And this is only the beginning.
The costs now hitting us through network upgrades are not costs we can simply avoid anymore. They are the bill for infrastructure that was allowed to absorb more and more stress without being properly renewed.
When I was a child, electricity grids in most European countries were public utilities. Their costs were regulated, and networks were generally built conservatively.
There was no requirement to extract a profit target from every kilometre of cable, every transformer or every substation.
The people responsible for keeping the lights on built systems with enough capacity to cope with conditions that were considerably worse than normal.
That is one reason blackouts were so rare when I was growing up.
The networks were overbuilt.
Not necessarily stupidly overbuilt. But overbuilt nonetheless.
Sometimes, admittedly, they were built with rather a lot of spare capacity.
That spare capacity has a name.
Fat.
And fat is not necessarily waste.
This is one of those things that becomes obvious only when you have spent enough time looking at real-world systems.
Theoretical systems can be optimised almost indefinitely. Every component can be sized according to expected demand. Every margin can be squeezed. Every reserve can be treated as an unnecessary cost.
Real systems do not work like that.
Real systems need slack.
They need overhead.
They need redundancy.
They need spare capacity for the things nobody predicted.
Accidents happen. Equipment fails. Demand spikes. Weather behaves differently from the model. Maintenance takes longer than expected. Somebody makes a mistake.
The system needs somewhere to absorb those events.
That is what the fat was for.
Then wind and solar began adding another layer of uncertainty to the electricity system.
Previously, the main uncertainty was demand.
You knew roughly what your generating fleet could produce and you had to deal with the fact that consumers did not always consume exactly what you expected.
Now uncertainty exists on both sides.
Demand moves.
Generation moves.
And renewable generation can disappear or surge according to weather conditions rather than according to what the grid actually needs.
The obvious response should have been to strengthen the network.
More transmission.
More distribution capacity.
More balancing capability.
More reserve.
More redundancy.
Instead, much of that investment did not happen at the scale required.
The existing network had something useful built into it already: spare capacity.
So we used it.
And we used it for free.
The additional stress could be absorbed because the old system had been built with margins. That allowed the new generation to connect without immediately paying the full cost of the infrastructure required to support it.
From an accounting perspective, that looked wonderfully efficient.
From an engineering perspective, it was simply consuming the reserve.
The fat was being eaten.
And once you eat the fat, it is gone.
Eventually the system reaches the point where there is no longer enough slack to absorb the next failure, the next extreme weather event, the next unexpected demand peak or the next piece of equipment that decides to die at the wrong moment.
Then things start failing.
And suddenly we discover that the network needs investment after all.
Of course it does.
The infrastructure was never designed to operate indefinitely without adequate reserves.
Now we are being asked to pay for the upgrades.
But there remains a rather uncomfortable question:
Who should actually be paying?
Because the people who benefited from consuming the system’s existing capacity are not necessarily the people volunteering to replace it.
The costs are being socialised.
The benefits were privatised, politicised or simply assumed to be free.
And the true culprits still have little appetite for presenting the bill honestly.
But the grid does not care about political narratives.
It does not care who promised what.
It does not care whether the spreadsheet says the system is efficient.
Physics eventually sends the invoice.
And this one is only the beginning.