Electricity

At the end of last month, a fire at an electrical substation in Maida Vale caused chaos in west London. Homes lost power. Transport services ground to a halt. It came in the same week as outages across Spain and Portugal and just a few weeks after a fire at another substation caused Heathrow airport to shut down. We also know that the British government is drawing up contingency plans for Russian attacks on energy infrastructure. All of this raises an important question: how resilient would the British state be in the face of a determined effort to cripple its power grid? The blunt answer is: not very. David Betz,

A lead article in the sober-sided New York Times is seldom funny. Yet ‘A New Surge in Power Use is Threatening US Climate Goals’ earlier this month cracked me up. Check out this sternly dramatic first paragraph: ‘Something unusual is happening in America. Demand for electricity, which has stayed largely flat for two decades, has begun to surge.’ Personally, I’d have headlined that article ‘Well, duh’ – perhaps with the subhead ‘Aw, shucks’. Lo and behold, when you push people to electrify everything in their lives – cars, cookers, heating systems – while bribing them to go all-electric with lavish government subsidies, it turns out they use more electricity. Who