The chief of Net Zero Watch has warned that "people will die" if major electrical outages and substation fires become a common occurrence in Britain.
Thousands of commuters were thrown into chaos after an electrical substation fire in Maida Vale brought London Underground to a standstill.
Fifteen fire engines and around 100 firefighters attended the blaze on Aberdeen Place, with three metres of high-voltage cabling connected to the substation destroyed by the fire.
Discussing the major outage on GB News, Director of Net Zero watch Andrew Montford claimed that the "dangerous infrastructures" are "not being replaced", causing "more and more outages" and fires.
Andrew Montford has warned 'people will die' after TfL experienced a major power outage
GB News
Montford explained: "We are getting more faults, but they are still being contained in a relatively small area.
"The Heathrow fire a few weeks ago where it caused absolute chaos but was contained within a relatively small area. This time we've had another fault in a larger area.
"So it seems to me that we have a problem - our grid is quite fault prone. I think the reason for that is that all the money that needs to be invested in grid infrastructure is going to build new infrastructure for net zero.
"So we're building new cables from Scotland down to England to bring in the power from the wind farms, but we're not replacing all the old infrastructure, so that could be dangerous."
Highlighting the scale of the problem for Energy Secretary Ed Miliband, Montford warned that Government are set to encounter a "big problem" with outdated cabling.
He cautioned: "I think we are going to see a big problem in the next few decades in that we've allowed all the transformers and all the wiring across what we have already to get very old. And essentially that is going to put a new pressure on spending.
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London Underground was thrown into chaos on Monday after a power failure left travellers facing severe delays
PA"And I think Mr. Miliband is going to have a problem here because he wants to spend big money on extending the grid, but in fact, we need to look rather urgently at the existing grid."
When asked by host Andrew Pierce if these substation fires could lead to "people being injured" by larger-scale blazes, Montford starkly warned that "people could die" as a result of such events.
Montford stated: "When power goes out, it can be life threatening in itself. In Spain, when the whole grid went out, people died, and that could happen here.
"At the moment, our grid hasn't suffered a complete blackout like they did in Spain, but if these faults go on happening and we go on adding renewables to our grid, which will destabilise the grid, then perhaps we might have a blackout, too. And then people will die as well.
Montford told GB News that the direction of travel on these incidents is 'disturbing'
GB News
He added: "So the whole direction of travel is really quite disturbing. And I think people will will die eventually."
Emphasising the possible scale of an outage in Britain, Montford concluded that if there are "a lot of renewables" on the grid, it is "rather difficult" to contain the impact.
He said: "If you have a lot of renewables on the grid, then it's rather difficult to contain it - you essentially you can lose your whole national grid in the space of a couple of seconds. But we just don't know, so yeah, it's a big problem."
In a statement following the outage, TfL's chief operating officer Claire Mann said: "Due to a brief interruption of the power supply to our network, several lines lost power for a short period earlier this afternoon.
"We apologise to customers whose journeys will have been affected. We are working to get the whole network up and running again as quickly as possible."
