"Cock-up beats conspiracy most of the time, but that didn't stop Orkney residents wondering if a Russian warship caused their two-hour power cut. The lights went out across Orkney and part of Caithness for two hours from 1910 UTC on Wednesday, November 19. With no immediate explanation, locals filled the gap with their own notions."
"Alistair Carmichael, MP for Orkney and Shetland, wrote to Defence Secretary John Healey seeking answers. He noted this wasn't Yantar's first visit - the Nikolay Chiker had prowled around Shetland's subsea infrastructure in 2023, raising "significant local security concerns." "While the disruption we have faced to date is believed to be due to accidents or storm damage, I am sure you can appreciate why the operations of a Russian vessel around the subsea cables in our waters would be of local interest," Carmichael wrote."
"But Scottish and Southern Electricity Networks (SSEN) delivered a far less exotic explanation to local paper The Orcadian: a fault at a Caithness wind farm. The culprit was a network protection system that "did not operate as expected" when a fault occurred near a substation, causing a wider outage. SSEN has taken steps to prevent a repeat and insisted it has "no ongoing concerns regarding network security.""
Residents of Orkney and part of Caithness experienced a two-hour power outage beginning at 1910 UTC on Wednesday, November 19. The coinciding presence of Russian intelligence-gathering vessels prompted local speculation about interference with subsea infrastructure. The Ministry of Defence warned that the vessel Yantar was suspected of mapping subsea cables north of Scotland, and the MP for Orkney and Shetland noted prior activity by the Nikolay Chiker. Scottish and Southern Electricity Networks attributed the outage to a fault at a Caithness wind farm and a network protection system that failed to operate as expected, and confirmed steps to prevent repetition.
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