Britain’s electricity grid still reliant on fax machines

Revelation comes day after rail operator Northern admitted it also used outdated tech

Faxes are still being used to run the UK’s electricity grids, the Government’s energy systems operator has admitted.
The outdated machines are being used by the National Energy System Operator (Neso), which is overseen by Ed Miliband, the Energy Secretary, to communicate with power producers and traders about generating capacity and prices.
Faxes are in its key control rooms where staff monitor the UK’s electricity flows, matching generating capacity with demand minute by minute to prevent shortages and blackouts.
The revelation comes a day after state-owned rail operator Northern admitted it too still used the machines.
A Neso spokesman said: “We do have fax machines in our control centre so that we can continue to receive information from some market participants that still use fax machines as their primary communication option to relay their information to us.”
The machines are a legacy – Neso was part of National Grid, a commercial company, until just a few weeks ago.
The Neso spokesman said: “We are currently undertaking a project to replace the fax machines with an electronic system to be in place in the coming weeks.”
A report in New Power, a trade newsletter, in May said the faxes were used to support a range of “critical functions” including communications with control room engineers, adding the machines were “baked in to the Grid Code that governs the parties’ actions”.
It added: “The ‘received receipt’ which confirms a fax has been successfully received is particularly important when fulfilling Grid Code obligations such as the issue of system warnings.”
The revelation follows a similar admission by Northern Rail. Quizzed by Andy Burnham, the Mayor of Greater Manchester, its bosses admitted that faxes are still used in crew rostering.
It claimed junking fax machines for a more modern system was being blocked by the rail unions. Unions have disputed this assertion.
In a session of the Rail North Committee, which he chairs, Mr Burnham asked: “I’ve heard that you’re still using fax machines. How on earth can this be the case in 2024?”
Matt Rice, Northern’s chief operating officer, said the business would struggle to shift to a more modern alternative. “The tools we use to get information and messages to our crew rely on faxes, amazingly. It’s our challenge to get rid of them.”
Fax machines work by scanning a document to digitise it so it can be transmitted over a phone line to a receiving fax machine, which then prints it out.
The technology was revolutionary in the 1980s when few people had email, meaning postal services and couriers were the main way of sending documents.
However, Neso is racing to replace the technology within weeks after being told that the analogue telephone network on which the machines rely will be decommissioned in 2025.