Britain ‘a few meals from anarchy’ if power goes out

Experts say our reliance on electricity would render cities uninhabitable within days in prolonged outage

BRITISH cities would be uninhabitable within days and only a few meals from anarchy if the national grid were taken down, experts have warned.

Modern life is so reliant on electricity that a prolonged blackout would lead to a loss of water, fuel, banking, transport and communications and leave the country “in the Stone Age”.

The warning comes weeks after Gavin Williamson, the Defence Secretary, said Russia had been spying on the UK’S energy infrastructure and could cause “thousands and thousands and thousands” of deaths if it crippled the power supply. Energy and security experts say a cyber attack is one of a number of so-called “black sky hazards” that have the potential to knock out power for days, weeks or longer.

America this week blamed the Russian government for a campaign of cyber attacks stretching back at least two years that targeted the US power grid.

“I think that is a risk that is very real in the UK and it’s also neglected and that sort of scenario could happen anytime – it could happen tomorrow,” said Julius Weitzdörfer, who studies the problem at Cambridge University’s Centre for the Study of Existential Risk.

He said a previous study by the UK’S security services had estimated that the country was “four meals away from anarchy” because looting would erupt and civil order would start to break down as soon as people had eaten what they had in their cupboards and fridges.

As well as a cyber attack, other blacksky risks include extreme weather, an electromagnetic pulse caused by a nuclear detonation in the atmosphere, terrorist attacks on key substations or transformers, or powerful solar storms.

Lord Arbuthnot of Edrom, a former chair of the Commons defence committee, who now advises the Electric Infrastructure Security Council, said modern life had complete reliance on electricity. “Without electricity, modern life would grind to a halt and the complexity of modern society is such that if you take out one or two little pieces of the jigsaw, the whole thing collapses,” he said.

One of the biggest problems would be that water supplies and sewage services rely on electrical pumps. Fuel would quickly run out because it also requires electrical pumps, meaning transport and deliveries to shops, hospitals and institutions would cease.

As communications such as the internet and phones failed, the Government would struggle to tell people what was going on.

A spokesman for National Grid said the safe and reliable supply of energy “is our most important job”.

“We work closely with Government, industry partners and regulators to share information and intelligence to protect our network from current and future threats,” the spokesman said.