Energy resilience has spent too long being treated as an engineering footnote. It is time to treat it as what it actually is: A whole-system infrastructure issue with direct consequences for communities, operations and investment.

In March 2025, a transformer bushing failed at the North Hyde substation in west London, causing a fire. Within hours, Heathrow Airport had closed, more than 70,000 customers and businesses lost power, and flights were cancelled across Europe and beyond. The substation was not Heathrow's asset and the fire was not Heathrow's fault. That distinction mattered enormously in legal and commercial terms, and not a whit to the passengers whose flights were disrupted.

That gap, between where responsibility sits and where consequences land, is the defining feature of energy disruption in modern infrastructure. The initiating event is almost always technical and localised as consequences move through systems.

An energy system usually doesn’t fail in isolation. A transformer failure can become an aviation crisis, a gas leak may close a railway, flooding might affect a pumping station and make a community lose water pressure. A system fails as part of a chain. Though this is not a new observation, it is becoming an urgent one.

Across the economy, electrification and digitalisation are quietly but significantly changing the risk profile of assets that were not originally designed around continuous, uninterruptible power.

Transport systems now rely on power for signalling, safety systems, airfield operations and passenger communications in ways that have no manual fallback. Water utilities depend on powered pumping and treatment at a scale that makes gravity-fed alternatives impractical. Hospitals and healthcare facilities carry statutory obligations that create direct legal exposure when power fails. Logistics, warehousing and cold storage operations depend on automated systems that cannot simply pause and restart cleanly.

Alongside these established sectors, energy-intensive uses such as data centres, battery storage, electric vehicle charging, advanced manufacturing and electrified heat are expanding rapidly. These uses place demands on networks that were not built for their scale, location or load patterns.

The result is a growing gap between what infrastructure assumes it can rely on and what the energy system is able to deliver under stress. For some assets, that gap is manageable, but for others, it is already materially affecting safety, revenue, availability obligations and long-term value.

A grid connection is not, in itself, a resilient power strategy. It tells you that capacity exists, in principle, at a point in time. It does not tell you whether that capacity is firm or interruptible, what happens during network maintenance or fault conditions, how quickly supply is restored after failure, or what the contractual position is if supply is cut without notice. Risks do not arrive in separate categories, they compound.

We reviewed a power supply agreement for a major data centre development in Northern Europe that was structured entirely on disconnection terms. The grid company could interrupt or reduce supply at any time, without prior notice or any obligation to compensate the customer. The arrangement was not unusual for the jurisdiction, but for an investor whose entire commercial model depended on continuous asset uptime, the implications were significant. That agreement needed independent legal and technical scrutiny before transaction close, not after.

In the same Northern European diligence, substations serving the site are in an inland region identified by national civil protection authorities as having high susceptibility to wildfire. Climate projections suggest the number of high-danger fire days could nearly double by mid-century. Power infrastructure such as transmission lines and transformer stations are specifically called out as vulnerable. The investor had to account for overlapping risks: a supply agreement on disconnection terms and substations in an area prone to wildfires, where climate projections pointed to greater fire risk over time.

None of those three risks viewed in isolation would necessarily be a deal-breaker. Collectively, they demanded a different level of scrutiny as well as a different set of contractual protections.

This is a serious problem with how resilience is typically assessed. Power supply sits with engineers while climate risk sits with sustainability teams. Business continuity sits with operations and insurance sits with finance, while cyber risk sits somewhere else. But actual disruptions do not respect those internal boundaries. They hit multiple systems simultaneously, and the organisations caught unprepared are usually the ones that assessed each risk in a separate workstream without looking at the system holistically.

There is a version of this conversation that ends at “does the asset have backup power?” A backup generator does not create resilience if it has not been tested under realistic load conditions, if fuel arrangements are inadequate for more than a few hours, if the transfer between normal and backup supply is poorly understood, or if the systems it supports have not been correctly prioritised. We have seen all of these in practice.

Similarly, a second grid connection does not create resilience if it shares the same substation, follows the same exposed cable route or is subject to the same network constraint as the primary feed. Redundancy on paper is not recoverability in practice.

True resilience requires an integrated view of the asset, the network, the contracts and the hazard environment. It also requires asking questions that cut across technical, commercial and operational disciplines, including:

• What are the single points of failure and who owns them?
• What is the commercial and operational impact of an outage lasting one hour, one day, one week?
• Are backup arrangements designed around nominal capacity or actual operating scenarios?
• Are restoration procedures tested and coordinated with third parties?
• Do the contracts reflect who bears the risk if power is constrained, cut or unavailable?

These are critical governance questions, and they should be on the agenda of investment committees and boards, not just in the technical schedules.

When energy disruption affects critical services, communities feel the impact long before it appears in a financial model or legal argument. In practice, when services fail, communities do not distinguish between the asset owner, the utility, the network operator, the developer and the regulator. The technical allocation of responsibility may matter enormously to lawyers and insurers. It does not change the reputational and social consequences of disruption for the organisations whose names are on the buildings.

That broader exposure to community confidence, regulatory scrutiny and political attention is a critical part of what energy resilience means for infrastructure owners and investors. A resilient asset is not one that never experiences disruption. It is one designed and operated so that disruption can be absorbed and recovered from without disproportionate harm to the people who depend on it.

Energy resilience does not happen by accident, and it cannot be bolted on after the fact. At the planning and design stage, it means treating power supply as a core design requirement, not a utility connection to be sorted once planning is secured. Route diversity, substation configuration, backup strategy and climate scenario planning belong in the design brief, not the snagging list.

At the investment and transaction stage, it means independent technical review of the power supply arrangements and risk allocation in the contract terms, which reflects what the diligence actually found. An identified risk that is not reflected in the deal is a risk the investor has accepted implicitly.

At the operational stage, it means tested systems, verified fuel arrangements, rehearsed restoration procedures, and clear interfaces with network operators, emergency responders and local stakeholders. It also means reviewing resilience assumptions against future climate conditions. A long-lived asset will operate in a different risk environment at the midpoint of its life than the one it was designed for.

None of this requires infrastructure investors to become energy engineers. But it does require asking harder questions earlier, commissioning independent skilled professionals where it matters, and treating the answers as material inputs to the investment decision.

Infrastructure is judged by whether it works when people need it. The energy system that supports it should be held to the same standard. A grid connection is only the start of that solution. Building genuine resilience around it is the work, and it needs to begin long before the lights go out.