Consciousness of Sheep
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With gas shortages across Europe, we are likely to need nuclear power more than ever this winter – especially if early weather modelling proves anywhere near correct. But only one of the two reactors of the massively over-budget and delayed 3.2GW Hinkley Point C power station has been completed (Britain lacked the skilled engineers to build both reactors at once). Some of the blame for this rests with the 2010-15 Lib-Con coalition government which saw new nuclear power as too far in the future for the electoral cycle. Deputy prime minister Nick Clegg famously remarking that:
“By the most optimistic scenarios from the government itself, there’s no way they are going to have new nuclear come on stream until 2021, 2022. So it’s just not even an answer.”
Britain was probably already technologically-incapable – lacking the skills and materials to build anything large-scale – by then anyway. From the failure to build a high-speed rail link between London and Birmingham, Keir Starmer’s risible attempt to encourage the building of 300,000 houses a year (only a third of that number were even registered) to the £180 million spent not building a tunnel under Stonehenge, Britain simply lacks the ability to do much more than announce things that nobody in their right mind imagines will ever happen in the real world.
It has been a long time coming too. After the drought in 1976 – the benchmark year against which the media is measuring the current summer – there was a serious debate about building a national water grid to allow water to flow from the wetter north and west of Great Britain to the generally drier midlands and southeast. Predictably, it was all too expensive and would take too long… and in any case, it would make privatisation more difficult. Moreover, the usual British weather returned the following year. And ever since, the main concern has been with the increasing winter flooding rather than the occasional few weeks of hot, dry weather that come around every five years or so.
This year has been different though. Here in South Wales, arson-induced fires have drained the resources of both local and national fire brigades, leading to what remains of the British Army being drafted in to help beat back the flames – a process not helped by some landowners taking grants for “rewilding” but in practice merely neglecting land management. Nor is fire the only problem. This year’s harvest is going to be down as sun-shrivelled crops are a fraction of the size they would have been if they had access to sufficient water. Animals are also likely to have to be slaughtered this winter because of a lack of winter food. And even supplying clean drinking water to humans is at risk as reservoirs drain to historically low levels.
The response to all of this by Ofwat – the water industry (non-)regulator – is telling too. Instead of requiring the privatised water monopolies to build appropriate infrastructure – Britain has more than enough rain, but not enough places to store it, the last reservoir being built in 1992 – the long-suffering customers are to be hit with “surge pricing” in an attempt to force us to lower demand for water when it hasn’t rained for a bit. No doubt this will be sold as a means of curbing affluent suburban gardeners’ excessive hosepipe use, but the reality is that poorer people will be forced into insanitary behaviours like not flushing toilets and not washing hands just to have enough water to drink and cook with. This, of course, in the wider context of AI datacentres and global soft drinks manufacturers insisting on their right to drain aquifers and rivers while denying that ordinary people have any right to clean drinking water (unless it comes in an expensive plastic bottle).
As with water, so with the supply of electricity… although in a more brutal form (even Ofgem – the energy industry regulator – realises that they can’t jack up prices much further). Tucked away in its clean power 2030 report, The National Energy System Operator (NESO) proposes the right to simply disconnect regions of the country from the electricity grid on days when there is not enough wind and sunlight to go around – a problem which will be a lot more frequent if its proposal to locate a raft of AI datacentres to Scotland to mop up excess wind-generated electricity on days when there is too much of the stuff goes ahead.
Despite NESO’s mendacious claim that “Renewables generated an average of 63% of our electricity during 2025,” Wind, solar and hydro provided just 38 percent of our electricity. Add in biomass – mostly the once-and-done destruction and burning of North American forests – and we get to 45 percent. But the UK remains dangerously dependent upon the ageing fleet of gas and nuclear power stations – along with exports from Europe – to keep the lights on. The problem is that industries and households do not consume averages… they need 24/7 firm electricity. And the fact that NESO has too much on a windy day is neither here nor there (save that a few industries are now paid to increase consumption on windy or sunny days). Most often though, wind farm operators are simply paid to cease generating.
This type of curtailment is not just a British problem either:
“Across the world, governments have raced to build wind and solar generation faster than the electricity networks needed to carry and use the power.
“Now the consequences are arriving.
“Reuters reports that China may have curtailed 360 TWh of wind and solar electricity in the first six months of 2026, according to estimates from Global Energy Monitor and CREA, up 49% on the previous year. China’s own official curtailment figures are considerably lower, so the 360 TWh figure should be treated as an independent estimate rather than an uncontested measurement. But the underlying warning remains: insufficient transmission infrastructure is contributing to enormous quantities of potential renewable generation being rejected.”
China, however, has a well-developed electricity grid with a much broader range of generation from old fossil fuels to new fourth-generation nuclear… it can afford to curtail. Britain, on the other hand, took an ideology-first/engineering-later approach to electricity, insisting that wind and solar provide almost all of the power while hoping that clever people somewhere else would figure out how to build an electricity grid that would overcome the many issues with intermittency without having to switch the lights off.
Rather like our failure to build the water grid – or even a fraction of the new water storage – proposed after 1976, leading to the big shortages this year, come the winter, when the freezing, low-wind weather systems settle over a Europe which is already woefully low in gas, and a lot of us will very likely find ourselves shivering in the dark. No doubt, as with the current drought, the political class will blame the cold winter conditions on the changing climate. But that doesn’t explain why we in Britain have been left dangerously unable to cope. The cause of that is the political short-termism and cowardice which has afflicted us for more than half a century. Sometime back then, a country which had once built the world’s infrastructure turned from science and engineering to wishful thinking and an unwarranted faith in mythical “market forces” as the basis for the change we might have wanted to bring about. And like everything else our political class attempts to construct these days, in a kind of reverse Midas touch, our water and electricity systems are about to turn to shit… because the last of the competent engineers retired decades ago.
As you made it to the end…
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