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Alastair Martin, the chief strategy officer of the energy solutions specialist Flexitricty, said the UK energy system “hasn’t seen anything like this for at least a decade”.

A similar energy system failure took place in May 2008 after the Sizewell B nuclear power plant tripped offline, two minutes before an outage at the Longannet coal-fired power plant.

“It was a coincidence, but it was dramatic,” he said. The twin outages also caused frequency to drop below the critical 50 Hz limit, which caused an automatic shutdown of parts of the energy grid, he added.