Sellindge evacuated after fire at UK-France IFA interconnector site

A fire at National Grid's IFA power interconnector site in Sellindge has caused the site to be evacuated while emergency services deal with the incident, the UK transmission system operator said Sept. 15.

The IFA link offers 2 GW of capacity and has been importing power in recent days due to high UK price premiums.

"The site has been evacuated and the safety of our staff, emergency teams and local residents is our highest priority," National Grid said in a tweet.

Further updates would be made in due course, it said.

National Grid ESO said it was still forecasting sufficient margin for this evening's peak demand period.

It noted that one pole of the 2-GW IFA link had been on outage, reducing availability to 1 GW.

Maintenance on the pole changed from "planned" to "unplanned failure" early Sept. 15 on French system operator RTE's transparency website.

RTE gave an estimated end date of the work as Oct. 13, with daily variations in net transmission capacity until then.

Interconnector flows on the asset were at zero on Elexon's data summary webpage.

Flows on the IFA2 link to France were seen at 1 GW, as were flows on the NEMO link to Belgium, while those on the BritNed link to the Netherlands were at 500 MW.

Hourly UK day-ahead power prices on the N2EX exchange rose to GBP2,500.01/MWh ($3,460.14/MWh) for delivery between 19:00-20:00 Sept. 15.

S&P Global Platts assessed the price of UK day-ahead baseload power at GBP385.00/MWh for delivery Sept. 15. Front-month October base power was assessed at GBP158.65/MWh, up 12.20% on the day.