The Government has pulled hard on the lever marked ‘create panic’ and instructed the British people to stockpile enough essentials such as food, medicines and water to see a family over a few days and advised Britons to keep a wind up analogue radio handy. I’m sure that those who remember the early days of Covid will understand that this sort of panic encouragement creates just as many problems as it solves as many could recall from the widespread hoarding of toilet paper that happened back then.

The ostensible reason for the encouragement of panic and a prepper attitude among the British public is the potential activity of adversary nations such as the Russians. A cyber attack, for example, by a hostile nation on the nation’s infrastructure, especially its energy infrastructure could create great disruption.

However in my view whilst adversary nations are an issue that needs to be considered, it’s less likely to be the Russians who are going to create the sort of problems that require a 1940’s attitude to prepping but the actions of successive British governments themselves. There’s little or no need for the Russians to inject hostile code into the systems that manage Britain’s energy supply system as most of the damage to Britain’s energy sector and energy availability has already been done by British governments from at least the time of Lord David Cameron onwards.

An obsession among Britain’s political elite with so-called green energy has created in Britain the situation where Britain’s energy supply system is extremely vulnerable. The political classes removed the means of generating electricity that have served the nation well such as coal fired thermal power stations for ‘environmental’ reasons and shifted the load onto gas fired thermal power stations and onto masses of often unreliable renewables. We do not have sufficient nuclear generated electricity to provide grid backbone power in part because of planning issues but also because when the opportunity came up during the Cameron Government to invest in nuclear the Deputy Prime Minister Liberal Democrat leader Nick Clegg. He thought we didn’t need nuclear power stations as they took ‘too long’, ten years, to build and to come on stream.

Short sighted political decision making and an obsession with a tiny trace gas, Carbon Dioxide, in the atmosphere has led Britain’s political classes to totally eviscerate Britain’s energy production and distribution systems. We are very much at risk of energy shortages, especially over the coming winter and indeed a great deal of hardship and danger appears to be on the horizon. However it’s not the Russians who have brought this situation about but those who have misgoverned Britain for so long.

For the purposes of is article I’ve been reading around the subject of energy policy and what has been done specifically to the British electricity grid that we all rely on and it scares the crap out of me. It scares me because whilst I knew the situation with regarding a potential collapse of the electricity grid was possible I now understand how close we are to such as disaster.

What angers me is it didn’t have to be this way. If Britain’s politicians had not thrown their brains out over the CO2 issue and if Britain’s Civil Service had not done the same then Britain would not be in this position. There would be less need to worry about regional or national blackouts or having to rely in grid interconnects with other countries, if different more sensible decisions had been made. If the British political and administrative classes had not shackled Britain’s electric grid to unreliable renewables and taken away base load coal burning generators, then we would not be staring down the barrel of the blackout gun with all that this entails.

If we get a blackout either regional or national then getting power back on is not a simple matter of flicking a switch. Britain’s grid is complex and parts of it have been in place for well over a century. It’s also necessary to ensure that the frequency of the restarted electricity generating sources are going to have to match each other and the rest of the grid in frequency which in Britain is fifty cycles of alternating current (AC) per second or 50Hz. I’m going to have to quote others extensively on this issue of restarting an electricity grid, much more than I normally would, because the sources are technical in nature, but I will put sources in the links below and I would strongly advise readers to support those sources by visiting them.

Dr Richard North over at Turbulent Times sums up well the difficulty of restoring power after a blackout and the shakiness of Britain’s current generation systems.

Dr North said:

“The point, of course, is that our worst-case scenario would encompass a total collapse of the National Grid, either as a result of a targeted cyber attack or a cascade failure brought about by an over-reliance on renewables and a lack of inertia, perhaps compounded by software failures – or a combination of all three.

As it stands, in the event of a collapse, the network is legally required to restore full functionality within five days.

Under the legally binding Electricity System Restoration Standard (ESRS) overseen by Ofgem and the National Energy System Operator (NESO), the grid must be capable of restoring 60 percent of regional electricity demand within 24 hours and 100 percent of demand within those five days.

For a multiplicity of reasons, though, that target might turn out to be a cruel fiction. Those with even the slightest knowledge of the electricity supply system know that the grid cannot simply be switched back on all at once.

Doing so would cause immediate voltage and frequency crashes. Instead, the restoration process – known technically as a “Black Start” – is highly structured and has to be executed in distinct phases.”

