How We Happened to Sell Off Our Electricity

[Eternal Sunshine]

Interesting article by James Meek on the privatisation of the UK electricity industry.

http://www.lrb.co.uk/v34/n17/james-meek ... lectricity

‘There’s only one country that’s stupid enough to sell off its electricity industry, and that’s Britain.’

Defending her record in Parliament on the day she resigned in 1990, Thatcher spoke in patriotic tones of how, with millions of people buying shares in former state industries, privatisation was giving ‘power back to the people’, and how competition at home and open markets in Europe would free British enterprise to lead the world. Now, in 2012, it’s clear that the result of electricity privatisation was to take power away from the people. Small British shareholders have no influence over the overwhelmingly non-British owners of the firms that generate and distribute power in Britain.

It's a lengthy article, but a good read.

[Tarrel]

The only way for people to take control of their power back is by micro-generation, either on an individual household, or small local community basis.

For example, there's this...

http://www.isleofeigg.net/eigg_electric.html

[raspberry-blower]

I recall reading an article in ENDS a couple of years ago about how market privatisation killed the nuclear programme back in the early 90s. This was incredibly ironic. Thatcher's energy plan, when she was elected in 1979, contained plans to build 10 Westinghouse PWRs. She also championed market privatisation. A total of 1 PWR was built - Sizewell B It was not the Chernobyl meltdown that killed off new nuclear, but it was that other policy she championed, market privatisation:

Sizewell B is the UK's only commercial pressurised water reactor (PWR) power station, with a single reactor. It was built and commissioned between 1987 and 1995, first synchronised with the national grid on 14 Feb 1995

It was built and commissioned AFTER Chernobyl!

Another repeating theme is that of complexity. The electricity markets that were developed were increasingly complex that allowed fraudulent companies such as ENRON to set up shop. We all know how that ended...

The other area of complexity is that of the nukes themselves. As said in the article:

And experimental is what the new reactors are. They are untried. No EPR or AP1000 is or ever has been operational. Two EPRs are being built in China, one in Finland and one at Flamanville in Normandy. None is close to switch-on. The Finnish and French EPRs will cost at least twice as much as they were supposed to. The Chinese reactors are said, by the firms involved, to be on schedule, but Flamanville is running four years late. Recently the local electricity company that ordered the Finnish reactor cancelled the latest opening date – 2014, already five years behind schedule – without giving a new one.

The nukes themselves are of experimental design. What could possibly go wrong?

Tarrel has it spot on. Interesting to note that the Brighton Energy Coop (which I have invested in ) has recently stated that it is over performing by 10%

[emordnilap]

Before this year is out, politicians, regulators and corporations will make a set of decisions determining the electric life of Britain for the next half century. They will decide how the country keeps the lights burning and the wheels of industry turning for the next fifty years without severely affecting the climate or impoverishing us.

That's really great news, at long last. We can shut down PS now.