With its growing “pick-your-own” agritourism operation, and herds of cattle and fields of wheat and soybeans, Gaver Farm is one of Frederick County’s agricultural gems. But Lisa Gaver, who runs the farm with her husband Mike, tells me that the joy of the harvest season has been mixed with uncertainty about the future. As it stands, the farm is along the projected route for the Maryland Piedmont Reliability Project (MPRP), a proposed high-voltage overhead transmission line that, if approved in its current form, would span roughly 70 miles through mostly rural Maryland, directly impacting hundreds of private landowners in Frederick, Carroll and Baltimore counties.

“If this is allowed to go forward,” Lisa says, “it’ll devastate our business.” The farm depends in no small part on the income that agritourism brings. Lisa worries that many guests won’t visit with the transmission lines looming overhead. She also worries that the development will affect what crops they can grow, and how they can grow them. “We’ve planned 50 years into the future, and we’re able to have our kids and grandkids working here with us for that reason,” she says. “Now we’re facing this. It’s just been so stressful.”

Inside the gates, the farm unfolds like a pop-up storybook. A boy pets a goat through a fence as the animal tugs insistently at his sleeve. A father and son shoot basketballs through peach hoops. A little girl wearing braids stands at her mother’s side, clutching her tiny green pumpkin by the stem. The place is alive, radiating with the shouts and giggles of children. “We were sold out both days this weekend,” Lisa says. “We worked all year long for that.”

***

The MPRP is at the center of a complex web of economic, energy and other policy choices made miles and miles from Gaver Farm’s rolling fields. The surge in demand for AI-driven cloud computing has spurred a data-center gold rush across the United States, and Northern Virginia has emerged as the world’s largest market, outpacing major global hubs like Beijing and Singapore by some metrics. Now, the energy demands of Virginia’s server farms are beginning to impact the regional electricity market. According to the Electric Power Research Institute, data centers consumed about a quarter of Virginia’s total electricity supply in 2023. “Unconstrained” demand for power in Virginia could double within the next 10 years, according to one recent policy report, with the data-center industry being the main driver.

PJM Interconnection (PJM) is the regional transmission operator (RTO) that coordinates wholesale electricity in parts of 13 states (including Maryland and Virginia), as well as in Washington, D.C. In late 2022, the organization noticed a spike in demand for electricity caused by the rapid development of the data center market in Northern Virginia and advanced planning efforts to balance load growth with reliability. Since then, it has approved a slew of projects across the mid-Atlantic, representing billions of dollars in new grid investment. That includes the $424 million Maryland Piedmont Reliability Project.

PJM has said the transmission line is essential to maintaining grid reliability as the demand for electricity rises — largely due to data centers — and older power plants are retired. Public Service Enterprise Group (PSEG), the energy company developing the transmission line, similarly says the project will expand transmission capacity and strengthen the grid. “Without these updates,” spokesperson William Smith said in an email, “Maryland may face severe grid congestion, threatening affordability and reliability for ratepayers.”

Opponents, including many elected officials, say the project is not about powering Maryland. Rather, they argue that the transmission line is just an elongated “extension cord” carrying energy from Pennsylvania to the data center hubs in the Northern Virginia suburbs, cutting through Maryland’s farms and forests along the way.

***

In July 2024, PSEG hosted its first round of informational meetings about the MPRP. That’s when Marylanders most likely to be affected say they first learned about the project. Though the energy company was considering a number of possible routes for the transmission line at that time, locals say there were already concerns about what it could mean for private landowners. There were fears that the project would cut through farms, historic properties, businesses, and conserved lands.

Jon Bisset leads River Valley Ranch, a faith-based nonprofit in the northeast portion of Carroll County. It serves more than 10,000 youth and adults annually through its summer camps, retreats, and equestrian programs. Bisset says that the ranch was in the middle of its busiest season, with hundreds of campers on site, when administrators became aware that the transmission line could affect the camp’s fields and forests. “The pace at which this is happening…  it’s just maddening,” Jon tells me as we sit at a picnic table near a stream that runs through the sun-drenched campus. “By the time we found out about it, we only had two weeks to file our appeal with PSEG about why we think this isn’t good for us. We had almost no time.”

