How the wind blew

From the archive

I am a little busy at the moment. So I though I’d just post this old video.

I was talking to a friend this morning, who tells me that some folks, broadly in the conservative sphere, are just now catching on to the fact that the ‘Smart Grid’ (ho ho ho) is going to be able to switch off your appliances.

I tried explaining this to people at the 2012 Cheltenham Science Festival, which accidentally invited me to debate. They didn’t ask me back.

Anyway, it turns out that the video of the debate is on Youtube. So here it is.

I found it astonishing that the grid’s managers were talking openly about rationing power, but that this was of only limited interest to the media, and had practically no political consequences.

Chief Executive of National Grid, Steve Holliday, had told an audience at the Royal Academy of Engineering the year before that power wasn’t going to be available when it was needed. The next year, the same Academy held a debate about wind power, where I reminded the Cheltenham audience of the Grid boss’s words to engineers, to incredulity from the engineer on my right and the hardcore green to my left.

Here’s that speech from Holliday, which is given the false title “power to the people” — false, because as he said himself: “we all need to be clear about what we can and can’t afford”.

I must confess, I haven’t watched it fully. It’s very boring.

Given all the recent talk of “electrification” (as discussed in the previous post here), it’s amazing to think that there has been such little talk of reliable generation. Yet this deficit has been understood for such a long time.