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Post by alancalverd on Dec 13, 2012 14:50:25 GMT 1
Back in the dark days of socialism, it was pretty obvious who to blame. The Central Electricity Generating Board was charged to make the stuff by whatever means was most economical and efficient at the time, shift it around the country at 400 kV, and sell it wholesale to Local Electricity Boards. The LEBs distributed it to the consumer at 11 kV, 440V, or 240V, and you paid the retail cost according to how much you used and when, but pretty much independent of where you consumed it.
So when the lights went out, either the LEB or the CEGB was responsible for turning them back on, depending on whether the problem was at low or high voltage, and it was pretty obvious where your money was being spent.
Nowadays, in the white heat of unrestrained capitalism
Anyone can make the stuff, and the less efficient the production plant, the more the taxpayer will subsidise it. Nobody is under any obligation to make any at all.
It's sold to the National Grid Company, who may be responsible if there's a transmission fault, but not if there simply isn't enough to transmit.
It's distributed through local low voltage networks, each owned by a different (now mostly foreign) company, who sell it to retailers at a regional or local price. They are not responsible for buying enough to meet demand, nor for supplying their customers' demands, nor for ensuring that it actually reaches the consumer.
You can buy the stuff from any retailer you like, but he is under no obligation to ensure continuity of supply.
Although the electrons that come out of the socket are completely indistinguishable, you can for instance choose a "green" retailer who will charge you more than average for the stuff, with a promise that your electrons are somehow greener in origin than your neighbours. But of course he is under no obligation to prove the unprovable, nor to stop supplying you when the green stuff is unavailable. And no retailer is liable for availability or continuity of supply, because you can change retailers any time you like without having to rewire the entire street.
In the bad old days, when I built a new small clinic, I'd call the LEB and ask for 200 amps at 440 volts, standard industrial daytime tariff. They would give me a price for installation, metering and billing, and the juice would flow. Nowadays, I have first to find out who has the distribution rights to a particular street, persuade them that their British consumers are worth supplying (but as we are not actual customers, why should they care?) and negotiate for the supply to be grudgingly brought to my meter cupboard, but not to install a meter. Then I have to find another company to install a meter and yet another to actually sell the product. They then have to negotiate with the distribution company to switch it on, and eventually after many committee meetings I may get a trickle of juice.
Now what happens when the lights go out? Whoever I phone, it isn't their responsibility to diagnose and fix the problem. But if I default on the bill, I'll be cut off and cast into the outer darkness.
Is this progress?
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Post by marchesarosa on Dec 13, 2012 17:05:09 GMT 1
Is this progress?
No, it is backsliding. Just an opportunity for more plutocrats to get their snout into the publicly financed trough. No problem with gas, coal or oil being extracted by the private sector but no rational reason whatsoever why electricity production and distribution should have been privatised - A disaster, in fact, as it has turned out. Even worse when the government sets itself up to pick winners in the energy stakes.
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Post by mrsonde on Dec 13, 2012 17:46:31 GMT 1
No problem with gas, coal or oil being extracted by the private sector but no rational reason whatsoever why electricity production and distribution should have been privatised - A disaster, in fact, as it has turned out. I see it as the other way around. No reason it should have been nationalised. Regulated, and invested in, yes. Ferranti built the national grid - which is why it's always worked. The last thing the government built was...the Millenium Dome. Oh no - the NHS integrated computer system, was it? Oh no - the aircraft carriers with no aircraft to carry. The helicopters that can't operate in the desert? We have more civil servants in the MoD than there are men and women in uniform, yet they still can't manage to organise a decent piece of kit appropriate to where the war is, or build a fighter that isn;t twenty years out of date by the time it's finished, or an APC that can't be blown apart by an illiterate peasant with a bag of fertiliser and a stick.
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Post by rsmith7 on Dec 13, 2012 21:59:21 GMT 1
We also have more Admirals than ships in the RN. How depressing is that...
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Post by alancalverd on Dec 13, 2012 22:23:25 GMT 1
Obviously somebody has to build stuff, and since the government doesn't have electrical workshops, it has to be contracted to someone who has. But that isn't the point.
