The energy crisis in Great Britain, and across Europe, continues to deepen. The concept now in the news is “load shedding.” The Telegraph reports:
[L]oad-shedding looks likely to become the buzzword of this winter amid warnings that blackouts of the developing world are making their way to Britain.
As chaos in energy markets picks up pace and supplies falter, the UK faces a similar crisis of having to choose how to distribute demand for electrical power across multiple power sources.
The spectre of organised blackouts risks Britain being dragged into a crisis to match the power cuts of the 1970s.
Now, industry is pushing Government officials to finalise plans for reducing demand on the electricity grid to provide certainty ahead of winter. It would be the first managed decline of the country’s energy system for decades.
Consider that phrase: “managed decline of the country’s energy system.”
Yet the reality of life under energy rationing may be difficult for families in an advanced economy to swallow.
Mark Nelson, managing director of consultancy Radiant Energy Group, says: “…Many developing countries have load-shedding, billions of people know what this means, it’s just rich countries have not had to deal with it.”
Nelson adds that while load-shedding is commonly described as blackouts, plans currently being put in place in Britain are very different.
“Blackouts we associate with sudden, accidental bad performance of the grid, but load-shedding is a planned, longer-term failure,” he says.
“Load-shedding means the grid is fine but there just isn’t enough power for everyone.
“It’s a slower, managed decline of the country.”
This is the path that the U.S. is now going down, in one of the most catastrophically stupid policy decisions in history. From the liberal Bloomberg: “The US Industrial Complex Is Starting to Buckle From High Power Costs.”
Europe’s fertilizer plants, steel mills, and chemical manufacturers were the first to succumb. Massive paper mills, soybean processors, and electronics factories in Asia went dark.
Now soaring natural gas and electricity prices are starting to hit the US industrial complex.
On June 22, 600 workers at the second-largest aluminum mill in America, accounting for 20% of US supply, learned they were losing their jobs because the plant can’t afford an electricity tab that’s tripled in a matter of months.
Much more at the link. The scale of the human tragedy we will witness if we do not reverse our current “green” course is incalculable.
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