I missed last weeks power cut in Denmark ("some residents said their first thoughts were of a possible terrorist connection"), but found it linked from the BBC News article about last night's in Italy.
In the discussion following the article about Denmark, there is some pondering about whether these, and the earlier cuts in North America and London, could be connected, with implication of terrorist involvement. Great how people jump to the fantastic explanation, or perhaps the explanation which places the blame elsewhere, rather than suspecting that, for reasons which surely boil down in a democracy to individual culpability, the structure or capacity is at fault.
It occurs that the centralisation of power generation (rather than collecting and generating power as locally as possible) not only increases vulnerability to this sort of thing, and to the domino effect failure that saw tracts of North America plunged into darkness, it also removes the individual responsibility for the implications of our demand for power.
This ties up my long standing gripe about the idea that electric cars are good for the environment, and applies, I think, to the use of hydrogen as a "power source" that some are so optimistic about. Batteries and hydrogen are time/space shifting tools; a combined forward shift for energy and backward shift for pollution. They hide the implications of the energy used, they don't change it. So instead of us having to breath fumes in the streets, they go up a chimney to cause plausibly deniable pollution elsewhere.
More generally, the separation of demand and supply -- mediated by money -- is what enables us to ignore the impacts of the choices we make, and the power of the corporation over the media and over national governments is such that, in general, we don't see the impacts at all, and don't even realise we have a decision to make.
Systems without negative feedback tend to spiral out of control.
Why not hold family conversations in a public space?
When I was a kid, every town had its power company and power station (and its gas company and water company. I guess they come in reverse cronological order. London's stations had to be on the banks of the Thames so coal could be brought by sea from Newcastle. The polution locally was dire. It suited the politicians well to shift the power generation to the coal fields and shift electricity instead of coal.
The theory of the CEGB was that it allowed power to be produced by the cheapest available means for what was needed. Drax burnt coal in a system that was only efficient flat out. So it delivered base load. Various hydro power stations stood buy to turn on during commercial breaks when a million kettles were turned on at once. At night, the power from Drax could be used to reverse the hydro power flow at Dinorwic, Loch Ness and Cruachan and pump water back up the hill for the next surge.
Now we burn gas (for how long, I wonder) we could put the power stations back in town because there is negligible energy loss in transport and it is possible to turn the gas turbines on or off at will.
The real challenge to your comment about people being removed from responsibility is comparison with the railways. The vast majority of railwaymen were career committed. They cared about what they did. Now that has been broken up and individual jobs on the railway are just jobs so far as the workers are concerned. The chances of Jarvis managing to change the ethos of their workforce is negligible. Changing to another supplier will have little or no effect, because the people at the front will remain the same. They will just have to move firms.
The BIG organisation/ small organisation debate is far from simple.
Posted by: Bill Harvey | September 28, 2003 at 12:42 PM