No electrics in Bread Street for 20 hours

At 6pm this evening there was much relief here in Bread Street when the electrics came back on after 20 hours without the stuff - some 38 houses had lost it for that time - although many others across the County were also without electricity for periods. A lot of the stuff in our freezer has sadly gone very soft....

Photo: Had to boil in my fancy camping stove to make coffee this morning!

The reason for the power cut was a line down near the farm - indeed fire engines and police last night closed the road completely as live cables straddled the road.

It seems increasingly likely that power cuts will feature more often in the coming years - there have been repeated warnings yet virtually no actions from Government (see for example BBC reports in 2005 and 2008). We have failed to develop our energy supplies to replace the nuclear dinosaurs and there are fears of huge electricity and gas price rises as Britain is held to ransom by such foreign energy producers as Russia - last year the Government's Low Carbon Transition Plan said we could expect a gap of 3,000 megawatt hours a year could mean an hour-long power cut for 16million people simultaneously on a winter evening. This year Ofgem warned about the lack of energy security - see here. Many others have done the same - see for example my blog re the US military warning back in April.

However the Government is still failing to recognise Peak Oil. Interestingly just this last week or so, the Lloyd's insurance market and the highly regarded Royal Institute of International Affairs, known as Chatham House, says Britain needs to be ready for "peak oil" and disrupted energy supplies at a time of soaring fuel demand in China and India, constraints on production caused by the BP oil spill and political moves to cut CO2 to halt global warming. The report says the world is heading for a global oil supply crunch and high prices owing to insufficient investment in oil production plus a rebound in global demand following recession. See Guardian here.

We need to act.