Blackout Britain
Sep 17 - Ecologist, The
Britain has gobbled its North Sea gas resources in little more than 10 years, its nuclear power stations are due to be decommissioned and wind farms alone cannot fill the gap. Within two years, Britain could be facing a series of blackouts' and the ignomony of importing the resource it once considered so plentiful from a host of politically unstable countries
Antonio Moroni would soon know how Davies felt. Days later, 1,000 miles away
in Rome, the security guard had summoned an elevator to pop downstairs for a
late-night espresso. It was a bad choice. With a fearsome clank the tin box
froze between floors. And unlike Davies, Moroni would have no-one to share his
nightmarish thoughts of an AlQaeda strike. Outside, pandemonium would erupt on
the streets of the Italian capital. Barely a week earlier neon-gorged New York,
beacon of the world economy, had too been plunged into blackness. A power
shortage in Denmark and Sweden would quickly follow, and soon after the biggest
of all would strike Moroni and his homeland. One by one some of the brightest
Western democracies, built on their addiction to safe, reliable electricity, had
seen their lights go out. In the space of just 40 days late last summer, many of
the planet's great cities had the reassuring cord of power ripped from them,
leaving them flapping and confused in the dark.
Now, though, it was the turn of southern England. London mayor Ken
Livingstone watched from his plush fourth floor Thames-side offices as the glare
of his city sputtered out below him. 'An outrage,' he screamed. Yet Livingstone
had better get used to it. Blackout Britain is inevitable, according to the UK's
most eminent experts on the subject. Key government advisors, engineering
bodies, leading think tanks and the power industry itself concur that a dim
future remains a likely scenario. The first wave of blackouts are forecast in
less than two years. By then, Britain will be well on the way to begging some of
the world's most volatile regimes for something as basic as its power.
Make no mistake, Britain is facing the gravest energy crisis in its history.
Cursory investigation soon casts light upon an unholy alliance of failed
policies and short-sighted cost-cutting. Tony Blair already knows his country is
inching towards a day when the factories will fall silent and candles will
dominate supermarket sales. MPs recently analysed the London blackouts and found
that Britain's power network was nearing the end of its 40-year life span.
Chronic under investment, they concluded after sifting through the evidence, was
squarely to blame. Dieter Helm, who advises the government on energy policy,
similarly describes a 'clapped out' system. Former Government advisor Professor
Ian Fells of Newcastle University and principal author of a far-reaching energy
inquiry by the Royal Academy of Engineering, describes those in charge of our
electricity strategy as living in 'cloud cuckoo land'. Yet the malaise runs way
deeper than a decrepit supply network. Britain's main supply of electricity -
gas - is about to run out.
The world's third largest consumer of natural gas, after the US and Russia,
has effectively exhausted the North Sea's once- plentiful reserves in little
more than a decade. Britain has come to rely on gas as though it were like the
wind: replenishable, safe and never-ending. In 1990, gas provided just 1.7 per
cent of Britain's main electricity supply. Twelve years later it was fuelling
almost one-third of our power. In two years' time, the government will face the
ignominy of having to import an energy that it had considered so plentiful so
recently. At the same time, Britain's other two key sources of power - coal and
nuclear - are about to be phased out for environmental reasons that few dispute.
Britain's dirty, belching power stations will begin closing in 2008 when
European directives to curb emissions ensure that these ancient powerhouses of
yesteryear can no longer be countenanced. At around the same time, Britain's
controversy-shrouded Magnox nuclear reactors will finally start to shut. All but
one of the nuclear plants that now generate almost a quarter of Britain's
electricity will start to be decommissioned in the next seven years. The nuclear
dream, punctured by persistent safety and financial concerns, has all but faded.
Last year both these produced 58 per cent jf Oritain's electricity. 'A
yawning enerj y gap wiljl stai t appearing by 2006 Things are beginning to go
really astray arid I aril no alone in that belief,' said Fells.
The answer, ace Drding to the Governrhent, iS blowing in the wind. Yet more
than a year after the laudable aims of Blair's energy white paper, his green
clrear just remains just that. No-one seems clear just how wind energy will
reach his intended target of producing a tenth of Britain's electricity in the
next six years. Fells relieves ah opimistic target stands at just seven per
cent. Inside Whitehall the heat is rising. Like Davies, ties are being loosened
in rising panic. If wind farms are not given the chance to suca ed, Britain
cannot power itself.