The question is whether breaking the supply chain down to several layers, each of which has several local monopoly suppliers, without anyone having an overall duty to supply anything to anyone else, or (at the retail end) "competing" suppliers who are simply commodity speculators who add no value to the product, was a Good Thing. Did it improve the quality or price of the product?
The incompetence of the MoD is legendary. Interestingly, a significant number of MoD staff are actually uniformed officers, but it is well known that every general starts off by fighting the last war. The Yanks didn't exactly come out of Vietnam covered in glory, having had every modern instrument of mechanised war comprehensively ignored by little men with sharp sticks. And the same lesson is being learned in Afghanistan today. But is the alternative a privatised military? Private contractors are certainly being used in present theatres, and they tend to be something between an expensive embarrassment and an entirely unaccountable bunch of thugs with no commitment to the Geneva Convention. Abraham Lincoln said that the irreducible function of government is to raise taxes to pay the army, without which you do not have a defined and defended territory. So how do you equip the army?
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Post by marchesarosa on Dec 13, 2012 23:42:07 GMT 1
It is part of the state's duty to protect its citizens and that means protecting them from power cuts. Either the state can ensure that the private sector does that by devising appropriate contracts or it can organise the generation and the grid itself. I don't remember there being complaints about either generation or the grid when it was a nationalised industry. So why change what isn't broken?
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Post by mrsonde on Dec 16, 2012 1:26:44 GMT 1
It is part of the state's duty to protect its citizens and that means protecting them from power cuts. Either the state can ensure that the private sector does that by devising appropriate contracts or it can organise the generation and the grid itself. I don't remember there being complaints about either generation or the grid when it was a nationalised industry. So why change what isn't broken? You weren't living here in the 70s then? Three day weeks, telly shut down at ten, breakfast by candlelight? There are no complaints about generation or the grid now. They aren't the problem. There is in fact no problem. Private industry will provide the power that's required, driven by the profit motive, which is why Hitachi are investing ten billion here. The problem is with the government arbitrarily deciding that such and such a percentage of power has to be supplied by windmills and butterfly kisses, and that carbon is sooty and so passay, and nuclear is a little bit scary and too scientificky to understand.
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Post by mrsonde on Dec 16, 2012 1:47:03 GMT 1
Obviously somebody has to build stuff, and since the government doesn't have electrical workshops, it has to be contracted to someone who has. But that isn't the point. It is the point. Not contracted to - assigned to, under standard regulatary conditions, with permissable profit margins. That's how Britain's infrastructure got built - the bits that work, anyway. It wasn't perfectly done, of course. But yes, it was a good thing, despite that. I recently bought a new house and got my telephone connected within 24 hours. When I started my first business in the early 80s, before privatisation, I had to wait four months before I could get a telephone hooked up, even though the line was already installed. Why? Well, why not? Who cared? It's merely the department where the incompetence is numerically most obvious, because it has the most dramatic results - people being blown to bits and so forth. It's no more incompetent than the NHS, or Education, or any other department. Any comparison with private "competitors" doing comparable tasks would lead any objective analysis to that conclusion. Not sure what you're saying there. The fighting men of the US certainly did come out of Vietnam with justifiable glory - never lost a battle. And not because they had more modern equipment - apart from helicopters, they didn't. It was the DoD who fucked them over. What lesson? The lesson is you need a clear well-thought out strategy to win any war, and the determination to pursue it within a time-frame to its projected conclusion. That's what's been missing in Afghanistan, and was equally so in Iraq, and Vietnam. Unlike, say, the Falklands. Management by Objectives it used to be called. No. It's a rigorous and efficient civil service, instead of an obese overpaid over-secure one, where everyone's doing one fifth of a job, covering their asses, their main objectibe to maintain the growing value of their departmental budget. A very one-sided view. But I'm inclined to agree there should be no role for a private military in a State war. It's not rocket science. You need vigilant oversight and thorough accounting. You need to be constantly aware of Parkinson's Law. You need to be constantly aware that publicly paid organisations will do everything they can to expand, and avoid delivering what they've been paid to deliver, so that they can bemoan they're inadequate size, and underfunding. You need to be aware that targets will never be met and standards never improved, through fear that then the size and reward of their organisation might then be reduced, given that they're doing such a good job. Thus you end up with warehouses overflowing with toilet seats invoiced at $20,000 each, GPs earning up to a grand a week through their detection of a non-existent emphysema epidemic, over half of the population on statins and prozac even though no one has any idea how such drugs work, or even if they do work, and teachers training their students on how to pass the exam papers they've already been slipped by the examination boards.