Founded as a cowboy summer camp in 1952 by Jon’s grandfather and great uncle, the ranch is the kind of place where kids can leave the digital world behind and spend the week riding horses, tackling the ropes course and zooming over the trees on the 1,500-foot zipline. “There’s a real need,” Jon says, “for spaces where kids can unplug, be in community, and engage in activities that teach them something. We have personal, spiritual, emotional engagement with these kids through all the things that we do here, and in a lot of ways, they leave at the end of the week different than when they first arrived. This project… clear-cutting trees and installing a transmission line, it’s diametrically opposed to what we do here.”

Jon says that he’s not against AI, nor against expansion, but he does take issue with how the transmission line is being advanced. “What’s struck me about the whole thing,” he says, “is that data centers are driving all the decisions, and it should be the other way around. It just seems like we’re getting the cart before the horse and destroying a lot of property in the process.”

“My family doesn’t own this land,” Jon tells me, “but we’ve always understood ourselves to be stewards of this land. We’re using what belongs to God for His glory. We feel we have a moral obligation. That’s why we’re standing up to this.”

PSEG announced its proposed route in October 2024. Jon tells me if the project advances in its current form, it’ll cut through 17 acres at River Valley Ranch. He shows me the place, pointing from a field into a dense forest. “There’ll be a clear cut path right through there.”

***

In Maryland, construction of a high-voltage transmission line generally requires a Certificate of Public Convenience and Necessity (CPCN), a mandatory permit issued by the state’s Public Service Commission (PSC). The process includes a multi-step review, in which the applicant must notify affected local governments, provide opportunities for public comment, and submit a detailed application describing the project’s purpose, alternative routes, and environmental and socioeconomic impacts. If the CPCN is granted, then PSEG may, if necessary, initiate eminent domain proceedings to acquire land or easement rights from property owners unwilling to reach a voluntary agreement.

PSEG filed its CPCN application in late December 2024. Then, in March 2025, the Power Plant Research Program (PPRP), which acts as coordinator and technical reviewer for proposed transmission projects, said in a letter to PSC that while PSEG’s application did include a description of the MPRP along with an explanation of its purpose, it lacked adequate information about alternative project routes and specific environmental and socioeconomic impacts. “This is especially important for this Project given its significant length and impacts to land uses, which will be necessary for its construction and operation,” the letter said. “Without field-based information, [the program] cannot fully evaluate the Project’s impacts to Maryland’s socioeconomic and natural resources.”

In April 2025, PSEG filed the first of three lawsuits (as of this writing) in the US District Court for the District of Maryland, seeking temporary access to private properties for the purpose of performing the field studies. Though the developer offered landowners $1,000 to allow surveyors to enter properties for tests, a PSEG spokesperson said, more than 300 declined. Legal action was appropriate, the company argued, under a Maryland law that allows surveyors acting on behalf of “any body politic or corporate having the power of eminent domain” to apply to “a law court of the county where the property, or any part of it, is located” for an order allowing entry in certain circumstances. In the first two lawsuits, a federal judge granted preliminary injunction requests allowing PSEG to access hundreds of named properties to conduct surveys, so long as the company provides 24-hours notice to landowners. The third lawsuit is still pending.

Opponents to the transmission line say the ruling sets a dangerous precedent. They argue that, because the PSC has not yet determined whether the project is needed in Maryland, PSEG does not have statutory authority to enter private property. Stop MPRP, Inc., a non-profit membership organization that says its aim is to balance technological advancements with agricultural, environmental and housing preservation, stated in a post on its website: “This ruling forces landowners — many of whom have farmed and stewarded this land for generations — to allow private utility contractors on their property against their will. This ruling subjects hardworking Americans to strangers having unfettered access to their property… This is not just a local issue.”

