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Recent reporting warns that the UK faces a growing risk of Spain-style blackouts, where grid instability can trigger nationwide outages.
Spain’s 2025 blackout shut down transport, communications and businesses with billions lost in economic output, highlighting how quickly disruption can escalate.
While recent warnings have focused on economic disruption and energy resilience, security specialists are cautioning that widespread outages could also trigger a hidden but serious risk, the failure of electronic access control systems that protect offices, warehouses and critical infrastructure.
The UK access control market, valued at $470 million in 2025, reflects how heavily modern organisations rely on systems such as keycards, fobs and cloud-based identity platforms to manage building access. However, these systems depend entirely on continuous power and network connectivity.
In the event of a blackout, card readers can go offline instantly, central systems become inaccessible, and electronically controlled doors may default to pre-set behaviours, either unlocking automatically or remaining locked without the ability to override them digitally.
Access control experts at ID Card Centre warn that this combination of disruption and reduced visibility could create a “perfect storm” for physical security breaches.
Managing Director, Ben O’Brien comments, “The potential blackouts are not just an energy issue, they’d be a security risk that businesses possibly haven’t considered. Organisations invest heavily in their buildings, but a lot fewer plan for what happens when the power goes out.
“Businesses should take proactive steps to assess their resilience, including reviewing whether access control systems have adequate battery backup, understanding how doors behave during power loss, ensuring manual override procedures are in place and regularly servicing their systems. Small steps like staying on top of consumables such as replacing batteries in controllers on a regular basis to ensure that data is retained in the event of power failure.”
With pressure on the UK’s energy infrastructure expected to increase in the coming years, the warning highlights a critical but often overlooked aspect of business continuity planning.
ID Card Centre
ID Card Centre are a UK-based, family-owned supplier and manufacturer of identity access control and security products, founded in 1998. Providing a range of products including ID cards, printers, and sustainable identification solutions for a range of industries, including government, education, events and more.
Also read: Ways to Prepare Your Business for a Power Outage
Image source: Freepik.com
