德国电网疑遭蓄意破坏，RWE五台褐煤机组短暂停运

Germany’s power grid came under a second attack on Tuesday, with incidents on opposite sides of the country knocking units of coal-fired power plants offline and adding to concerns over the vulnerability of critical energy infrastructure.

The latest incident struck western Germany on Tuesday evening, forcing five units RWE AG’s lignite-fired power plants offline. The sites in the industrial heartland surrounding the Rhine river have a combined capacity of 4.2 gigawatts, and the local Essen police force said it was operating on the assumption of “a deliberate act, a criminal offense.”

Germany has faced several attacks on its energy infrastructure this year, including a major arson attack in Berlin that caused a widespread blackout. Earlier on Tuesday, unknown perpetrators damaged several transmission lines in eastern Germany using homemade projectiles, triggering a temporary outage at LEAG’s Jänschwalde coal plant.

Read More: German Power Grid Sabotage Briefly Disrupts Network, Coal Plant

Grid operator Amprion said the latest incident on Tuesday evening occurred near its substation in Rommerskirchen in the Rhineland. It added that general power supply was not affected at any time and system stability was guaranteed.

RWE said the five lignite-fired power plant units included Neurath G and F and Niederaußem H, G and K. Most had been feeding electricity into the grid at the time of the incident. RWE said it will reconnect most of the units, with a combined capacity of 2.6 gigawatts, on Wednesday, and the remaining 1.6 gigawatts is expected to return over the weekend.

While the attackers of the power grids remain unknown, Germany is on high alert following a failed drone attack at Leipzig airport, which authorities have blamed on Russia.

Read More: Germany Blames Russia for Attempted Drone Attack, Expects More

Countries across Europe are racing to harden power grids against sabotage, cyberattacks and military threats. The push follows Russia’s repeated attacks on Ukraine’s energy infrastructure and a series of sabotage incidents across Europe.

According to Talha Torlak, who leads short-term power trading at Vitus Commodities, there was a “very extreme deficit” on Tuesday evening between 8 p.m. and 9 p.m. after RWE’s lignite units went offline. That pushed preliminary imbalance prices — the cost of correcting unexpected gaps between electricity supply and demand — to €5,000 per megawatt-hour. After 9 p.m. the system quickly stabilized, he said.