And last night was only the beginning... it’s certainly good news for candle makers...
Operations were cancelled as hospitals plunged into darkness... people got stuck in lifts, panicking as they waited hours to be rescued... traffic lights failed causing chaos on city centre roads.
We are not talking about some far-away developing nation stumbling into the 21st Century. Embarrassingly, this was actually the UK... and it happened yesterday.
Cleveland, Cheshire, Lincolnshire and parts of London were left in the dark as a mysterious outage crippled the network. This was no minor local event - and no-one who knows what went on is prepared to speak about it.
The cuts escalated as the day progressed and the National Grid was forced to issue its second-most serious warning: demand control imminent!
Two entirely unrelated power stations (one coal, one nuclear - one in Suffolk, one in Fife) suddenly shut down within minutes of each another... the cascade continued with nine "generating units" also going dark... four other power stations also suffered failures to varying extents.
This caused the price of wholesale electricity prices to jump 35% to £95 per megawatt.
Secrets fill me with rancour...
Mysteriously, both British Energy and E.On said that they could not reveal the source of the problem. They won’t even say when the power stations are expected to be fully back on line, because of the effect this will have the wholesale electricity market.
David Hunter an analyst at independent energy consultancy McKinnon & Clarke summed it up nicely. He told The Times:
"The Government’s inability to make long-term energy security decisions over the last decade is coming home to roost. Since the ‘dash for gas’ in the 1990s, the lack of political will to make tough decisions has left Britain short of power."
So, there is a massive question mark over the future of the UK. Tony Blair is responsible for this... and so is Greenpeace.
Blair didn’t have the balls to make essential decisions that would have secured our energy future. He was too busy fighting someone else’s oil war. He did not have the guts to take on the greens - and this was a mistake.
He should have set us on the track to nuclear power a decade ago - and made sure everyone knew that coal would have to fill the gap.
Instead he dithered and fretted over what to do. Policymakers even listened to the type of people that love to be in "focus groups," so men with beards and women in comfortable shoes had their say. There was delay after delay after delay.
Greenpeace made everything worse...
When the government actually did something about getting our nuclear strategy on track, it got it so utterly wrong that Greenpeace took it to court on a technicality! This caused another year-long delay.
We must all consider the following pertinent facts.
Our North Sea oil is running out and oil imports are becoming more and more expensive. Russia is sewing up the European gas market (and we do not want to beholden to the Putins of this world for our future energy security).
Biofuels are an expensive con and burning food is stupid. Wind and solar power are unlikely to be able to provide all the energy for the 75 million people that are expected to be living in this country by the middle of the century.
The solution is blindingly obvious. We need to build new nuclear powers stations - and accept we will have to burn coal in the interim.
If we don’t do this, we could easily find ourselves suffering from energy poverty in the future. We will then have to hand over all our wealth to Russia in order to buy their gas.
Energy poverty will lead to economic poverty and then personal poverty if we let it... and the blame for this can be laid firmly at the door of Tony Blair and Greenpeace.
I worry yesterday’s blackouts could be a mere taster of what we have in store in the future. I reckon you should be worried too.
Regards,
Garry White
Editor
Smart Commodities UK
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