This article is taken from the November 2024 issue of The Critic. To get the full magazine why not subscribe? Right now we’re offering five issues for just £10.

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One day an engineer will turn a key and nothing will happen. The weather has been freezing cold. For a few days, the sky has been bright, beautiful and clear, and the nights bitterly cold. A high pressure system, an anticyclone, has settled over Europe — what the Germans call a dunkelflaute, or literally, “dark doldrums”. Apart from a desultory turbine or two turning in the North Sea, the wind isn’t blowing anywhere in Europe.

Having dispensed with much of its reliable, dispatchable energy generation, the power grid bosses believe that Britain should scrape by. We routinely make up our shortfall by buying power from Europe, usually France or Norway, over cables called interconnectors. But now they have no surplus to sell us.

What follows is a total, nationwide electricity blackout. It’s never happened before in the UK: which means getting it going again — what’s known as a “black start” — has never been tried before, either.

Now large parts of the country are without electricity. Payment systems and traffic lights go dead. Heat pumps and the costly thermal bar heaters that accompany them don’t work, leaving homes freezing. Even if they’re taking cash, shops can’t stay open without lighting or heating. Trucks can only go as far as the diesel in their tanks can take them, and filling stations can’t refuel without mains power.

Food, medicines and emergency fuel all stop moving. Communications networks are down too, as the mobile phone sites have at best a few hours of battery backup. Hospitals can maintain only a skeleton service on their limited supply of emergency diesel. Then that runs out too, and now things begin to get really serious. The UK has almost 17,000 water pumping stations, but most do not have backup power. The first cholera case is reported within seven to nine days. The first such outbreak kills thousands over the next few weeks.

In the formulation misattributed to Vladimir Lenin, society is only “three warm meals from anarchy”. But today’s fragile and deeply interconnected society is closer to an energy apocalypse than ever. The blackout the UK is about to experience in this scenario is not the result of malice — a cyberattack on our grid. Instead it’s the culmination of a series of decisions on infrastructure and energy taken over recent decades, and the complex world those decisions have created.

“We really don’t know how our systems are working,” says Herbert Saurugg, of the Society for Crisis Preparedness (GfKV), a German-speaking think tank, and co-author of the book Blackbox Brownout. “These are not simple machines any more. There are engineers who know this, but they are not heard.”

So how did we get here?

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In the early years of the 21st century, Western Europe made a historic decision to turn away from energy abundance and low prices. Not only do we generate much less energy, but what power we have is both less reliable — meaning it isn’t there when we need it — and it flows through a system that is now both more volatile and more fragile.

The European Union’s energy strategy of 2007 was the work of a secondary school headteacher from a small market town in Latvia, a former Communist Party member called Andris Piebalgs. Piebalgs had become the EU’s Energy Commissioner, and in the name of climate change, he envisaged that Europe would use 13 per cent less energy by 2020. It could make up any shortfalls with Russian gas, a policy which he defended stoutly. The Economist anointed him Eurocrat of the Year. Then Russia invaded Ukraine, and her gas no longer flows to Europe.

The commissioners and also Britain’s own bureaucrats made the mistake of assuming that falling demand would continue and be painless. They had also been seduced by promises of “smart grids” to balance the books. NESO, as the National Grid is now called, confirms that it will even pay people not to use electricity all the year round. But however you slice a pie that’s too small to begin with, you risk someone going hungry. As the energy analyst David Turver explains, we now have a “greater reliance on the kindness of strangers”.

Britain can’t blame the EU for its mistakes, as it has made so many unforced errors of its own. It shut down its reliable coal power stations. In 2012, the energy and climate change secretary, Ed Davey, wanted 20 more new gas-powered stations by 2020, but not one has been built. The UK focused excessively on far more wind power instead.

Yet during a long, windless spell, it doesn’t matter how many more wind turbines we build, as without wind none of them will be generating power. Having ruled out the 20 gas stations we needed a decade ago, that means storing wind-generated power to cover the windless periods. Doing so is incredibly expensive. The Royal Society ducked the calculations when it examined the issue in its 2023 report on large-scale electricity storage, but independent analysis suggests it’s anything between one and 15 times the size of Britain’s GDP. The consumer pays for this, of course.

