ACM to take into account TenneT’s reports in investigation into recent power outage

The Netherlands Authority for Consumers and Markets (ACM) has launched an investigation into the power outage that occurred in the town of Diemen (near Amsterdam) in late-March. It was launched immediately after the outage had occurred, and is still ongoing. One of the issues that is looked into is whether Dutch transmission system operator (TSO) TenneT in the past has made the necessary investments in security, and whether TenneT has followed the necessary procedures. In its investigation, ACM will also take into account the reports about the power outage that TenneT published today.

Power outage in Diemen

On March 27, a failure occurred in TenneT’s Diemen distribution substation, which led to the complete outage of this substation. As a result, a large part of the province of North-Holland, and a small part of the adjacent province of Flevoland had no power. Approximately one million households were affected, as well as several large-scale users, and critical infrastructure such as Amsterdam airport Schiphol and parts of the rail network. After an hour, the substation was restarted. In the hours that followed, power was restored to all affected customers using the underlying regional networks of distribution system operator Liander.