By 2020 Britain risks a staggering 80 per cent energy shortfall, according to
the Institution of Givil Engineers. The days of walle wing in a hot bath before
catching the latest episode of Coronation Street safe in the knowledge that
there is electricity for all - appear to be coming to an end. Yet against this
backdrop the government has remained publicly upbeat. So far ministers have
refused to ensure against economy-crippling power cuts. Similarly the National
Grid, responsible for distributing power to our homes, refuses to discuss
contingency measures designed to deal with a bout of blackouts.
And so Britain rushes headlong towards the moment when it cannot offer
electricity for all. A worse case scenario involves four- fifths of UK energy
being harvested in faraway gas fields within 15 years. Massive gas pipelines
will snake thousands of miles across continents to ensure that our lights stay
on. Mechanical failure, political whim and blackmail threaten as much disruption
as a terrorist act might. In addition, the economy would remain hostage to
volatile gas prices over which it has no control. Yet it is the terrorist threat
that haunts most in the industry. And the countries pinpointed to supply
Britain's future energy only serve to exaggerate such unease. Algeria, Iran,
Turkmenistan, Russia and Nigeria are among those on the list.
Blair's war on terror suddenly seems faintly incongruous when ordering his
nation to rely on states it has pinpointed as some of the most dangerous in the
world. Even so, civil servants have little option but to consider Algeria -
despite it having been named as a principal runner in the rise of North African
fundamentalism and whose former residents are implicated in the Madrid bombings.
Iran is likewise considered unstable by the intelligence services. Turkmenistan
and Nigeria are viewed as operating under the cloud of corruption. Russia in
turn remains firmly under the dark shadow of terror, with the Moscow bomb
certain to linger long in the memory. Chechnya separatists have vowed not to
give up their struggle.
A pipeline supplying a state that remains accused of kow-towing to Bush's
perceived war on Islam would appear a target too tasty to ignore. Elsewhere,
dispute continues to rage in the Ukraine through which vital pipelines could
run. In March the BBC offered an apocalyptic vision of blackout Britain
following a terrorist attack on a gas terminal near Moscow. The message was that
a very high stakes game of Russian roulette may have to be played. Fells, who
helped write much of the programme's script, said he did not receive a single
complaint of scare-mongering from anyone inside the energy industry.
Those involved in negotiating for their gas supplies will, like Davies,
loosen their ties as they blush at the sheer temerity of their diplomacy. Yet
they cannot fail. Britain has enough gas storage to feed the island for about 14
days. Germany and Italy, by comparison, have several months' storage capacity.
Experts agree that a 13bn programme on new gas pipelines, liquefied gas
terminals on the Thames Estuary and South Wales, as well as new interconnector
links to the continent will help. But there is little hope that they will be
completed by 2006 and maybe not for another decade. The short-term energy
vacuum, as well as the long term one, seem equally intractable. Meanwhile
industry insiders have already devised a series of calamitous scenarios for what
might happen in the event of a terrorist strike on such installations.
But the bungling does not end there. Planning consent does exist to build
seven massive gas-fired stations to help Britain through its ele\ctricity
shortfall. Permission though expires next year and fears over the high price of
natural gas as North Sea reserves dwindle means they may already have been
written off.
Fittingly, the London blackout underlines just how ill-prepared the country
remains should terrorists strike its power supply. How Britain provides
electricity can only be viewed alongside the routine warnings of senior police
chiefs, who claim that Britain should be braced for an inevitable attack. More
than ever though, the fear persists that the capital of the fourth richest
country in the world and whose streets were first illuminated by electricity in
1870 remains unable to secure something as fundamental as its electricity. It
took 30 minutes for those in charge of the National Grid to inform Scotland Yard
that the failure was a system fault and not the work of terrorists. Similarly no
announcement was issued to quell the paranoia choking commuters like Davies. It
was the first real test of London's overhauled defence mechanism after the
September 11 strikes. And it failed.
Likewise the ability of the emergency services to cope with an attack on our
nuclear power stations or electricity supply remains a topic of considerable
concern. So alarmed is the Emergency Planning Society that it has written to the
Cabinet Office more than a dozen times since the Twin Towers atrocity, saying
that funding shortfalls mean the country would not cope with a terror strike.
Despite repeated demands to government, no advice has been issued to the public
on how to react following an attack on a nearby nuclear or power plant. Nuclear
sites remain a catastrophic, but vulnerable target as The Mirror newspaper
revealed last year when a reporter crept into the supposedly watertight inner
sanctum of Size-well, which houses tons of plutonium waste.
