One step away from a banana republic

I ONCE said that only two things kept us from qualifying as a banana republic – the fact that we don’t have regular power cuts, and the fact that we don’t grow bananas.

It now emerges that the recent collapse of our electricity grid was not, as claimed, a fluke. There had been three ‘near misses’ in three months. These may well be connected with unwise reliance on wind.

I am not in the last bit surprised, and I have been predicting it for ages, warning that our dogma-driven closures of perfectly good coal-fired power stations were worthless even on their own terms.

I suspect that it is highly significant that the recent cuts came minutes after power companies were boasting that they were on the verge of achieving 50 per cent wind power for the first time. Did a dash to achieve this futile propaganda target blow the nation’s fuses? If so, don’t expect an official confirmation from our warmist establishment, where green dogma affects everyone right up to the First Girlfriend, Carrie Symonds. But I think a lot of people will be buying ungreen petrol-driven generators in the next few years, as power becomes less reliable.

And what is it all for? Green campaigners Coalswarm reported last year that China then had a giant 993 gigawatts of coal power capacity, but approved new coal plants would increase this by 25 per cent. These vast, innumerable, soot factories overwhelmingly cancel out any effect from our own daft closures of coal stations, microscopic compared to China’s huge CO2 output.