Major Outage

North Sea Link tripped at 08:47 local time on 8 October 2024, with Norwegian power exports to Great Britain via the interconnector dropping suddenly from 1.4 GW to zero. The sudden loss of import caused GB grid frequency to fall to 49.59 Hz within two seconds, well below NESO's operational limits of 49.8–50.2 Hz. The grid recovered within approximately two minutes, driven by fast-acting frequency-response services — particularly battery energy storage. Approximately 1.5 GW of contracted BESS capacity across the GB network injected power during the incident, including 12 batteries on Arenko's Nimbus platform and over 450 MW of Kraken-optimised response (roughly one-third of the lost transfer). The event was the first major NSL trip of winter 2024/25 and was widely cited as a demonstration of BESS contribution to frequency containment for large-loss-of-infeed events.