There was a headline in one of the newspapers this week warning of power cuts in the coming winter.
It reminded my wife and I to check the state of our camping gas, because we normally cook with electricity. Most years there are minor power cuts out in the country and some years we have been without power for several days at a time, so you learn to
be resilient. We are now getting a wood fuel stove that runs radiators, so heating in a power cut is not a problem, but it does mean more wood cutting in readiness.
The story behind the headline was about our national power supplies.
More than two years ago the government said that the UK generating capacity would be reduced by 40 per cent by 2014, as old power stations came to the end of their useful working lives. Because of the privatisation of the energy companies, the government is not in a position to build new power stations, but simply encourage the industry to do so. So far little has happened.
Last week a report by a leading think tank reminded the Government of this situation and stated that the existing system is already under strain and that power cuts will be inevitable. Even if new power stations become agreed and financed it takes some years before they come on stream.
Last spring, Sizewell B nuclear power plant had to shut down for maintenance and the national grid struggled to match electricity supply to demand. Within hours five more power stations had to be closed down as the grid could no longer cope and large swathes of south London, the Midlands and Merseyside found themselves without power for several hours.
You might think that having a wind farm in the locality would save us from this inconvenience but that is not the case. The wind farm supplies the grid, not the local community. We have to find resilience in another way; independence from the grid is the obvious answer, but is that a realistic possibility? The answer to that question is yes. The town of Woking in Surrey generates its own electricity and even exports some to neighbouring boroughs.
The thinking behind such a solution starts with the question of resilience, which is why resilience is an important factor in the Transition Town movement. A Greener Hawick is allied to this movement.