That moonlight flit came amid government claims that British power stations
are on heightened alert. Despite this no security guards were found patrolling
the fences which were easily sliced with wire cutters, and there were no guard
dogs or security lights. No alarms were heard. Elsewhere MI5 is reportedly
investigating several attempted break-ins at electricity power stations amid
fears that Al-Qaeda is planning an attack against large 'soft' infrastructure
targets in southern England. When IRA safe houses were raided by police and
intelligence officers, they stumbled across maps of the national power supply
network. The threat to our energy supply takes other forms. An electronic attack
by mainland operatives is also considered a bona fide risk, according to the
Government's advisor on computer security. Sabotaging software controlling the
distribution of power would ensure chaos. All the same, experts agree that such
a threat is miniscule compared to the impending reliance of overseas gas
pipelines.
In reality, blame for the London blackouts fell on a group of electrical
engineers working for a private contractor one early evening last September. The
mistake appears simple enough: a 2,000 shoebox-sized one-amp fuse was installed
instead of a five-amp alternative. An instant cut in the power supply ensured
that repercussions were rapid and broad. A cataclysmic chain of reactions left
410,000 households in the dark, 270 sets of traffic lights misfiring and
thousands like Davies ensnared in a subterranean hell.
Privatisation too played its role. London Underground's decision to scrap its
power station in Lots Road, Chelsea, as part of its modernising, guaranteed
chaos would unfold. Before then, the Tube was immune to National Grid power
failures. Again analysis of the manner in which the mistake was handled provides
significant cause for concern, betraying further inherent failings with the way
Britain's power industry is being structured.
A consistent failure of privatisation has often been the lack of
accountability in the aftermath of mistakes. And, as with the rail industry, so
too the electricity network is accused of operating in a powerless vacuum. Noone
took direct responsibility for the London blackout. No contracts were withdrawn.
Disciplinary action was conspicuous by its absence. National Grid Transco is
liable for fines totalling up to 10 per cent of its 1bn turnover if it is found
to have breached conditions, yet escaped without losing a penny following the
chaos. The fact that it occurred less than a year after two million homes were
left powerless following violent October storms, suggested to many that lessons
were not being learned.
All of which would more than enough to set alarm bells ringing. But the
malaise gripping Britain's future electricity supply again runs deeper. Analysts
agree that Britain's capacity for producing power is insufficient and that,
during periods of peak demand, there is too little margin for error. Not long
ago power stations were able to offer capacity 27 per cent greater than the
amount typically required, an excess that has now dangerously slimmed down to
just 16 per cent. Britain can produce a maximum of 65,000 megawatts. Surges have
recently hit 54,000mw. Blame lies at the decision of power companies to mothball
spare power stations in order to save running costs. Such a policy has shaved
3,400mw off emergency supplies - or the equivalent power required to make more
than 333,200 thousand million cups of tea a year. Maybe it's not surprising then
that the National Grid itself has told the public to prepare for a risk of power
failure in periods of heavy demand.
Once peak periods were confined to the frosty winter months of December and
January: climate change has altered the picture dramatically. Global warming
will soon call for an intensive all- year round supply of electricity. If the
government's drive for homeowners and business to improve energy efficiency
remains unheeded, our lust for power will sharply increase at the precise point
Britain's ability to meet such demands ebbs away. To see what this might mean,
one need look no further than the massive Italian blackouts, which affected 57
million people and all parts of the country except Sardinia. Blame has fallen,
in part at least, on the huge demands caused by air conditioning systems during
last summer's heat wave. Climatologists described that same stretch of heat as a
harbinger of future British summers. The Pentagon recently joined them in
warning that Europe, more than any other continent, will be hit hardest by the
effects of heat and violent storms. These issues have already been identified in
Britain. The National Grid repeatedly dipped into emergency reserve supplies
several times last summer. During that same sweaty period, no fewer than seven
shortage warnings were issued to power producers.
The problems are compounded by under-investment in the UK's 16bn transmission
network, which was implicated in last year's London blackout and days later when
200,000 homes in the West Midlands were left starved of electricity. The
National Grid is replacing just one per cent of its network a year, a rate that
would make the rail industry blush with shame. MPs recently questioned power
companies about whether they were skimping on maintenance following reports the
National Grid had cut maintenance staff by 60 per cent. In addition, there
remains speculation that the London fiasco was caused by poor maintenance of the
network. An unnamed engineer reportedly confessed that there were insufficient
staff to carry out maintenance work, accusations denied by National Grid
Transco, which says spending on repairs has increased to 300m from 80m. Whatever
the truth, the hiccups keep coming. The latest occurred this April when a fault
at a substation plunged 61,000 homes in Wiltshire into darkness.
