Post by Steve HayesIn the 1980s, as a result of the then (and to some extent still)
fashionable Thatcherism, they converted our Electricity Supply
Commission into a "State-owned Enterprise" and put bean-counters at
the top rather than engineers. As a result we've had rolling
blackouts on and off for the last 15 years.
NSW used to have a State Electricity Commission, which was publicly
owned and which was responsible for the entire electricity generation
and distribution. And, more importantly, the system planning. Then it
was privatised, and now we have several companies doing the generation,
several others owning the "poles and wires", and so on. As a result
there seems to be nobody left with the responsibility for overall
coordination. What happened to the engineers who were checking for
system stability, who were identifying weak spots in the system where a
collapse is likely, who did the forward planning to decide when a new
power station or a new transmission line was needed, and so on? All
gone, as far as I can see. For each individual company, "that's not our
problem".
There is an overall coordinator called something like the National
Energy Market Regulator, but that is run by bean counters and, as far as
I can see, employs no engineers. It supervises the bidding process by
which different companies buy electricity to sell to consumers. (The
price varies wildly in the course of a day.) Those companies don't
generate any electricity. They are purely marketers.
One side-effect of this system is that the companies that sell to
consumers have as their primary function using call centres to convince
people to switch "suppliers". I get several junk calls per day from
them. It's getting to the point where I'm thinking of not having a
phone. I already got rid of our landline for that reason, but now the
attacks on my mobile phone are just as bad.
--
Peter Moylan ***@pmoylan.org http://www.pmoylan.org
Newcastle, NSW