PSEG has already started conducting land surveys on some of the properties to which it was granted temporary access through prior rulings. Even so, some of the impacted landowners have sought to overturn the federal district court ruling, saying that the decision has “sweeping provisions and consequences” that will affect them for the “months or years” during which Maryland Regulators are considering the power-line proposal. A brief filed in the 4th US Circuit Court of Appeals argues that, in granting PSEG’s request for a preliminary injunction, the district court “ignored substantial damage to Appellants, whose property rights will be trampled without even the promise of future just compensation”.

According to a procedural calendar released by the Public Service Commission, PSEG will be expected to file updated analysis including some field studies by March 2026. That will be followed by a series of public hearings and other procedural steps. The PSC isn’t expected to issue a final decision about whether to approve PSEG’s application for a Certificate of Public Convenience and Necessity for the project until March 2027 at the earliest.

***

Betsy McFarland and her husband Michael live at the end of a narrowing two-lane road in Frederick County’s Adamstown community. As I drive there, I spot a sign hanging from a neighbor’s garden fence that says “STOP MPRP: No Eminent Domain For Corporate Gain”. There are a dozen or so more signs posted in front of houses throughout the neighborhood.

From the McFarlands’ back porch, you can look out beyond the sycamores and oak trees and see Sugarloaf Mountain in the distance. Nearer, Bennett Creek hugs the edge of the forest, its waters flowing toward the flaxen fields of a neighboring farm and then far beyond it to the Monocacy River.

“Right there is where the powerline would go,” Betsy tells me, pointing into the woods very near to the spot where we’re standing. “It would run right between here and Bennett Creek.” The line, she says, would require an easement 150 feet wide, and could come as close to 50 feet of their house. “We would never want to leave, but if the power line comes, we feel like we won’t be able to stay.”

Betsy recalls a man who spoke at one of the earliest meetings. He said he’d moved with his family out West and was working on selling their house back in Maryland. He had a buyer, he told the crowd, but after the project was announced, the deal fell through. “That just sent all of us into a panic,” Betsy says. “For us, this property is our biggest investment.”

Betsy and Michael have been in this house for 20 years. They moved here from a suburb of Washington, D.C. because they wanted to spend more time in nature. “We fell in love with it,” Betsy almost sighs. “It’s like a slice of heaven.” “In the spring,” she says, “I can sit inside and hear baby eagles out here chirping. It’s just really special.”

But in the last year, Betsy laments, the place has started to feel like a paradise interrupted. There have been no visits from surveyors yet, but Betsy understands that they’re coming. “It feels like they’ve gotten permission to come on our land to get information to take our land,” she says, “like they’re coming here to gather more ammo to use against us.”

When I ask what the stakes are for her, Betsy turns contemplative. “If we win,” she says, “we get to keep what’s already ours.” She pauses to think before she goes on. “To be honest, if I were fighting this by myself, I don’t think I could do it. We really need each other. We all get frustrated, we all get overwhelmed, but we just try to lift each other up and keep going.”

Betsy is an active member of citizen-led group Stop MPRP, which has joined forces with farm and conservation organizations like the Maryland Farm Bureau, Preservation Maryland, and the Gunpowder Valley Conservancy in the push against the green-field route. Betsy says that the local opposition effort has sometimes felt like a second job, but she says it’s worth it.

***

As the MPRP has continued to make its way through Maryland’s regulatory process, it has been met with skepticism from state and local officials. Maryland Governor Wes Moore has shared what he calls “grave concerns” about the way the MPRP has been advanced. In a public statement released in late 2024, he said that Maryland “need[s] sustainable and cost-effective infrastructure to ensure the reliability of our grid and build the economy of the future in our state. But the approach must be one that puts people first”. Earlier this year, Moore was among nine governors who signed an open letter to PJM voicing frustration about reliability and the rising cost of electricity, alongside misgivings about the company’s leadership.

