MPs want answers about power cut

The Tweede Kamer, lower house of parliament, wants clarification from the government on the major power outage that affected large parts of Noord Holland and Flevoland this morning, AD reports. The outage began just before 10:00 and was caused by a technical fault in a power station in Diemen. More than an hour later grid administrator TenneT reported that power would be gradually restored.

SP parliamentarian Eric Smaling wants to find out from Minister Henk Kamp of Economic Affairs what exactly happened during the question time on Tuesday. "On the one hand such a major outage is a romantic lesson in humility, but the more serious side is that vital infrastructure in a large part of the Randstad can apparently be turned off simultaneously and is dependent on a single power distribution point in Diemen." he said.

The power outage caused major disruptions that affected a large part of the Netherlands. NS is still struggling to get back on track. Planes were unable to land at Schiphol for a while. Telecom services T-Mobile and Vodafone also struggled under the outage. On their website, T-Mobile states that about 70 percent of their transmission towers in the affected areas were not working.  The resolution of the power outage has seen power restored to many of towers and only about 25 percent of them are still out of order. Vodafone also suffered. "We have masts with batteries that last an hour, but we have supplied important nodes in the network with generators." a spokesperson told NU. The outage caused sporadic problems with fixed telehony and internet throughout the Netherlands via Vodafone Home.

The VVD called the power failure "particularly worrisome", AD reports. "What is the cause and how can we prevent it in the future?" VVD parliamentarian André Bosman wants to know. The outage caused "serious problems in society" and had an enormous impact on the infrastructure.

PvdA parliamentarian Jan Vos called the power outage "serious", but also pointed out that the Dutch power supply is "very good" compared to other countries. He will wait to find out exactly what is going on before taking political action.

Minister Kamp has not yet been able to respond to the power outage as he is on his way back from a EU meeting in Latvia. The Ministry of Economic Affairs has stated that they are in close contact with grid administrator TenneT, but can not make any announcements yet.