Arriving in Copenhagen, on my way between visiting Kari {we had a great time, thanks for asking} and arriving back in the UK, I was surprised by the news that the airport had been closed due to a power failure. Sitting in the darkened departure lounge, surrounded by others whose flights had also been cancelled, I gathered that half of Denmark and Sweden had been affected. My mind of course turned to the recent outages in London and further back to the rolling blackouts in California which we all laughed so much at.
And then yesterday I started receiving messages from friends, hinting at a similar situation in Italy. Sure enough, the Italian mainland spent Sunday without power. Another example of why we’re called the ‘developed’ world?
It’s no surprise that people are beginning to wonder. The BBC’s Q and A on the subject makes interesting reading, including the comments:
Deregulation and privatisation have added to the problems faced by the electricity industry worldwide
They go on to comment on the lack of incentives for private corporations to invest in infrastructure for power grids, yet another example of why the ongoing privatisation fad is lacking, and interesting given the recent (unsurprising) announcement that Iraq will become the latest nation to privatise almost everything the state once owned.
It’s unlikely that we’ll see the Labour Party Conference this week used as a platform for beginning to address these issues, but surely the time has come to reconsider how the public-private ‘partnership’ which we’re told to worship is balanced? Either that, or I guess we could stop using electricity…