Over-reliance on wind increases our risk because we’ve removed stability from our power system to make way for it. The grid thrums to a steady heartbeat, 50 hertz, and even the slightest deviation from this will cause a crash, damaging the vital equipment and taking it offline. Traditional gas and coal-powered turbines, with their spinning mass of metal, provided inertia: a shock absorber that kicks in to compensate for a sudden loss. We’ve removed most of that instantaneous reserve. The dash for wind has created an instability that is now the norm.

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The government’s decision to prioritise wind power has also had the consequence of strangling the alternatives. Britain’s abundant reserves of shale gas are to be left in the ground, and its nuclear programme has been neglected. That leaves Britain squeezed, reliant on piping in electricity from abroad over interconnectors.

So what happens when the kindness of strangers falters?

When one of Norway’s connectors failed last month, the UK escaped blackouts by a whisker

“Interconnectors are presented as a virtue, but in fact they are symptomatic of weakness,” thinks Turver. Last month NESO said that the UK should just about scrape by this winter — its first without coal power station generation since William Ewart Gladstone was prime minister — thanks to getting around 5 per cent of its energy needs over these interconnectors. But on the day of that announcement, one of Norway’s connectors suddenly failed, taking 1.4GW offline in an instant. The UK escaped blackouts by a whisker.

The daunting challenge of black starts are what worry Saurugg, who gave up his career as an officer working in the security section of the Austrian Army to focus on the risk of catastrophic energy failure.

“People can imagine a power cut, but cannot think to the end,” he says. “They have hardly any clue what then happens to the supply chains when there is no electricity.” Today, every system is tied to another: when the power fails, we can’t manually crank a handle any more to get things working. For example, even a well-stocked petrol station can’t pump fuel, “because the station’s computer has to log in to a central server somewhere, and it can’t do that with no grid connection”.

Around two-thirds of the population has nothing left in the larder after a week, says Saurugg. “Society is on the brink of collapse within a few days. Help from outside the affected area can hardly be expected, as everyone is affected themselves, and there will hardly be any free resources available.”

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Europe has come close to a full blackout twice. What are called “frequency incidents” have increased by more than 50 per cent in a year. With an interconnected market, failures cascade across borders. For example, a fire on a transmission line in Montenegro over the summer not only knocked out the entire country, but much of Croatia and Albania too.

Britain’s energy planners haven’t been idle. They’ve been given a hard statutory target for achieving a successful black start target — although they don’t use the phrase any more, preferring “Electricity System Restoration”. By the end of next year they should be able to restore 60 per cent of the grid within 24 hours, and get the whole lot working again in five days. It has been a colossal endeavour.

However, we don’t know if it will work until a catastrophe strikes. An audit of NESO’s modelling by Professors Keith Bell and Wolfram Wellssow last year warned that it was far from perfect: “The modelling details are probably not close enough to real world behaviour when it comes to rare events and combinations of circumstances that would lead to very long restoration times,” they warned. Meeting the statutory target “is likely to result in need [sic] for very large additional investments … with decisions made on possibly inaccurate calculation results”. I asked to see the models, but they are not public.

The operational plan is secret, also “for security reasons”. NESO would only take questions in writing. But rest assured that it’s also developed an eco-friendly black start plan: “a world-first initiative that’s making it possible for renewables to deliver a new kind of black start capability”.

What worries Saurugg the most is the prospect of social upheaval. He frets that the accountants have worked to expunge firms of what they consider “dead capital”, or what we think of as vital backup. Power plants and backup units “have been optimised primarily to achieve maximum yields” and cannot “serve the system per se”, he observes. “What leads to a more efficient use of resources in everyday life can quickly lead to large-scale power cuts in the event of a disruption.”

If the accountants have been cutting corners, this is a terrible way to find out