Chris Isaac, Associate Director, Grayling
Hope Again. That was the slogan for Andy Burnham’s first Labour conference as leader. No doubt intended to suggest he will shine a beacon of light through what he describes as dark times.
Although to me, it sounds more like the title of an early 90s sitcom, starring Gwen Taylor as the eponymous newly divorced main character, hoping to find a second bloom with a long-widowed Keith Barron.
It also reminds me of one of the heuristics I’ve come to regard as true: the more you have to talk about something, the less of it there is.
And, as I often have to remind myself of the people and place I come from, to know there is nothing new under the sun. We have been through difficult times before and come through them.
My mother was born in 1942, conceived while Britain was at war in Europe. France had fallen. We had withdrawn from Dunkirk. The Blitz had killed tens of thousands of civilians. Atlantic supply chains were being savaged by German U-boats. America had yet to enter the war.
In short, not the perfect time to bring a child into the world.
But my mother had only followed the tradition of her own forebear, born in 1916, two years into the First World War. That summer saw the first day of the Somme, still the bloodiest day in the history of the British Army.
By the end of the war, hundreds of thousands of British men had indelibly sown their souls into blood-soaked foreign fields.
Hope must not have been in high supply.
But during these times – and in their aftermath – life goes on.
People still ate and drank. Cleaned their windows and shined their shoes. Still lit their homes with electricity, which required electricity pylons to be built.
Which brings me back to Burnham’s speech and the creation of Great British Grid: a publicly owned arm of Great British Energy intended to invest in electricity networks and compete with private operators to deliver new infrastructure.
Created, he says, to meet the massive new demand for electricity connections.
Taking us back to a place we have been before in the aftermath of 1945.
Britain’s first national 132kV electricity grid was created between the wars. But after the Second World War, the challenge became much bigger.
The country was heavily indebted, physically damaged and struggling with ageing infrastructure. Electricity demand was rising quickly and the existing grid was reaching its limits.
The answer was not a modest upgrade.
It was to build another grid on top of the grid.
Engineers created the 275kV supergrid, capable of moving huge quantities of electricity from the great power stations of the Midlands and Yorkshire to centres of demand. Much of it was designed with enough foresight to be upgraded later to 400kV.
And the people who built it had lived through those earlier seemingly hopeless times.
People like Christopher Hinton.
Hinton was one of that extraordinary generation of British engineers who seem to have regarded impossibly large industrial projects as intellectual fodder for a wet Tuesday afternoon.
He had helped run wartime munitions production before becoming one of the central figures in Britain’s atomic energy programme. Under his leadership came Windscale, Capenhurst, Springfields and Calder Hall, which began supplying nuclear-generated electricity to the grid in 1956.
The following year, Hinton became the first chairman of the Central Electricity Generating Board (where he kept an office even after retiring).
He went on to build enormous new power stations (the ‘Hinton Heavies’) and expand nuclear generation. In around 15 years Hinton built roughly 1,000 miles of pylons and developed the transmission network that still underpins much of the country today.
I am an unashamed romantic when it comes to that heroic generation and people like Hinton.
They had seen bleak days and saw them off. Undefeated, they created the new world and were prepared to think at a scale, and deliver at a pace, that we – with all the advantages of today’s wealth and technology – seem coy about even imagining.
They looked twenty, thirty and forty years ahead and built what they thought their grandchildren would need.
Today, Britain again needs to build an electricity system fit for our age – and the time beyond. The National Energy System Operator says electricity demand will rise by more than 30% by 2035 and we will need to invest more than £100 billion into cables and pylons to cope with it.
Does Burnham’s rhetoric match the challenge we face today?
That depends on the mechanics behind Great British Grid. Is it a fundamentally new delivery model, or just a new publicly owned bidder within a competitive framework that Ofgem has already been developing for a decade? Because unless the largely fixed procurement model changes substantially, the economics of these projects will still turn heavily on the cost of capital – who can raise the serious lolly required most cheaply in return for a long-term regulated return.
But the greater challenge that we must build new capacity is unavoidable.
And that takes me back to hope – which doesn’t have to be reminiscent of a corny sitcom.
We have been here before. We built our way out of far darker times than these and must again.
