Countdown to an energy apocalypse

Andrew Orlowski envisages what will happen when the wind doesn’t blow

ONE DAY AN ENGINEER WILL TURN A KEY and nothing will happen. The weather has been freezing cold. For a few days, the sky has been bright, beautiful and clear, and the nights bitterly cold. A high pressure system, an anticyclone, has settled over Europe — what the Germans call a dunkelflaute, or literally, “dark doldrums”. Apart from a desultory turbine or two turning in the North Sea, the wind isn’t blowing anywhere in Europe. Having dispensed with much of its reliable, dispatchable energy generation, the power grid bosses believe that Britain should scrape by. We routinely make up our shortfall by buying power from Europe, usually France or Norway, over cables called interconnectors. But now they have no surplus to sell us. What follows is a total, nationwide electricity blackout.…

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The Critic (Digital) - 1 Issue, November 2024

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