A number of Maryland state legislators have likewise expressed disapproval of the MPRP, and administrative bodies in all three affected counties — Carroll, Baltimore, and Frederick — have passed resolutions formalizing their oppositions to the development. Meanwhile, the Carroll County Government, Baltimore County, and Frederick County’s Office of the County Attorney have filed petitions to intervene as the Maryland Public Service Commission considers whether to grant PSEG’s request for a Certificate of Public Convenience and Necessity.

Carroll County has been especially staunch in its opposition. The Carroll County Board of Commissioners filed an amicus brief with the 4th US Circuit Court of Appeals on behalf of landowners. Then, in a joint letter to President Trump, county commissioners, along with Carroll County’s Delegation to the Maryland General Assembly, requested that the administration support alternatives to the MPRP, including the modernization and optimization of existing infrastructure, investment in distributed energy systems, and short-term energy generation for data centers including fossil-fuel based generation and small modular reactors to address immediate needs.

“I don’t want to be like so many people who only care about something that’s in their own backyard,” Commissioner Kenneth Kiler tells me on a Monday morning in his office in Westminster. “I went to high school here. My kids went to high school here. We don’t know everybody, but we know a lot of people, and a lot of people are going to be affected by this.” Commissioner Kiler, who serves as President of Carroll County’s Board of Commissioners, says that folks here “really work together”. He gestures around him as though the people he’s talking about are standing in the room with us. “There were people on the earlier routes who were not on the final route,” he says, “and now they’re fighting just as hard, because they care about their friends and neighbors.”

He tells me that he is strongly against the MPRP. “It doesn’t benefit us whatsoever,” he says. “It just runs through us. And that’s a shame.” And then there’s the issue of trust. “I think everybody in Carroll County is skeptical about this and they need some reassurance,” he says. “But instead of reassurance, with the way they’ve approached this, I think they’ve almost affirmed some of that skepticism.”

***

Back in Frederick County, Betsy introduces me to her neighbors, Matt and Zana Moran. The couple live just down the road from the McFarlands in a house they built themselves with materials they sourced from the land. “It’s truly amazing,” Matt tells me, “just one tree provided a quarter of the lumber we needed for the house.”

Matt’s father Frank bought this piece of property — some 40 acres — in the Seventies. Frank had moved around a lot as a boy, as his own father had served in the Marine Corps, and so he was looking or a green space to settle into and grow deep roots. When he found this place, he and his wife Terri built their home themselves. Their children, Matt and his brother Pat, used to wander for miles through the green space around the property.

When Matt and Pat were grown, Frank invited them to build their own homes here — he wanted this to be a place where they could raise their own families. Now, there are three generations here, joined together in this hamlet.

If the transmission lines are built along the planned route, they could pass within 120 feet of Frank’s house. Matt and Zana tell me that, because the house was so closely designed to coexist with the seasons of the forest, the clear-cutting required for the project could make the place unlivable.

Zana, who is quiet and thoughtful, says that she’s heartbroken for Matt’s parents. “They were really living off the land as much as they could. I’m just devastated for them and for people like them. This goes against their entire moral fiber, their entire life’s philosophy.”

“There’s a certain autonomy that you ought to be able to exercise on your own land,” Matt says. “There was a time when we never worried about closing gates, or putting up signs, or anything like that. But this has changed our neighborhood. It looks less welcoming. And it is less welcoming. Because we don’t want this here.”

Before I leave, we take a walk around the property with the Morans’ black dog. “You know,” Zana reflects, “there is value in new technology, and I see that, but that doesn’t mean the value of everything else is negligible. I think we need to slow down. We need to more reasonably make decisions, and really consider our values. What are we willing to give up? And what do we expect in return?”

The second time, the whole place went dark. The only illumination was the eerie glow of emergency lighting. Once again, the curtains closed, and the stage manager begged for our patience. After a couple of minutes, the house lights returned, but the hiatus dragged on until the final, apologetic, announcement that, after a total of three power cuts, the show couldn’t go on. Like the cast and crew, front-of-house staff coped perfectly, and as promised our tickets were refunded within hours.

