mikeh, I mentioned buying in capacity from abroad, but I meant to cover any shortfall causing blackouts, rather than the whole amount - hopefully any shortfall will just be a few percent over a small part of the year - enough to scare the bejeesus out of them.

" I know nothing about banking
but I could see that they'd gone bonkers lending to people who
could afford the mortgages on buildings that weren't worth what
they paid for them."

This is just the banks running a reverse London scheme on themselves. Keeping 'themselves' paid well until the pyramid collapses. The big difference here is a proper company goes bust at his point rather than get given huge sums of public money.

I keep trying to understand economics better but everywhere I look I just see London/pyramid schemes without any underlying sense..

Are we talking about powercuts of an hour's duration or more, or just temporary brownouts? The former could lead to disaster scenarios but the latter will be almost as disruptive but fall into eh seriously annoying rather than catastrophic camp.

a person halfway through buying a cart-load of groceries at Sainsbury might have to get everything re-scanned - depending on how well the till/servers handled the brownout. Not such a great way to spend your time...maybe you can handle it once or twice but....

At theatres, most of the lighting, sound and scenery is controlled by mini-servers...what happens if they shut down in a brownout? If they happen sufficiently often, will that mean that tourists will stay away? Not such a great use of the £60 for a seat at Les Mis was it?

It will be like the IRA bombing campaigns of the 1970s and 80s but much more disruptive. Back then, if Victoria was shut, you could always go to Waterloo, for example, and the tubes would not necessarily be shut. Nor would the neighbourhood, pubs, restaurants, hotels, so, if it were necessary you could while away the time there or get a bed for the night. The affected localities were small and tightly contained and the solution was a roll-out of security precautions that eventually cured the problem. Not so easy to solve the brownouts on a similarly tight timescale.

Now, you could not check in to most hotels, or even open a hotel room door, order a drink in a pub or a meal in a cafe, or find alternative transport if the servers and terminals were all rebooting.

On the other hand, if it happened at 1800 hours or so, there would be a huge mass of people able to make a flash demo at the Houses of Parliament.

The ecomomic consequences of such things would quickly amount to serious amounts of dosh....resulting in lower tax payments and then we will have to listen to further inanities from the Hodge-factor.

I have a little UPS that protects me against power cuts. Wouldn't critical facilities normally be protected like that? It is easy to do.

And big retailers like Tesco etc have acres of roof space where they could have solar panels. They could easily generate enough power for their computers, surely. I was reading that some companies such as Walmart, and Wholefoods in the US and Ikea are doing this.

Missy,

UPS is only for very short outages for low-power devices, but if the need is there, these things will be developed. Solar panels on Tesco's roof isn't going to help much in the middle of winter or at night.

But again, I'm not alarmist about this. If power cuts become regular, people will adapt, technology will fill that new niche.

thank you bigyin...missy has no idea, does she...maybe you should give her an arithmetic test

TBYJ

"If power cuts become regular, people will adapt, technology will fill that new niche."

Price guns and sticky labels? Teaching the checkout kids to do arithmetic?

If required TurningTide. I was thinking more along the lines of UPS or genny backup, or "we've seen your clubcard, we'll bill you later when the power is back", or local energy storage or some other thing I can't think of, but will happen to fill a need.

People are immensely versatile, the idea that if someone can't get a loaf of bread they'll get an AK47 instead comes straight out of fiction - that only happens if the blackouts are permanent and there's an expectation that this is what is supposed to happen.

The NY blackouts of a few years ago didn't cause mass society breakdown. People jammed with it. It was inconvenient and yes, some people took advantage, but some sort of post-apocalyptic world doesn't have to be inevitable.

As long as it's only temporary :)

This is worth a read to see the sorts of things that may go wrong if power fails for longish periods.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Northeast_blackout_of_2003#Effects

I agree, TBYJ.

I was in a supermarket in Oxford once when the power went off. Everybody remained calm and just carried on with their shopping in semi-darkness (I think there were some emergency lights on). At the checkouts, the girls were asking customers to estimate what their shopping should have cost and just agreeing a figure acceptable to both parties.

Re: solar panels in the uk -

"Solar panels are one of the least cost-effective ways of combating climate change and will take 100 years to pay back their installation costs, the Royal Institution of Chartered Surveyors (Rics) warned yesterday."

http://tallbloke.wordpress.com/2013/07/04/royal-institute-of-chartered-surveyors-domestic-renewables-are-uneconomic/

@Martin A

It was quite a few years ago (before ubiquitous chip 'n' pin etc.) so even people who were intending to pay by plastic probably also had a cheque book or cash on them: I didn't see anybody who couldn't find a means of paying at all.

I don't see what is wrong with my suggestion. Many of the things people are raising alarm about are low power devices. The hour+ that my UPS lasts seems quite good and its cost was insignificant. Banks and others would have to be idiots not to use UPS in their ATMs and critical systems. Data centres and telecoms are surely protected. Retailers have an interest in keeping their checkouts on too and their checkout power needs have to be relatively small. Alarm systems are not big electricity users either, are they?

It is true that solar is not going to operate at night, but during the day, even in winter, I think with sufficient roof space (and many retailers have that) there would be enough to run checkout systems (I've never stood paying for my groceries and thought, "Phew! Its hot next to the checkout").

I dare say Walmart is not installing solar to avoid power cuts, but they are not into wasting money. It is true though tat their stores will almost all be at lower latitude than the UK, so that makes it more effective.

Supermarkets are less likely to be affected by power cuts than homes and small businesses. They're on a separate supply and are protected because of the importance of what they do. If they did lose grid power they'd have trouble running because of the number of systems that need power. Open topped freezers, freezer cabinets for ice cream that struggle even when they're running, chill cabinets, bakery and hot food ovens, scales, tills, lighting, hot water, security scanners, fire systems, cctv, admin functions, electric gates. If the power's off the only way to let people in and out is to have the doors permanently open which would make the place pretty cold in winter and literally an open door for shop lifters.

Even if all you run is the tills, think on this – how do you separate the till from the rest of the system? And even if you can do that you still have a till, a scanner, a conveyor (because they’re probably connected), a server and net for the prices, banking systems (eg card reader), and scales.

Even if solar systems were designed to run off grid they wouldn’t deliver enough to run more than bits of the shop.

Any battery power would be used to effect a safe clearance of the store, not run it on till the power came back.

If a panel has a nominal power of 200W/m2, we might expect to get 20W/m2 on average (assuming 10% capacity factor). So a supermarket that covered its roof or car park with 1000m2 of these panels could expect to average 20KW. Multiply by 8000 hours (365 days of 24 hours) and that is 160MWh/a - that seems like a non-trivial amount of power (yes I know they don't produce at night, but that is part of the 10% capacity factor). Enough to run more than just 'bits' of the shop, no? (unless I got my arithmetic wrong, as someone suggested I must)