to 18 months to acquire), as well as the large population served by this infrastructure.
Figure 6 shows an overview of the largest global power outages through 2015. Here the year of
occurrence (x-axis), duration (y-axis), and number of people impacted (relative size of the
bubbles) are compared. It can be observed that the most common cause of these blackouts was
“natural phenomena” (six times), while design and application error, communications failure,
and operator errors were the second largest contributors. These kinds of power outages are
usually caused by a combination of technical failures and human errors, where a fault or defect
occurs at a critical moment and is then misinterpreted, after which an appropriate, but
incorrect action is taken.
Figure 6: Major Global Power Outages, 1965 to 2015 40 .
40 Peter Vaessen, ‘De Betrouwbaarheid van Het Toekomstige Elektriciteitsnet Nationale Veiligheid En
Crisisbeheersing’, Nationale Veiligheid En Crisisbeheersing, 2015.
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