9-Country Blackout Workshop Held in Mondorf

The Office of the High Commissioner for National Protection in Luxembourg has announced that, as part of the Luxembourg Presidency of the Benelux Union, they organised a workshop in Mondorf-les-Bains on Thursday 13 and Friday 14 June 2019 entitled "The long-term Blackout: consequence management", prioritisation of needs and planning methodologies".

The workshop brought together electricity distribution operators and managers, authorities in charge of critical infrastructure protection, the authorities in charge of the energy sector, as well as the authorities responsible for the protection of electricity, crisis management of the three Benelux countries, North Rhine-Westphalia, Germany, France, Switzerland, Austria, Sweden and Denmark.

The experts thus had the opportunity to discuss the complexity of managing the consequences of a malfunction in the electricity networks and to discuss the increased interdependencies at the network level.

The objective of this workshop was, on the one hand, to understand the impact of such a blackout on the basic needs of the population and to deepen the planning best practices to remedy the consequences as quickly as possible caused by such a failure. On the other hand, it was a question of defining the means and the flow of existing communication to ensure the internal communication between operators and managers of crisis as well as the external communication with the media and the population.

Finally, the experts exchanged on the recommendations to be given to critical infrastructures in order to improve their resilience.