I grew up in the Seventies and Eighties.
We did not have many of the things young people today take for granted. There was no internet. No websites. No streaming. No smartphones. No mobile phones worth calling mobile phones. The television I remember from my early childhood was black and white, genuinely small and, by today’s standards, almost comically primitive.
Television did not run twenty-four hours a day.
For much of the day, there simply was no programme.
We had no personal computers in anything resembling the modern sense. Air travel was an exception rather than an everyday convenience, and for most people it bordered on unaffordability. Cars were considerably less luxurious. Yes, we actually had to wind the windows down by hand.
Air conditioning was essentially nonexistent.
Microwave ovens were nonexistent.
Much of what people now expect machines to do was simply done by hand. Having a typewriter was something. Phones were fixed to the wall and operated with a rotary dial. Entertainment was far more limited than anything a child today would recognise.
We had considerably less.
And yet there is one thing I never remember doubting.
The electricity would be there.
Blackouts were extraordinarily rare. You switched on the light and the light came on. You plugged something in and it worked. The system around you was basic by today’s standards, but it was dependable.
Things worked.
That distinction matters more than we perhaps realised at the time.
We had less technology, less entertainment, less convenience and considerably less choice. But the fundamental infrastructure underneath it all was reliable. Electricity was not an ideological statement. It was infrastructure.
Then came the madness.
The climate narrative existed already when I was growing up, of course. But it lived at the fringes. It was something a relatively small number of people talked about with almost religious intensity while most people simply got on with their lives.
Nobody was seriously suggesting that we should deliberately make the fundamental infrastructure of modern civilisation less reliable in order to demonstrate our environmental virtue.
That came later.
And now we are discovering something that should never have required discovering.
Electricity generation that cannot reliably produce electricity when people need it has consequences.
The grid does not care about political narratives.
It does not care about glossy brochures, climate targets, activist campaigns or declarations of historic transformation.
It cares about supply and demand.
It needs enough generation, at the right time, with sufficient dispatchable capacity and adequate reserves to absorb the inevitable fluctuations of real life.
If you build an electricity system around generation that is inherently intermittent, while simultaneously shutting down reliable generation because it does not conform to the prevailing ideology, eventually the system becomes less reliable.
This should not be controversial.
It is engineering.
And yet blackouts are no longer quite the extraordinary event they once were. In some places they are becoming more frequent and lasting longer. The infrastructure we once regarded as invisible and dependable is becoming something people are increasingly expected to worry about.
This is what makes the whole exercise so absurd.
We once lived with considerably less.
But what we had worked.
Now we have extraordinary technology, almost unlimited entertainment, computers in our pockets and machines capable of doing things that would have seemed like science fiction when I was a child.
And yet we are increasingly being asked to accept the possibility that the most basic thing of all—the electricity supply—might not be reliable.
Apparently this is progress.
Who could have known that unreliable generation might make the grid unreliable?
Apparently, quite a few people did.
They just weren’t invited to write the narrative.