Consciousness of Sheep
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It is one of those late autumn days. Chilly but not yet icy. Overcast, but the high pressure air is still. You wake with a start. Some anxiety circuit deep within your reptile brain has triggered in response to the fear of being late for work… again. But as you become fully awake, you think that it must be early. Not only is it still dark, but it seems darker than usual. And so, you turn to the bedside clock to check the time.
This is the moment you realise that something is wrong. Instead of a digital display, the face of the clock – which is plugged into a nearby wall socket – is blank. Stumbling out of bed, you briefly pull back the curtain. That explains the unexpected darkness – the streetlights, which normally provide an amber glow, are all out. Eventually you find your phone, which at least still has some charge, and discover that it is 6.30am.
Briefly, you hope that you will be able to use the phone to find out how widespread the power outage is. But alas, there is no signal or wi-fi. Nevertheless, your working assumption is that the power outage is local… although you soon get a clue that it could be more widespread.
Without power, the heating is off. But even though you can’t shower, you can at least wash and brush your teeth using cold water. Or so you thought until you turned on the tap and were met with a gurgling sound but no water. Although you don’t know why the water is out, you will find out later that it is because the electrically-powered pumping station is offline – as, of course, is the communications network.
So, you get dressed and use the light of your phone to help navigate the stairs. Making your way to the kitchen you settle for a cold breakfast of cereal and cold milk from the fridge – as long as you keep the fridge and freezer doors closed, the contents will keep. And in any case, since – for cost and environmental reasons – you switched to an induction hob, you are not going to be cooking anything until the power comes back.
Picking up your bag and keys, you make your way to the driveway. At least your petrol-powered car is unaffected by the power cut. Well, not quite, because you were supposed to fill up on your way home from work yesterday but decided to leave it until this morning. Still, there’s probably enough fuel in the tank to get you to work and back. And if the outage is local, you will be able to fill up along the way. And so, along with thousands of other drivers, you make your way into the morning gloom and the unfamiliarity of roads lit by nothing more than car headlamps.
The journey takes a lot longer because of the traffic congestion resulting from all of the traffic signals being out. The local police are directing traffic at bigger junctions. But elsewhere drivers have to rely on others to let them through… which mostly works.
After half an hour, you pull into a supermarket where you hope to pick up some food for lunch as well as filling up with petrol. The lights though, are clearly out – although inside you can see torch and candlelight. So, you park and walk over to the store, only to find that, since the electronic tills and payment systems are out, they are only accepting cash payments… and you are out of cash.
There is an ATM at the front of the store. But when you get to it, it is not working. As, predictably, are the electrically-powered pumps at the filling station. Clearly the outage is bigger than you had first thought, probably encompassing the entire city at least. And now you face a dilemma – do you carry on driving to a workplace that may also be out of power, risking running out of fuel on the way home, or do you go back to your family and make sure they are okay?
Your choice depends on how widespread the outage is and how long it will take for the grid engineers to restore the power. And so, you turn on the car radio and begin turning the dials, hoping to find a news channel. Which is the point at which you decide to go home… because the radio is dead, or, rather, the radio is working fine but there is not a channel – local or national – broadcasting.
By the time you get home it is light. But home is no longer the comfort zone that you had taken for granted. Nothing works. You can’t cook or make a hot drink. Nor can you turn on the TV, radio or home computer. And you are reluctant to turn on your phone because you want to conserve the battery. Most worryingly, the central heating is not working. And although the house is still holding some of last night’s warmth, the temperature is gradually dropping to equal the chilly eight degrees air outside.
Your wife and children aren’t there. They’ve obviously left for school. But an hour later, they return. The school is closed. But they are none the wiser about the extent of the power outage or what caused it. And so, the only thing left to do is to climb into bed and use the bedding to hold your body heat to keep you all warm until power is restored…
*****
For my grandparents, bringing up children in the years after the Second World War, this would have been a normal morning (except that they wouldn’t have had a car or any electrical goods). But for those of us who have become entirely dependent upon the life-support of a complex, high-energy civilisation, the experience would be traumatic because of the sudden disconnection from the global system of communications.
