At 7:32pm on Monday 21 September, a high-voltage line came down from a pylon in Bartley Green, south Birmingham. Within seconds, around 80,000 homes and businesses had lost power. So had the Queen Elizabeth Hospital Birmingham (QEHB).
The QE is one of the largest single-site hospitals in the UK, with more than 1,200 beds. It’s a regional Major Trauma Centre and has what has been described as the world’s largest single-floor critical care unit. In short, a constant electricity supply is critical.
National Grid Electricity Distribution said most affected properties had power back within five minutes and all of them by 7:50pm. Inside the hospital, the effects lasted longer. According to a trust statement given to the Birmingham Mail, a “brief internal incident” was declared. Laboratories, scanners and refrigeration were disrupted, and some incoming patients were temporarily sent to other hospitals. Power was fully restored at 9:03 pm, and the incident was stood down at 10pm.
Critically, the trust added: “ventilators were not affected.”
Built to keep critical systems going
The fact that ventilators weren’t affected is more than just “good luck”. When the hospital was built, its standby power was designed to keep the most critical systems running if the mains supply failed.
According to Finning, the Caterpillar dealer that delivered the project with Balfour Beatty Engineering Services, the brief was to provide an uninterrupted supply in the event of a mains failure. The result was a 12MVA standby power system comprising ten Caterpillar diesel generators, a dual-ring high-voltage network with ten substations, N+1 redundancy and automatic load management designed to supply power to the most critical services first.
The trust hasn’t published a detailed account, but what it has said suggests that the backup system did what it was designed to do: protect the equipment patients’ lives depend on and let less critical systems wait.
How much worse it could have been
If the standby power wasn’t correctly specified, or the generators failed to start, the story could be very different.
This has happened before. During the UK-wide blackout of August 2019, a backup generator at Ipswich Hospital failed. In 2024, East Surrey Hospital declared a critical incident after a power failure hit its intensive care and high-dependency units. In the worst case, during Venezuela’s nationwide blackout in 2019, 26 deaths were reported in hospitals, including patients on ventilators and dialysis and babies in incubators.
At a hospital with a 100-bed critical care unit and a major trauma centre, even a few minutes without power to life-support systems could put lives at risk.
Installing generators isn’t enough
A standby generator only protects patients if it works when needed, often after months or years of doing nothing. Diesel generators that run lightly or are started only for short routine checks can develop problems that show up only under real load. These include unburnt fuel and carbon buildup in the engine and exhaust (known as “wet stacking”), cooling problems, and electrical system faults.
This is why load bank testing matters. A load bank puts an artificial electrical load on a generator, simulating what it would face in a real outage. The test checks that the fuel, exhaust, cooling, and electrical systems all perform under pressure. Specialists such as Crestchic Loadbanks recommend testing at least once a year with resistive-reactive load banks at a 0.8 power factor. Unlike simpler resistive-only tests, these show how a system copes with voltage drops and changing load. That matters most where several generators run together, as at the QE, because one unit failing can push the others over their limits and knock them out one after another.
NHS guidance on hospital electrical systems (HTM 06-01) sets out regular on-load testing of standby generators. Common industry practice is monthly running tests plus load bank testing at full load at least once a year.
The lesson from Bartley Green
Monday’s outage lasted minutes for most of Birmingham. At the QE, scans were delayed, lab work was interrupted, and some patients were diverted. There was disruption. It was, there is no doubt, inconvenient for the patients awaiting test results or trying to access treatment. But it was manageable. Life-preserving equipment kept running.
With an ageing grid and growing demand for electricity, the question for every hospital estate team is simple: if the power failed tonight, how sure are you that your generators would carry the load?
