Operations were cancelled as hospitals plunged into darkness… people got stuck in lifts, panicking as they waited hours to be rescued… traffic lights failed causing chaos on city centre roads.

We are not talking about some far-away developing nation stumbling into the 21st Century. Embarrassingly, this was actually the UK… and it happened yesterday.

Cleveland, Cheshire, Lincolnshire and parts of London were left in the dark as a mysterious outage crippled the network. This was no minor local event – and no-one who knows what went on is prepared to speak about it.

The cuts escalated as the day progressed and the National Grid was forced to issue its second-most serious warning: demand control imminent!

Two entirely unrelated power stations (one coal, one nuclear – one in Suffolk, one in Fife) suddenly shut down within minutes of each another… the cascade continued with nine “generating units” also going dark… four other power stations also suffered failures to varying extents.

This caused the price of wholesale electricity prices to jump 35% to £95 per megawatt.

Secrets fill me with rancour…

Mysteriously, both British Energy and E.On said that they could not reveal the source of the problem. They won’t even say when the power stations are expected to be fully back on line, because of the effect this will have the wholesale electricity market.

David Hunter an analyst at independent energy consultancy McKinnon & Clarke summed it up nicely. He told The Times:

“The Government’s inability to make long-term energy security decisions over the last decade is coming home to roost. Since the ‘dash for gas’ in the 1990s, the lack of political will to make tough decisions has left Britain short of power.”

So, there is a massive question mark over the future of the UK. Tony Blair is responsible for this… and so is Greenpeace.

Blair didn’t have the balls to make essential decisions that would have secured our energy future. He was too busy fighting someone else’s oil war. He did not have the guts to take on the greens – and this was a mistake.

He should have set us on the track to nuclear power a decade ago – and made sure everyone knew that coal would have to fill the gap.

Instead he dithered and fretted over what to do. Policymakers even listened to the type of people that love to be in “focus groups,” so men with beards and women in comfortable shoes had their say. There was delay after delay after delay.

Greenpeace made everything worse…

When the government actually did something about getting our nuclear strategy on track, it got it so utterly wrong that Greenpeace took it to court on a technicality! This caused another year-long delay.

We must all consider the following pertinent facts.

Our North Sea oil is running out and oil imports are becoming more and more expensive. Russia is sewing up the European gas market (and we do not want to beholden to the Putins of this world for our future energy security).

Biofuels are an expensive con and burning food is stupid. Wind and solar power are unlikely to be able to provide all the energy for the 75 million people that are expected to be living in this country by the middle of the century.

The solution is blindingly obvious. We need to build new nuclear powers stations – and accept we will have to burn coal in the interim.

If we don’t do this, we could easily find ourselves suffering from energy poverty in the future. We will then have to hand over all our wealth to Russia in order to buy their gas.

Energy poverty will lead to economic poverty and then personal poverty if we let it… and the blame for this can be laid firmly at the door of Tony Blair and Greenpeace.

I worry yesterday’s blackouts could be a mere taster of what we have in store in the future. I reckon you should be worried too.

Regards,

Garry White
Editor
Smart Commodities UK

P.S: If you like what I’ve got to say, you can become a subscriber to my Smart Commodities email and enjoy all the benefits of my regular readers…

Source: Panic, Pestilence and a Nation In Crisis: Welcome to Blackout Britain

Which is bad news for the American people… but great news for our food investments… here’s why…

We should not burn food – it’s that simple…

Whilst Europe has come to the realisation that ethanol is a big fat waste of time… the US are pressing on regardless.

The Department of Energy confirmed this last night… and it’s all down to “Homeland Security”.

The US government has revealed that ethanol usage and energy efficiency had cut the country’s total share of its oil imports for the first time since 1977. (Note that’s not total imports by volume, it is the proportion of oil used that is imported).

It also said that the US’s foreign oil dependency was expected to fall from 60% today to 50% in 2015, before rising again slightly to 54% in 2030.

US oil imports made up 57.9% of demand in the first quarter, compared with 58.2% in the equivalent period last year. The Department of Energy said:

“The 1970s is the last time we saw any significant decline in net import dependency in the US. It shows that markets do work, policy changes do work, technology does work.” Energy security is a big theme in the US – and I reckon that this data will make it much more difficult to reduce biofuels subsidies. In fact, it is now easier to argue in the US that those seeking a cut in ethanol subsidies are acting in an unpatriotic manner.

This is bad news for food prices… but good for our investment in food.

Food price will stay high…

Whilst not specifically mentioning biofuels, the World Bank warned today that prices of food will stay high in the next two to three years.

“This is not a short-term phenomenon. We need to work on a new deal for food policy in order to address the short-term need while keeping in mind that it is going to take longer to alleviate the situation,” according to World Bank managing director Juan Jose Daboub.

The US remains in denial about its biofuels policy. Agriculture Secretary Ed Schafer said yesterday that the increased use of biofuels may have some small, short-term costs, but those do not outweigh the ultimate benefits of reducing the country’s dependence on oil.

The problem with this is that poorer people pay a higher proportion of their income on food and are therefore hurt more by rising food costs. These “small, short-term costs” mentioned by Schafer are significant and long-term in other parts of the world.

Subsidy is supposed to be a short-term solution to a problem. Its aim is to prevent any jarring of the economy. However, it’s going to take the US a very long-time to wean itself off imported oil – and the cost will be paid in rising food prices.

That’s why we’re in on an agricultural play that will take full advantage of this situation. This short term solution won’t be changing any time soon (now there’s an oxymoron for you) – and now is the perfect time to get in on this wave. Discover what this stock is right now…

Regards,

Garry White
Editor
Smart Commodities UK

Source: USA Prefers Driving To Eating