Brussels, 08/01/2014 (Agence Europe) - The European Network and Information Security Agency, ENISA, has published a detailed report on electricity blackouts, making recommendations on how to deal with power cuts and the problems they cause. Udo Helmbrecht, ENISA's executive director, said: 2We encourage the different actors to find ways to improve information-sharing about failures and outages, particularly between the energy sector and the electronic communications sector”.
ENISA's annual report on serious incidents in the EU says that “power cuts are a dominant cause of severe network and service outages in the EU's electronic communications sector” (see EUROPE 10910). ENISA makes eight recommendations to national regulatory boards and industry to help reduce incidents in the wake of power cuts: 1) analyse the frequency and impact of network outages caused by power cuts; 2) liaise with providers to collect good practices to increase reliance against power cuts; 3) perform a cost-benefit analysis to determine a suitable minimum level of resilience against power cuts; 4) take lessons learned from outages caused by power cuts and ensure that affected providers work systematically to develop their protection measures; 5) act to establish a strategy to promote cooperation and mutual aid agreements on joint service restoration after severe power cuts; 6) consider a priority scheme that would give preferential treatment within the electronic communications sector and decrease service restoration times under exceptional circumstances; 7) providers should regularly perform checks of existing protection measures; 8) NRAs, providers and actors in the energy sector should, in the case of severe power cuts, cooperate to establish information exchange mechanisms to enable an efficient exchange of situational awareness information and forecasts of restoration times. (IL/transl.fl)