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Post by alancalverd on Dec 16, 2012 2:27:35 GMT 1
I recently bought a new house and got my telephone connected within 24 hours. When I started my first business in the early 80s, before privatisation, I had to wait four months before I could get a telephone hooked up, even though the line was already installed. Why? Well, why not? Who cared? My post was about electricity, not telephones. When I opened a clinic 5 years ago, it took 3 months to get the electricity turned on despite the fact that I had laid in the 11 kV lines from the street and built the transformer substation. ...and as I recall, it went steadily downhill from there on. Carpet bombing, defoliation, napalm, machine-gunning cows at My Lai....massive technical superiority all led to a final evacuation of the US Embassy. George Bush Senior put it very well apropos the Balkans. He said "No president should commit ground forces unless he can tell them who they are fighting, what they are fighting for, how they will know they have won, and what will happen when they go home." His idiot son clearly didn't listen. The astonishing thing about the present UK government is that, whilst blaming the previous administration for everything, they haven't had the guts to point out that Blair's wars are not worth fighting. To do so would save hundreds of lives, billions of pounds, and the credibility of the Conservative party.
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Post by alancalverd on Dec 16, 2012 2:32:55 GMT 1
You weren't living here in the 70s then? Three day weeks, telly shut down at ten, breakfast by candlelight? But no restriction in theatre or concert hall lighting, only soccer matches. Nothing to do with ownership of the grid anyway - the 3 day week was a government response to coalminers' wage demands. But it doesn't, which is why I'm complaining and the "regulator" is up to its neck in complaints and investigations. Driven by the profit motive, private industry is investing in bloody windmills!
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Post by mrsonde on Dec 16, 2012 6:14:59 GMT 1
I recently bought a new house and got my telephone connected within 24 hours. When I started my first business in the early 80s, before privatisation, I had to wait four months before I could get a telephone hooked up, even though the line was already installed. Why? Well, why not? Who cared? My post was about electricity, not telephones. When I opened a clinic 5 years ago, it took 3 months to get the electricity turned on despite the fact that I had laid in the 11 kV lines from the street and built the transformer substation. You should have opted for the pay-as-you-go meter. Aaah - I love military history. Some of your quote could be said to be strictly true, I suppose, though I'd say it was highly tendentious and obviously partial. Khe Sanh was clearly down to very poor logistic planning - a base too far, inadequately secured. Even so, it could hardly be said that the Marines lost a battle there - on the contrary, they managed to withdraw, more or less intact, inflicting very heavy casualties. They were simply too heavily outnumbered. Kham Duc can be analysed in exactly the same way. Less than a thousand special forces, who held off a regiment and then a whole division. A disorderly retreat - perhaps; in the same way that Dunkirk was. Difficult to retreat in an orderly manner surrounded and vastly outnumbered in a siege. Neither of these engagements could fairly be termed a lost battle. They're certainly not so by the Marines or SF. Forced withdrawals due to very poor military strategic planning - rather like Dunkirk, if one wished to dignify the thought processes of the French high command with such a generous description. Tet? I don't think so. A massive defeat for the NVA by any reasonable assessment. It's a myth the Americans had massive technical superiority. They had air power, yes, but of very limited effect in a jungle guerrilla war. The bombing - mainly of Cambodia - and the defoliation - mainly along the Trail - had no significant impact on the enemy: they simply moved sideways into the jungle. In terms of other technical supplies, in many ways the NVA and Vietcong had the clear advantage - limitless supplies from China and Moscow, including superior weaponry, no shortage of food or medical supplies, a population bendable to their every demand or else. Of course the whole crazy war was a defeat for the US; no one could possibly argue differently. As Iraq was a defeat for us - the British, at least. My point was that the personnel actually trying to fight that war were never defeated. Not by the enemy. They were defeated by the Pentagon and by Washington; in particular by the egregious LBJ. As in Iraq, and even more so with our Afghanistan adventure, no one ever formulated a plan for victory - this is what needs to happen for us to win this war, and obtain a peace that looks like such and such. Unbelievable, but true. Quite so. I believe he's more or less quoting Robert McNamara there. And, also, parrotting Clinton's stance. Well, that would be an interesting discussion. But before we do so, I think your premise needs reformulating: I'm not astonished at all that it doesn't point out such a thing! Every war Blair took us into were very much worth fighting, in my opinion: and I'm fairly sure most Conservatives at least would still see it that way. They were fought in the wrong way - Iraq and Afghanistan, anyway - but I'm sure there'd be no disagreement from anyone about that.
