Renewable energy is so fucking cheap....

It's about £1000 per household, maybe more. You are being lied to. I wouldn;t mind, but I have to pay for your gullibility

What benefits?

There is nothing a well maintained fleet of nuclear reactors could not do that would not be made far far worse, more expensive and more environmentally destructive than by adding intermittent renewable energy.

Or the diesel burned by the off road trucks and sea going service vessels and of course helicopters needed to replace the bearings twice a year.

Then it's *definitely* a 'renewable power cut'. The narrative of cheap clean reliable eco friendly energy must be upheld by the renewable deniers, even when its utter bollocks.

Japan is restarting its reactors one by one.

Even Chernobyl is looking post war to deploy small modular reactors on the old site

I dislike the term "power cut". To me, it means a deliberate act. "Power failure" would be more accurate.

Electricity distribution company SP Electricity North West said there was an "incident" involving a high-voltage cable in Harpurhey, north-east of Manchester city centre.

The failure affected "around 5,000 customers in the Manchester area", with all power "fully restored within 90 seconds", a spokesperson said.

(It was showing on

Chris Wright, north-west route director at Network Rail, told the BBC "we didn't experience a 90-second interruption," insisting its systems were back online sooner.

But he said some of Network Rail's communications systems "did not respond how we would have expected, and then needed reconfiguring and replacing"

Is it just me, or shouldn't a control centre of that size and importance have backup power? A big UPS (or multiples) short-term, with an auto-starting generator coming up within a minute or so. I visited the BBC long-wave transmitter site some decades ago, where the backups were generators (plural) driven by huge marine diesel engines. OK, that was for half a megaWatt or so.

today its about providing the shoddiest service at the highest price and calling it 'modern' amd 'eco friendly'

at a guess, back-up power was specified, but rejected by the money people.

TNP is quite right - Nationalised the lot! Capitalism and essential services simply do not mix.

Neither does socialism

The problem isn't the model, its the attitude of people who have grown up with absolutely no sense of social responsibility.

wave a fiver at them and they install solar panels on their balconies faster that you can say 'capitalist pig'.

'redundant infrastructure' means sup[lying the same ting from two cronies and having the paperwork to prove it

The distribution operator had a 90 second power failure, and the site had systems back online sooner. That suggests to me they did have an UPS or generator coming up within a minute or so

like a house near here where the panels are installed on a north facing wall.

We got a much better result when we privatised our monopoly govt owned telco and you can now get a very decent mobile service for just $10 a month with gives you free calls and texts and MMSs to any mobile or landline in the country and a very decent amount of data which is all anyone needs unless you watch movies on your phone or tablet

Indeed. Anyone who lived through the Seventies as an adult will recall that 'essential services' and 'state monopoly' don't mix either. Our Mr Burnham was a small child then.

Not UPS, by definition of the 'U', as they were not able to maintain

Same here, although we won't have many landlines soon. I remember when an extra fifty pence a month would allow you to choose an alternative model of telephone, one which blackbirds could imitate. Rented, of course, not owned. And only a year to get a new landline installed in most places.

Mind you, having been in the Peak District for the last week, mobile coverage is just a little less than complete, even in towns.

While not defending the excesses of private companies people seem to forget how bad the Nationalised and/or previous monopoly industries were. Plus some of the industries that the state continued to have a stake in continued to get worse.

Many years ago, I was working for a contractor at a new paint shop at a GM plant in the US. It was one of the first places which was to be wired with a system to monitor, and possibly later control, the paint shop equipment, by what we later came to know as PLC Control. I was talking to the GM engineer in anticipation of this, and when the great day came when he was going to connect up to the equipment, I went to his office to see how he was getting on. He said that there was a problem, in that the Purchasing Dept. had refused funding for a terminal which would allow communication with the equipment. The whole process was on hold until somebody put a rocket under the Purchasing Dept. and ultimately, a terminal arrived. So yes, it certainly happens.