Major Outage

On 22 December 2023 a fault occurred on the IFA1 HVDC interconnector between France and the UK that caused a full outage of the link. IFA1 comprises two independent bipole cables (each ~1 GW); the link was already operating at half outage when a fault on the second cable tripped the remaining circuit. The fault produced a rapid system frequency disturbance in Great Britain (frequency dropped quickly towards ~49.5 Hz) and led to the loss of around 2 GW of import capacity, contributing to generator trips and system balancing actions. National Grid ESO deployed frequency response and generation resources to restore stability. This event was reported in industry coverage and technical commentary.