Naturally, the draining of North Sea gas reserves and persistent doubts over
wind energy has resurrected demands for Britain to embark on a new age of
building nuclear plants. If the potential offered by wind energy is not realised,
the clamour for a return to nuclear power may well prove difficult to resist.
The vast and well- connected nuclear lobby points to Erance to support their
unswerving vision for a nuclear island state. They claim nuclear power has
allowed France to become Europe's powerhouse, able to produce more electricity
than it needs and selling off the rest. Sir Alec Broers, president of the Royal
Academy of Engineering, is among the latest to rubbish the Government's plans to
generate 20 per cent from renewables by 2020 as unrealistic. Nuclear is the only
option, he warns. Sir David King, the government's chief scientific advisor, and
who believes climate change is the planet's biggest threat, agrees nuclear
provides a viable alternative.
The debate is bitter and the stakes are high. And not just for the
pro-nuclear camp but environmentalists too, some of whom are accused of being
more antinuclear than contemplating energy that ciocs not exacerbate climate
change. Yet the industry's flaws remain as profound as ever. Concerns over the
safety of Britain's massive nuclear waste stockpile and the catastrophic failure
to achieve financial viability remain persuasive arguments against. British
Energy, which runs our imminently moribund nuclear plants, is virtually
bankrupt, kept barely alive by colossal government loans. And even if a decision
is taken in favour of nuclear power, the planning process for nuclear power is
so torturous that it can take more than 12 years to build replacements.
Stephen Timms, the minister in charge, recently admitted that the question of
new build won't be addressed for years. Wind farms will it seems get their
chance, but the political backing has to be cranked up and quickly according to
the sector. Whatever the outcome, tough choices lie ahead - and not just in
which candle- making companies to buy shares. Many like Davies have accepted
that the Tube may never run on time. But when the lights start going out on the
journey home, forg\iveness may prove a great deal more elusive.
Tony Blair already knows his country is inching towards a day when the
factories will fall silent and candles will dominate supermarket sales.
If you're stuck on the tube, or trapped in a lift when the lights go out,
rest assured that in the UK, it's far more likely to be a power failure than a
terrorist attack
1 Where our power comes from
There are 202 power stations across the UK with more than 1MW capacity each,
and many more smaller local sources producing less than 1MW each.
2 How it reaches us
Electricity is carried from these power stations by one of four transmission
systems, two for Scotland, one for Northern Ireland and the largest one for
England and Wales, known as the National Grid. These systems distribute
electricity to the Regional Electricity Companies along a network of overhead
lines, underground cables and sub-stations.
3 What are the problems with this system?
The further electricity has to travel, the more is wasted in transportation.
At the moment, however, most of the power stations are in the North, although
the highest demand comes from the South. For this reason alone, a proliferation
of local power sources is preferable to relying on just a few large power
stations dotted across the country. Furthermore, if we were less reliant upon a
few big, polluting stations, we would be less vulnerable to any one of them
suddenly going down, either through technical failure or terrorist attack.
4 How is demand met?
Every day, the National Grid Company predicts how much electricity will be
needed, telling enough power stations to generate electricity to meet that
demand and picking the cheapest first. Demand from industry is fairly uniform
with factories often running all night as cheaper electricity during off peak
hours encourages 24 hour working. Most of the variation in demand is due to
changes in domestic and business use, affected by many factors aside from time
of year and temperature.
Variations in daily demand
1am to 3am Demand is higher than for the rest of the night as people take
advantage of cheap rates to use their washing machines, storage heaters, etc on
time clocks.
6am-10am Demand increases as we wake up, and shops and businesses open.
1pm Slight rise around lunchtime
5.30pm The day's peak is reached. Many shops and businesses are still open,
yet people are beginning to go home and turn on their heating and electrical
appliances. In winter, lights start coming on all over the country.
Occasional Popular TV programmes cause surges in demand, known as TVpick
ups'. These are not caused by more sets being on, but by all the kettles and
lights switched on at the end of the programme. These 'pick-ups' can demand as
much power as one large power station can provide.
What happens if demand is not met?
If demand were not met, a number of steps would have to be taken, ranging
from dropping the voltage slightly (causing lights to dim and electrical
equipment to work less effectively) to, in the worst case, blackouts.
Alternatively, if too much electricity were generated, then fuel would be wasted
by power stations whose output was not required.
If the drive to improve energy efficiency remains unheeded, our lust for
power will sharply increase at the precise point Britain's ability to meet such
demands ebbs away
Mark Townsend is an award-winning environmental journalist
Copyright Ecosystems Limited Jun 2004