Dr North then went on to talk about how Spain recovered from a large scale blackout last year (2025) and said that the Spanish engineers managed to restore the bulk of the power in less than a day but it’s unlikely that Britain with its much more complex and older grid will be able to do the same. What is called a Blackstart, the starting of a grid from nothing, is a difficult task in itself but even harder in a country like Britain that has a complex electricity distribution system than some other nations and little in the way of stable mechanical electricity generators such as thermal coal, gas or nuclear. Such machinery with the sort of spinning flywheels that help to keep the AC frequency in the very narrow bands that it needs to be kept are absolutely essential in order to not crash the grid system.

Dr North added:

“Given that a black start has never been carried out in the UK, among some energy market experts, think tanks, and even some of the network’s own engineers, confidence that a total UK blackout could be fully resolved within the 5-day statutory timeframe is exceptionally low.

While the National Energy System Operator (NESO) publicly maintains that its restoration protocols are robust, an independent investigation by Eversheds Sutherland highlighted severe internal scepticism, high stress, and cultural friction regarding grid unmanageability.

The core problem is that a successful Black Start relies on the availability of system inertia – large, heavy, spinning metal turbines (found in coal, gas, and nuclear plants). Only this can dampen fluctuations in the system to keep the grid frequency steady around 50Hz, within the operational limits which will prevent the system tripping out.

Right now, though, we are in the grip of the moronic net-zero obsession and, as the UK recklessly phases out conventional fossil-fuel baseload generation in favour of weather-dependent wind and solar, the grid is stripped of this natural buffer.

Critics argue that trying to patch together a collapsed grid using highly volatile wind and distributed solar power is unproven (and probably impossible). If a cloud cover rolls in or the wind drops during an active restoration phase, the newly established local “power islands” – which form the basis of the recovery prior to re-synchronisation – would immediately crash from frequency instability.

NESO, as one might expect, is aware of this problem and, because the UK has fewer large thermal power stations available to serve as traditional, high-capacity “anchor” restarts, it has pioneered a world-first “Distributed Energy Restart” (or bottom-up) methodology.

This involves linking hundreds of small-scale regional assets – such as local solar arrays, battery storage units, and small wind farms – slowly to energise regional distribution networks, before stepping power up to the high-voltage transmission pylons.

To say that this is a revolutionary system is an understatement. Theoretical and totally unproven might be a better description. The system has been described as an incredibly complex, chaotic puzzle. Managing the precise phase-alignment and voltage control of thousands of small, automated inverters over digital networks during a blackout has never been tested in real-world conditions.

Whistleblowers and control room operators within the Electricity National Control Centre (ENCC) have voiced heavy concern that senior management has prioritised positive public relations over systemic operational safety.”

Jon MC, a commentator who appears incredibly knowledgable about energy matters over at Harry’s Place added his input to what Dr North has said and commenting on some of Dr North’s points. He added that restarting a grid that it heavily reliant on unreliable renewables is more tricky than usual and a Blackstart is difficult in itself especially when it comes to getting traditional generating systems, such as gas and hydro, back on line. JonMC said:

“Those spinning generators need an electrical supply to energise themselves, so not all conventional power plants are, in fact, capable of black start (i.e. starting themselves). They are only so if they have backup diesel generators (for example) that use permanent magnets as the field magnets and not electromagnets (which require … electricity to produce the magnetic field). So another questions is whether or not the current fleet of conventional stations have this capability. You can’t just point to a conventional plant and say “that’ll black start”.

The only attempt ever made to Blackstart a (local) grid with renewables was in Broken Hills Australia and it failed repeatedly over many days. Only when conventional grid supply was restored was the grid reenergised in a stable manner. So I think that the practical chance of managing a black start in this way, as NESO intends, is very remote indeed, I can see many problems with it, however it is attempted, partly due to the fact that NESO does not actually know where all the domestic solar arrays are. I would like to be proved wrong in one way, but I’d prefer it never be tested at all, given that sitting in the dark and cold 14 days after the power goes out saying “I told you so” doesn’t keep you warm or fed. “

So not only do we now in Britain not have enough large bits of spinning electricity generating machinery to provide base load and frequency management capabilities, there could be challenges in even bringing what we still have in terms of electromechanical electricity generation back on line. What a mess. We could be in a situation where electricity generating stations of the traditional kind have difficulty starting up because they need electricity either from batteries or diesel generators or both in order to start. As we can see from JonMC’s Australian example, it proved impossible to restart the area’s grid that was mostly built upon renewables and it needed traditionally generated electricity to do the job of bringing power back to the affected area.

Restarting a grid where the voltage frequency has gone haywire possibly even a black start either a regional one or worse a national one and doing so with so much of Britain’s electricity being supplied by unreliable renewables or by interconnects with other nations puts us in a very very invidious position. We could be looking at not just a few hours without electricity but days and days without power.

