Consciousness of Sheep
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For a few seconds last Thursday, the power went out in a suburb of Manchester. Given Britain’s ageing Grid infrastructure, this is just one of those things that happens week-in week-out somewhere in the UK. In any case, Grid engineers quickly fixed the problem, and 90 seconds later, power was restored. And that might have been the end of the story. Except that twelve years ago Network Rail decided to concentrate its complex control system to that same Manchester suburb. So that, when the power went out, so too did the signalling system across most of northwest England.
It shouldn’t have happened, of course. Network Rail had anticipated the possibility of a power failure and had installed back-up generators… generators which failed to kick in quickly enough. And so, not only was the control centre plunged into darkness, but critical hardware failed and had to be replaced. The result was that a 90 second power cut led directly to hundreds of trains being halted and thousands of passengers stranded for several hours:
“Almost every train across the Midlands and North West England came to a halt after railway systems lost connection to the control centre.”
This was a relatively small example of a growing problem that I alluded to in the aftermath of a similar event which took out Heathrow airport in March last year, when a 60-year-old transformer burst into flames, and again, supposedly hi-tech back-up systems failed to kick in:
“This is, of course, one of the unspoken myths about a tech revolution that was mostly consumer-facing. Yes, the advent of the PC, and later the smartphone, the worldwide web and fibre-optic cabling allowed us to do a lot more for a lot less physical effort. But behind the curtain, we remained dependent upon an interconnected web of 1970s technologies that get patched up with the equivalent of string and sticky paper with increasing regularity. Interconnected, because failure in one rapidly infects its neighbour. Mostly out of sight, but occasionally – as we witnessed at Heathrow airport in March – resulting in a crisis of international proportions. In that case, having been forced to rule out the default Russian cyber-attack, ancient infrastructure was cited as the most likely cause. And it turns out that the transformer that caught fire had been listed for maintenance seven years ago!”
Indeed, this is the same ancient and creaking infrastructure that the political class blithely assumes will host their drive to a net zero generating system which must incorporate even more complex – and thus fragile – computerised back-up systems to have any chance of balancing the second-by-second fluctuations in wind and sunlight… as we witnessed in Iberia last year, those systems have a nasty habit of disconnecting from the Grid when there is a power cut or even a slight fluctuation in voltage and/or frequency.
Thus far, Britain has escaped a complete national blackout. But this is down to luck rather than forward planning. However, with European gas storage at half what is needed to see the continent through the coming winter, and with Britain (along with Germany) over-reliant on intermittent sources of generation and lacking anything like the back-up to cope with a run of the mill winter high-pressure weather system, it is only a matter of time before we face a more widespread blackout.
Nor is this just about a loss of electricity, because all of our critical infrastructure (life-support) systems are interconnected. And just as a local power cut can take out a regional rail network or an international air hub, so everything from water and sewage to communications will rapidly fail in the event of a nationwide blackout. And while, in theory, key nodes within the infrastructure network – hospitals, central police stations, communications datacentres, etc. – have installed back-up (mostly diesel-powered) generators, as we saw last week, these can fail… a particular issue in a country that is facing diesel fuel shortages later in the year.
The problem is that the more contagion spreads, and the longer outages persist, the harder it is going to be to restore even emergency life-support. Modern British homes lack the storage space for more than a few days of food and tend not to have any water storage. But without power, water pumping stations fail while supermarkets are unable to process transactions. Meanwhile, having lost computer control systems, transport hubs may be unable to move food from regional distribution centres to individual stores. So, ask yourself how long you could last without food and clean drinking water… because it is likely to be days, if not weeks before the authorities get their act together.
As Moisés R. Hernández explains:
“Germany [and the UK] treated energy as a political project. The Energiewende —the energy transition— was sold as a moral imperative, a way to ‘save the planet’ by abandoning nuclear power and fossil fuels. But thermodynamics does not respond to moral imperatives. It responds to physical laws. And the physical law is clear: you cannot power an industrial powerhouse with intermittent sources without firm backup guaranteeing supply when the sun doesn’t shine and the wind doesn’t blow…
“The lesson is not that renewables are the problem. The lesson is that destroying dependable infrastructure before replacing it creates dependence, higher costs, and industrial vulnerability. Energy is not ideology. It is the metabolism of civilization…”
Even as we bask in the heat of the hottest summer on record, just over the horizon the grey clouds of a difficult winter are looming… a winter marred by the massive loss of fuel from the Persian Gulf and from self-inflicted sanctions on Russia. For years, the political class has been quick to point to the occasional day when wind and solar have been able to meet our demand for electricity, while ignoring the 60 percent of the time when we are dependent upon a mixture of nuclear and gas generation. But this winter, we may well get to see what happens when wind and solar are all we have… and whether our ancient Grid infrastructure is up to the challenge.
As you made it to the end…
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