My student Aneesha gave me a book a few weeks ago before she headed off to do her PhD in energy systems at Berkeley, The Grid by Gretchen Bakke. OK, I thought, I’ll give it a try – but how well she knows me. I loved this book. It’s part history of how the electricity grid was built, part diagnosis of how it’s all going wrong, and part reflection about the net zero transition. What I loved about it was the way it links this fundamental infrastructure system to its social and cultural context.

I’ve always reckoned (eg around p 80 in here) that the provision of electricity is fundamentally social rather than technical, and the book illustrates that on every page. Who knew that Texas and Quebec have separate grids (in case they ever want to secede)? In a sign that the US is starting to become a failing state, it has”the highest number of outage minutes of any developed nation” – six hours a year compared with 11 minutes in Japan and even 51 minutes a year in Italy. Trees and squirrels account for much of this – or to put it another way, lack of maintenance.

Interestingly, the book pinpoints the separation of generation from transmission, and the arrival of wholesale electricity trading, as the start of the end. The margins in operating the grid itself are low, so maintenance got cut, while the arbitraging meant there was too much electricity trying to travel too far along the wires. Increasingly American companies, people and the military are setting up their own microgrids, including using renewables such as rooftop solar, and in the case of the military compost from kitchen waste and latrines. “They have all stopped expecting the state and the utilities to do their job.” Rugged individualism is the order of the day in getting stable access to electricity.

Highly recommended – I underlined something on pretty much every page. I’m thinking a lot about infrastructure these days. Thank you Aneesha!

The depressing UK election campaign (albeit far less depressing than some others around the world) sent me back to a book whose subtitle is ‘Half a century of British economic decline’. It’s Russell Jones’s excellent and sobering The Tyranny of Nostalgia. I read it in proof and, as I remembered, it offers a more or less ringside view of economic policymaking (mainly macro) in the UK during the past half century. It takes a couple of chapters to get into its stride, but does so when it gets past an initial chapter about the nature of economics and one about the years before Jones started his career as a professional economist. As he sums up the story, “It is a depressing catalogue of misapprehensions, missteps, underachievement, wasted opportunities, crises and humiliations.”

The themes that jump out – and in my view remain key problems today – are consistent under-investment and what Jones describes as the ‘capriciousness’ of policy, or churn. And above all, nostalgia for past glories, which “infected programmes with wishful thinking. … Britain lost an empire and time and again it failed to find an enduringly workable economic policy framework.” The post-colonial angst is one reason the book describes the UK’s ever-fraught relationship with the rest of Europe as a ‘running sore’.

There’s scant sign in the current campaign of overt political recognition of the fact that most of Britain is a poor country by the standard of those we like to consider our peers, paying the price for at least five decades of failure to invest in the future. Also depressing is the absence of a meaningful area of consensus about long term economic startegy across parties (or within them) about economic policy, suggesting that the British disease of policy churn will persist. We’ll see after 5th July if things will get better….