I don’t need to tell you just how catastrophic a significant number of days with either no power or intermittent power could be for Britain. Nothing will work. Food will spoil in freezers, there will be no road fuel due to the pumps and the wider distribution system for such fuel also relies on electricity to make it function. Shops will not be able to operate because they now need reliable electricity to operate their own systems and to manage electronic payments for goods. Hospitals will be able to operate only as long as the fuel available for their diesel generators can keep coming and it’s likely that fuel distribution for such end uses are themselves going to be in deep trouble, logistics these days does not run as it used to on paper documentation but on digital platforms that cannot work without reliable electricity.

People will die of cold, of hunger, by accident or violence or of potentially curable or manageable conditions because of the mismanagement by politicians of Britain’s energy generation and distribution systems. People will also die because of ‘policy’ because government agencies will go into crisis mode and protect themselves instead of the people they are supposed to help. This is what happened to a close friend of my family who had a heart attack at the beginning of the Covid period. To this day I believe that she could have been saved but she was not saved by the paramedics in time because they were taking up valuable time suiting up in, what later turned out to be unnecessary, biohazard gear before they attempted to treat her. By the time the paramedics had donned their hazmat gear my friend was already dead.

Those of us who are older and who remember the days of the various miners strikes of the 1970s that compromised electricity supply should not expect a repeat of what happened back then. Yes there were regional blackouts and kids had to do homework by the light of candles with shopping also being done under the light of candles or paraffin lamps. We survived back then in part because the lack of electricity merely created inconveniences and were not complete disasters because we had less essential stuff that relied on electricity. People who had coal fires didn’t freeze because central heating failed and society back then was still a high trust one and there were still had enough people in it who had lived through much worse, such as regular visits from the Luftwaffe, than a power cut.

We should not expect a repeat of the attitude of pulling together that existed the last time that Britain had extensive power outages. The country has changed and often not for the better. Britain is now a much lower trust country than it once was for all sorts of reasons including immigration and by people generally being more individualistic. There’s few left who remember the unavoidable privations for a cause that once existed, such as during World War II and who could guide people in how to act in a crisis and it’s doubtful that they would be listened to by today’s Britons anyway.

Extensive power outages would be a bloodbath in all sorts of ways. When communications especially mobile phones go down because of power cuts and battery exhaustion in cellphone relay stations, people will panic and panicking people can do odd, stupid or cruel things. Few people will have access to enough hard cash to shop at those few shops that still have back up mechanical cash registers or which can institute an emergency cash handling system to temporarily replace electronic payment systems.

I reckon that three days or so into a national or regional blackout we will start to see thefts from shops of essential items such as food, well all that might still be available after panic buying. Our hostile ghettos that politicians have allowed to grow and gain influence in the country might become even more hostile. Deeply held and currently suppressed hatred of the rest of us that is currently having a lid kept on it by the state via the police and the state’s strategic appeasement might break out and become murderous and unrestrained in its violence. I would not want to be a white British person in some of our hostile ghettos when the lights go out.

Outside of this particular problem is going to be the targeting, maybe by previously decent but now deranged and frightened people, of those who have had the foresight to get for themselves generators or battery back up systems. They are going to be besieged by angry people desperate to have access to power to charge phones which would by useless anyway if the grid is down and therefore the relay stations, warm baby’s bottles, put food in freezers or whatever is an electricity hungry mob’s need for energy. I would not want to be the person who has the only lights on in the street if the electricity goes out for any extended period of time. A living room light on in an otherwise darkened street or the sound of a small generator set is going to make that person a target for every desperate person or every wrong’un for miles around.

People will freeze to death because Britain has legislated and planned away access to many other forms of alternative heating or because much of Britain’s home heating relies on electricity to function. There are few if any new build properties that are fitted out for an open fire or some other form of solid fuel heating and even gas fired central heating along with heat pumps also rely on electricity to function. A few properties still have 1980’s style open flame or flame and ceramic gas fires but that number is not as great as it once was. In any event gas supply itself also requires electricity to work for things such as pumps and monitoring systems. Gas itself could become a problem if electrical power is not maintained to the gas distribution network.

In an electricity collapse we will not be able to rely on any of the State agencies to either protect us or assist us if we should need them. An already hollowed out policing system with far fewer officers than is needed to police Britain in the best of times is quickly going to be overwhelmed by calls for help. The mass crime and violence that an extended blackout could help to create might not be in the capability of police forces to manage. It’s also likely that power outages could affect the ability of organisations such as the police, fire brigades, ambulances and the Coastguard to communicate.

