Britain’s erratic weather has been the cause of many problems over the years. While you may bask in glorious sunshine one moment, you’ll be soaked from a downpour the next. This can cause stress to systems nationwide which can potentially cause power outages. In July, Thorpe Park experienced a series a power cuts which left worried visitors stuck on rides. Although you would think this was the result of harsh weather conditions, it was in fact due to high levels of heat across the region. Around the same time, there were more than 15 reports of power cuts in 24 hours across Cambridgeshire, which were caused by lightning strikes in the area.

While it’s clear that some organisations have fully prepared themselves to cope with such situations, unfortunately there are some which have not. Power cuts aren’t only difficult to deal with when you’re at home, but in a work environment, this can cause lost productivity – can your business afford it?

A problem faced by the nation

For many years, the UK has been home to memorable power cuts. You may be old enough to remember the miners’ strike in 1972, which caused major power issues – leading to astate of emergency being declared. A more recent power event that caused power outage to 40,000 properties was the result of Storm Frank in 2015.

There are more than 17,000km of electricity cables in Britain, so there’s a lot to contend with to make sure power cuts are kept to a minimum. However, some can’t be prevented.

Below are the most common types of power cuts in Britain:

• Transient fault: lasting only a few seconds. This is a temporary fault, but power is automatically restored.
• Brownout: reduction in mains power supply that can last for a few days (e.g. lowered light levels) and cause machinery malfunction.
• Blackout: absolute power loss. As the most severe case of power outage, blackouts are often the most costly and difficult to recover from.

While the type of power cuts can vary, it was noted that 80% of those which occurred between 2003 and 2012 were due to the weather.

Damages to your organisation

Businesses across the nationrun off the power of energy. This means that is it crucial to ensure operations remain consistent and don’t put a stop to our productivity. Below, we take a look at how power cuts can actually harm a business.

Even if you only experience a slight delay, a power cut could cause loss of data. If this is the case, this could have a profound impact on any ongoing campaigns and prove difficult for you to meet deadlines on a range of projects and ultimately meet the requirements of a client. Imagine if all of your work is lost due to such circumstances – you might have to start your work from scratch.

The downtime cost a business will incur can vary. Some small businesses state that one hour of no power could cost £800. Believe it or not, Google lost their power in 2013 and this cost them £100,000 each minute.But, downtime could come down to several reasons. If your business does not have access to electricity for example, employees will not be able to communicate with customers. If you’re a business that operates as an ecommerce, you won’t be able to monitor online sales and respond to website queries.

A recent survey found that 23% of IT professionals claim that an hour of business downtime can cost their organisation between £10,000 and £1 million. Each year in Britain, as a result of IT downtime, businesses can pay the price of £3.6 million collectively and lose 545 productivity hours.

To work out the average cost of downtime an hour, this is the general formula: Employee cost per hour x fraction of employees affected by the power cut x average revenue for each hour x fraction of the revenue that was affected by the outage

Is it worth the risk?

Of course, all businesses have different priorities. If your company relies on computers and data, you should look at installing an uninterrupted power supply (UPS) that will allow your devices to run off battery power in the event of a power cut. Most companies now rely on an internet connection too, which means it could be difficult to cope without one. If you set up a MiFi – which can operate as a WiFi hotspot – your staff will be able to connect to an ad-hoc network which can help you operate when a power cut does strike.

It’s vital that you plan ahead and create a strategy for your team to follow. Do this by creating a team or committee that will determine the specific risks to your business — a small IT company will have different points to consider compared to a large factory — and then draw up a detailed process for mitigating these risks.

This article was provided by Flogas, LPG price specialists.