English ‘green Banksy’ shuts down turbine, leaves station owners gobsmacked.

In a story just appearing now on the Guardian news site it appears that back on November 28th a lone individual breached one of the most secure electrical stations in England and shutdown one of its 500MW turbines. The shutdown turbine creates enough power to keep a city the size of Bristol lit up and powered. As well the shutdown by this mystery person is reported to have reduced UK’s climate change emissions by 2%.

Apparently even the members of some England’s most vocal direct action environment groups don’t have a clue as to who this person is

“We have no idea who he is – but we really want to know. Everybody’s asking ‘where were you on Friday November 28’,” said Ben Stewart of Greenpeace, one of six people arrested for climbing the 76 metre (250ft) chimney of the Kingsnorth station early last year but found not guilty of criminal damage in November. “We would never act anonymously,” he added.

As for E.on the operators of the affected power plant they are just as confused by the person being dubbed climate man or the green Banksy. The fact that a single individual was able to successfully breach a £12m security system and shutdown the turbine has them – in their words – gobsmacked. Emily Highmore a spokeswoman for E.on said in an interview

“It was about 10pm, very dark indeed,” said Highmore. “It looks from the CCTV like he came in via a very remote part of the site by the sea wall and got over the double layer of fences.”

The intruder then crossed a car park and walked to an unlocked door. But instead of going to the power station’s main control room, where about eight people would have been working, he headed for its main turbine hall, where no one would have been working at that time.

Within minutes, says E.On, “he had tampered with some equipment” – believed to be a computer at a control panel – “and tripped unit 2, one of the station’s giant 500MW turbines”.

“This caused the unit to go offline,” she added. “It was running at full 500MW load and the noise it would have made as it shut itself down is just incredible. CCTV shows that he then just walked out, and went back over the fence.

All I can say is wow and way to go Green Banksy.

[image courtesy of Daniel Berehulak/Getty Images]