Whilst the Airwave Tetra encrypted radio system used by entities such as the police is effective it still relies on computer networks and radio networks similar to those used by cellular telephones to operate. As commentators on radio issues such as Ringway Manchester have pointed out in an excellent and informative video on emergency service the Airwave Tetra system is robust and has impressive levels of built in redundancy when faults or power outages occur.

I believe that whilst the Airwave Tetra network might be resilient in normal circumstances it might not be so resilient if there was a significant power outage lasting days or weeks and the means of charging batteries for back up power or getting fuel to back up generators for relay and command radio sites is unavailable, difficult or disrupted. I also believe that some of the more rural relay sites as well as being reliant on generators of batteries if the mains power is disrupted might also be vulnerable to attack by wrong’uns of various sorts. Currently, as Ringway Manchester says, Airwave Tetra sites have enough battery or generator power to last until an engineer can get out to solve whatever the fault is. This can currently be done extremely quickly and swift also is repair to these sites and their equipment.

Without the relay sites police officers are relying on a point to point or direct radio to radio communications mode that doesn’t really have the sort of range that is needed for serious operational police work, for handsets this could be down to a few hundred yards or maybe half a mile in favourable geographic territory, in other words about the same as a civilian 446MHz licence free 0.5 Watt walkie talkie. In a serious social breakdown situation caused by extended power outages it’s quite possible that network system outages and many officers simultaneously pressing their radio’s emergency buttons which prioritises their call on the network, could adversely affect the police’s ability to communicate.

Many other public services in Britain, such as Fire Brigades, Ambulance services, transport organisations and other large public sector organisations,such as prisons also rely on variants of the Airwave Tetra network and similar communication protocols and equipment. An overly long communications outage or a degradation of system abilities due to power outages could affect much more than just the police.

We live in an interconnected society but that connectedness relies on readily available and reliable supplies of electricity. Our public services, military, emergency services all rely on these interconnections and the networks that make such interconnections possible. Take away the electricity supply and deplete the fuel for back up generators in the initial period of an energy emergency and we have all the ingredients for chaos of a particularly nasty kind.

Even a simple purchase in a shop using a chip and pin card uses masses of computing power and relies on secure communication between the shop and the customer’s bank. A power outage at any part along the chain that the payment would need to take could cause a failed payment to occur. If we have a supermarket on a Saturday afternoon in winter that is full of shoppers suddenly faced with the shop’s lights going out and no means to pay for their goods and no means for the shop to accept alternative payments such as cash, could quite easily create an island of panic.

Panic in one shop could quite easily lead to people walking out of the shops with their trolley’s full of unpaid goods because of frustration and panic. Such panic could spread and the stores could be cleaned out of non perishable goods in a day or so if this sort of scenario happened. Things would be made even worse by the ‘just in time’ philosophy of retail where local branches of shops do not keep extensive inventory in warehouses and only a limited supply is kept at regional distribution centres. An electricity supply issue with pumping diesel for the trucks that deliver the goods to shops and warehouses could very easily see the ‘just in time’ philosophy fail badly with shops unable to restock in any reasonable amount of time.

To conclude this piece. We are likely in the future to see some quite nasty blackouts, maybe even this winter unless some sort of miracle happens with electricity supply happens or the Government splurges billions that Britain doesn’t have on buying electricity from overseas. If we are lucky these blackouts will be localised and at worst regional, but Britain, by throwing in the country’s lot with ‘decarbonisation’ could be affected by blackouts on a much worse scale than merely local or regional ones or blackouts that are as short as possible. Idiots in authority, idiots with zero knowledge of physics or engineering or electricity supply have landed Britain with a creaking and unstable electricity generation and distribution system and if or rather when it collapses either in whole or in part, many Britons are going to suffer and maybe suffer mortally.

I cannot forgive the politicians who have brought us all to this dire and unnecessary point. They bet the future on sunbeams and windmills and by doing so may have set the stage for something extremely nasty that no amount of so-called system resilience will be able to cope with. The politicians who lied to us about ‘green energy’ have ensured that we in Britain are not as Boris Johnson once claimed we could be which was the ‘Saudi Arabia of wind power’, but instead are now the Rwanda of unreliable renewables, scrabbling around for whatever power we can get even if the cost is fiscally enormous. As I said at the beginning of this piece, it’s not the Russians that we should be worrying about or be prepping to survive, it’s the actions and decisions of our own damned governments as it is they that have brought us to this terrible point.

Links

Dr North’s piece on Britain’s energy disasters

https://www.turbulenttimes.co.uk/news/front-page/energy-wildly-unrealistic/

Harry’s Place October Hangout where I found the piece by JonMC

https://hurryupharry.net/2026/09/30/october-hangout-2/

Ringway Manchester video on Airwave Tetra

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Rly094n1f08