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Post by mrsonde on Dec 16, 2012 6:34:27 GMT 1
You weren't living here in the 70s then? Three day weeks, telly shut down at ten, breakfast by candlelight? But no restriction in theatre or concert hall lighting, only soccer matches. Nothing to do with ownership of the grid anyway - the 3 day week was a government response to coalminers' wage demands. Very much to do with ownership of the grid. About how you manage and ensure a secure energy supply for your country. One that is not utterly vulnerable to the decisions of any one group or politically motivated clique. A rational plan placing the consumer before the producer, the needs of the people before the immediate interests of the owners, would ensure a range of alternative sources of supply, would have reserve stocks able to outlive any disruption, deliberate or circumstantial, would think beyond the revenue sheet and the polling booth. And they would never - and should never be in a position to - use people's warmth and light and means of earning a living as a weapon in a bargaining war with a union, as Heath did (the three day week was economically entirely unnecessary.) It doesn't? Why so? I can't recall the last power cut in this country. The miners' strike above, wasn't it? Thatcher learned the lessons of that dispute very well - I don't think there was a single cut in generation for all that year was there? And since? As it should be. But more so than it would have been under nationalisation - if there'd been such a body then? I don't see how that could be the case. Because of the billions wasted on government subsidies. No one would build the things without that, anywhere in the world.
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Post by marchesarosa on Dec 16, 2012 14:55:53 GMT 1
I was, actually, and trying to run a cafe in the midst of electricity and gas outages.
I seem to remember it was something to do with industrial action, Mr Sonde.
There is no question that the private sector is the one with the expertise to build the infrastructure and extract the fuel but there is no reason they should be running the whole power generation and supply sector.
It's like arguing that medical equipment manufacturers or pharmaceutical companies should be running hospitals. Different folks, different expertise, different priorities, different objectives.
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Post by mrsonde on Dec 16, 2012 19:35:21 GMT 1
I was, actually, and trying to run a cafe in the midst of electricity and gas outages. I seem to remember it was something to do with industrial action, Mr Sonde. Exactly. It's inconceivable such a disaster could be effected by any single group in the production chain of this country's energy now. No one has that mush power. The power has been distributed, and diversified. Why wasn't it then? Political decision, pure and simple - the left-liberal consensus, happy to run their State with one seciton of the population as the drones, digging coal. A pitiful investment in nuclear. From the point where we were pioneers and the world's experts in such technology, we've arrived at a point where there's no one in this country with the know-how to build a new nuclear power station, or even decommision one. Competition - efficiency - diversity - cheaper prices, better service, focsussed forward planning, effective capital raising and economic investment decisions. Hitachi come here to build two nuclear power stations because they can see the government can't tell its arse from its elbow and within twenty years we're going to be desperately short of available energy whenever the wind stops blowing. A bit of smoothing has been done to oil that decision, but no one has made them - they're doing so from the profit motive. No, it's not. Charities should be running hospitals. They don;t need to make a profit, that's not what healthcare is or should be about. But they do noeed to raise their own budget, and adhere to it. That's the difference between a hospice and a State hospital - here, for example, the hospice that virtually pioneered the whole movement is universally loved: you won't find anyone who'd say a word against it. It delivers a superlative service. The County hospital, on the other hand, is a sick joke: everyone knows if you're ill it's the last place you want to go.
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Post by marchesarosa on Dec 16, 2012 21:26:17 GMT 1
It did not occur to me that the threat of industrial action was an over-riding or rational reason for privatising electricity generation and the grid, Mr Sonde. Sounds more like a post hoc rationalisation to me.
Just like hospitals, neither electricity generation nor the grid need to be privately owned. That does not mean the private sector is not involved in a big way as suppliers of expertise. They do not, however, need to own the thing outright nor to set the prices at which the product is sold.
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