In article ,
Dave Plowman (News) wrote:
In article ,
Mortimer wrote:
Don't/didn't TV studios have some form of backup generators in case of
power failure? At least enough to power VTs and sufficient lighting for
news reports etc, even if not enough to light whole studios?

TV centre had IIRC two feeds from different parts of the grid or whatever
and both failed.

Not quite. The power came in at 33kV (not 132kV gid voltage) as part of a
ring system in West London. There was alsa a reserve feed direct from a
distribution board at Battersea Generating Station. The West London Ring
was fed from the Grid two points, one at Iver in Buckinghamshire and the
other at Battersea. A fault at Iver put the whole load onto the
distribution board at Battersea, which was unable to handle that load.
Something caught fire as a result and there was a total failure, taking out
the reserve feed as well.


I suppose for a first night launch, they'd probably planned live events
that would have taken a lot of power for lighting.

It would have needed a massive generator to fully run TVC. It did have a
small standby one which could manage a continuity announcer.

Think the maximum load at TVC was 11Mw. But Charles will likely remember
better.

Not at that time; once colour came in to 8 studios, with an enormously
increased lighting load then that was quite probable; Studio 1, for
instance, had an installed lighting load of about 0.5MW..

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