There is outrage – outrage! – in the United Kingdom because its grid operator is making plans to, if the situation gets dire enough, cut the power to homes “at short notice”.
They’re still calling it “rolling blackouts”, because Britain hasn’t moved beyond the technical language yet, because it has never actually happened, but yes, that would be load shedding.
What is short notice, you ask?
Here’s The Guardian’s summary:
“The system operator could call for enough homes and businesses within a designated area to be disconnected to cut each block’s electricity use by more than a fifth with only eight hours’ notice, bringing rolling three-hour blackouts across the country to prevent the risk of total power system collapse.”
Big electricity outages are never a laughing matter, to be sure, they come at a terrible cost for vulnerable people and a shockingly high aggregate cost. But, seriously, a minimum of eight hours? That’s enough time to raise a family. In South Africa there was a case where the notice period – for Stage 6 load shedding, which borders on the apocalyptic – was negative 27 minutes.
When the UK (in theory) has trouble with its grid, it just isn’t the same as when South Africa has trouble with its grid. In much the same way you could never compare the power outages in South Africa with the grid collapses in places such as Nigeria and Chile. We talk blithely about the impact of more frequent absurd weather events and water outages, and the need for preparation and adaptation. But the rich world is as far removed from the middle-income countries as they are from the least developed countries, with the on-the-ground impact just not comparable.
Water is really bringing that home right now.
In Kent, where my family is based, the local water company is regularly failing to deliver water to towns and villages due to burst mains, treatment-works failures, low storage levels and high demand. Or, as the people affected would tell you, awful management of the water system following awful political decisions about the structure of the water market, with awful politicians and company business executives doing an awful job.
Oh how they complain.
And, fair enough. When you pay your bills in one of the most advanced countries in the world, you kinda expect water to come out when you open the tap.
But a water outage in England is oh so very different from many in South Africa, because the surrounding infrastructure and environment is utterly different.
In Diepsloot, outside Johannesburg, I spoke to mothers who had to choose between giving their babies possibly contaminated water and walking a two-kilometre round trip, half of it lugging a water bucket, twice a day. In Thlolong, in the Free State, water tankers just didn’t arrive for weeks at a time. And we often quoted those people anonymously, because they were too fearful of local leaders and institutional reprisals to even complain out loud.
In Kent, the water company takes over part of a big car park and sets up a water collection point. Cars drive in, people load up with bottled water, cars drive out.
Vulnerable and unable to drive? There’s a register for that; the water will come to your home. Using public transport? Well, there is public transport and then there’s public transport. I invite you to try to catch a crowded Gauteng minibus taxi with a couple of packs of shrink-wrapped water, and see how that compares with an English bus.
The human cost of a water outage is very different when everyone has a car. So is the atmosphere. When the relatively affluent queue for a couple of minutes for their water in England, there is a jovial sense of shared suffering, replete with promises of bringing electoral defeat to whoever is held responsible.
In South Africa, those enduring a three-hour wait for a bucketful tended to be a lot less feisty. Given the lack of any real prospect that things will improve during their lifetimes, fair enough. Economically, politically, and practically, there is no light at the end of that tunnel.
England’s water system should improve, but I’m not betting any money on when and by how much. There’s a surprising lack of data on what happens to underground pipes when the ground dries out more than it ever has, and a lot of politics around exactly how to raise the capital for more storage and treatment.
I will, however, quite confidently make this prediction: Britain’s power grid is going to be a great deal more stable than South Africa’s with every passing year, well into the future.
Britain is starting to harness the power of vehicle-to-grid, turning big electric vehicle batteries into edge-of-grid balancing assets – in a place rich enough for an increasing number of people to have EVs and with working patterns that can see those EVs plugged into the grid during peak times.
The UK is about to get zero-interest loans for rooftop-and-battery systems, making for vastly more solar penetration than a poorer country can even imagine. It already has much of the regulation in place to encourage consumers to shift use out of peak times and to feed into the grid when it is most required, plus the billing and banking infrastructure.
Heck, in a week or so there will even be plug-in solar systems on supermarket shelves, so apartment dwellers too can see the financial benefits of making their own power.
It’s not just about the amount of money available to the government for huge projects. It is that too, of course, very much so. But end users of water or electricity with some money in their pockets have a vast amount of agency, and that reverberates throughout the system. Everything is a little less dire, there’s a little more time and elbow room for proper solutions.
I wish there was a lesson in there for South Africa, but the only one I can think of comes down to a rather unhelpful “have you tried being less poor?”
But watching the contrast between rich and poor has made me a lot less tolerant of do-gooders, global institutions and NGOs and philanthropic funders, who speak broadly about building resilience and disaster preparedness. Many of those doing the talking come from places like England rather than places like South Africa, and I fear they genuinely don’t know what they are talking about.