Nor is it an unlikely scenario. Based on his experience as a cabinet minister with responsibility for crisis management, in Apocalypse How?, Oliver Letwin sets out how UK energy and communications policy have been moving us ever closer to such a breakdown. More recently, events in Iberia and Texas have shown the risks of adding too much intermittent generation while neglecting firm power. And the UK had its own taste of things to come in August 2019, when a lightning strike on the Hornsea windfarm, coupled to the failure of the Little Barford gas generator to come online in response, led to London and most of eastern England losing power. And although we escaped by the skin of our teeth, on 23 June 2026, in the face of record high temperatures (and very little wind) the grid used up all of its generating capacity and unilaterally (and unlawfully) halted exports to Europe. At that moment, any loss of voltage or frequency risked a cascading outage similar to the one in August 2019 or perhaps even across Iberia last year.
As a result of the closure of the Strait of Hormuz and the sanctions on Russia, Europe has just half of the stored gas than it should have if it is to avoid shortages in the coming winter. With no sight of an end to either conflict, power outages look certain. And despite UK energy companies producing gas from the North Sea, the way the European market operates means that any surplus could be bought up by another European state rather than being commandeered for UK use.
And so, there you are, wrapped beneath a pile of bedding along with your spouse and children. Warm for now, but still clueless as to when the power will be restored. Every couple of hours, you pop out to the car and turn on the radio in the hope that someone will start broadcasting. But so far you have been met with dead air.
Local power outages in the UK have been known to last days and – in heavy snow – even weeks. But few households maintain more than a few days’ food. And in any case, without power, there is no easy way of cooking. In the worst cases, families (presumably those with wood burners) have turned to burning their furniture for heat and cooking, while those fortunate enough to have a camping stove can at least have hot drinks or some basic warm food. In the case of a national emergency though, the assumption is that power will be restored more rapidly.
This is where Letwin’s account is troubling. Because one of the key cost-saving measures being used by emergency and critical infrastructure organisations is a switch from dedicated radio systems to using the 5-G network… a network which depends upon grid electricity. So that the process of fault-finding and transporting people and equipment to where they are needed is made far harder. And then there is a key problem with non-renewable renewable energy-harvesting technologies (NRREHTs) which we are generally forbidden to discuss… they lack black start capacity. This is a particular issue in Scotland, where there are just two black start-capable power stations, Peterhead (gas) and Torness (nuclear) – both due to close four years from now, leaving the nearest black start-capable power station hundreds of miles away in Hull.
Here we should note that for safety reasons, whatever gas that remains to the UK during a shortage will be first used for the domestic grid because of the risk of explosions if the system was disconnected then restarted without first checking all gas appliances are switched off. And so, gas power stations (which are black start-capable) will be taken offline even if there is still some gas available. This leaves the ageing nuclear fleet – much of which is often down for maintenance – to take up the slack in the event of a widespread power cut. So that bringing the system we have come to rely on back online may prove more difficult and more prolonged than we might hope for.
After an uncomfortable night, you go out to the car and switch on the radio and finally find a news station. A basic BBC service has been restored, and you now know at least that parts of Britain are gradually being brought back online. It is hoped that the grid will be operating normally by the end of the week. But for now, people are being encouraged to stay at home and to only seek help if there is a genuine emergency.
There will have been plenty of those, of course. Hospitals have emergency generators, but shortages and high diesel prices will have limited the amount of power available. Meanwhile, emergency services dependent upon the failed 5-G networks have been struggling to respond to emergencies – including the many fires caused by people knocking over the candles they’ve been using for lighting.
When it is all over, it will turn out that thousands of isolated old and disabled people have died from hypothermia, from a lack of medications, and from simply falling and breaking bones in the dark.
But despite the excess deployment of NRREHTs coupled to the loss of conventional generation being the obvious cause of the crisis, the ‘green’ energy zealots who advise the UK government will be quick to claim that the problem was that we hadn’t deployed enough NRREHTs quickly enough… the fact that no amount of wind turbines can generate electricity when there is no wind going entirely over their heads.
And for you – and the rest of us – the lesson that we will have to learn is how we can adapt to survive the increasingly regular power outages that lay in our future… something, I suspect, that very few of us are equipped to deal with just now.
As you made it to the end…
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