Board of Directors: Hundreds of hardware parts need to be replaced after frequency drops.
The near blackout in the European power grid two weeks ago caused damage of several hundred thousand euros at Vienna Airport. There are hundreds of hardware parts that have to be replaced after the extreme frequency fluctuations, said board member Günther Ofner on Thursday.
There have been several power outages at the airport. For such cases, Ofner Airport has emergency power generators with a capacity of ten megawatts. The emergency power supply worked perfectly this time too and kept the critical areas of the airport infrastructure in operation. However, if systems there are also destroyed by a drop in frequency, the emergency power will not help either, the board pointed out.
Two weeks ago on Friday, there was a fault in the European high-voltage power grid. The frequency dropped briefly by around 260 mHz to 49.74 Hz. According to the industry, it was the second worst incident in the European power grid to date, after a major disruption on November 4, 2006, when ten million households in Western Europe had to be disconnected from the power grid. Up to a real blackout, i.e. a complete breakdown of the power supply, there are further security levels.