Resorting to a local pub, our party discovered that the theatre over the road had cancelled their show before curtain up — again, because of power cuts. I later discovered that half a dozen West End shows had experienced power cuts that night. One of our group had recently been at Glyndebourne, which also had to cancel a performance because of power outages, prompting some snide commentary about that opera house’s lone wind turbine. 

Ironically, the report into March’s power outage that closed Heathrow Airport for a day had been published that very morning. So I became curious: was Glyndebourne’s often-mocked wind turbine unfairly blamed for the power cut that hit the opening night of Saul? Was our power outage a fluke, driven perhaps by the heatwave making unreasonable demands on the grid? Are theatres, with their energy-hungry lighting and special effects, particularly susceptible? 

Or is this a wider problem? Is the UK’s electricity supply becoming less reliable? That is a question which, it turns out, is hard to answer. Anecdotally, stories of power cuts lasting from a minute to a week seem to be more and more frequent. Small outages don’t even make the news: hardly anyone reported the show cancellations we experienced. But power suppliers give only generic answers, and theatre managers don’t want to comment at all.

We can piece things together, though. First, Glyndebourne. The opera house was not relying on its solitary wind turbine when it fell prey to power outages. Instead, said UK Power Networks, which maintains electricity networks across much of England, the outages were the result of a local fault. The half-dozen West End shows affected by power cuts the same night as ours were all in the same electricity distribution area, and that outage was down to a cable fault — rather than being weather-related. So the heatwave is off the hook.

But do theatres still — as they did back when I wielded a spanner and could tell you the catalogue numbers of my favourite colored gels — draw so much power from the grid that a poorly designed lighting rig can unbalance the substation?

The answer to that one is more complicated. 

Lighting technology has transformed in recent decades. LEDs have replaced most of the incandescent bulbs that would put out enough heat to burn a careless technician’s fingers. Rob Halliday, a stage lighting designer, calculated that the change could reduce the total energy demand for one performance by more than a quarter. The lighting for one musical could be done for less than 90 kilowatt-hours per performance — about the same wattage that Transport for London uses to transport 600 people for one kilometer. So it takes more electricity to get us all home than to entertain us.

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Perhaps more importantly for electricity suppliers, the energy demand has evened out, as peak power requirements have fallen to less than half the pre-LED levels. Curtain calls, when all the lights are blazing, are the moment of highest electricity use — but even if all West End shows had their curtain calls simultaneously, the local substations should be able to cope better than twenty years ago. 

On the other hand, Halliday pointed out to me, as theatre productions become more spectacular, with more special effects and dynamic staging, other energy-hungry equipment like winches and motors may be eating up the spare power. Then you have to add the ordinary building lighting, heating, bar and ice cream fridges, possibly air conditioning, and stage lighting starts to fade into insignificance. 

It nevertheless seems unlikely that theatres, compared to other public buildings, transport systems, and street lighting, are especially demanding of electricity suppliers. The latter are responsible for more than a quarter of local authority energy bills, which explains those authorities’ willingness to follow theatres in replacing older street lights with LEDs.

Which leaves me with my final question: was my party just unlucky, or is the UK experiencing more power outages? 

In the West End alone, Halliday tells me, “there have been a number of occasions I know about where there have been genuine power problems”. London is, after all, a tangle of tunnels, wires and pipes snaking around cellars and basements, with no definitive guide to what goes where. This is a tall order for anyone trying to maintain critical energy infrastructure, let alone repair it in a hurry. Many of the buildings are also old, with idiosyncratic wiring, though theatre wiring may be refurbished more regularly than, say, that of the Houses of Parliament. 

But on the other hand, it’s always easy to blame power when a problem is a technical one that’s specific to the building. Halliday tells me a story from decades ago: a failing show was closed shortly after opening for extensive rewrites and re-rehearsal, and “the excuse they gave to the public on that occasion was power problems”. A few days later, there were actual power problems in the building. “So we ended up with a generator parked outside, and the electricity board said, ‘Well, I’m sorry, we’re not covering the cost of this, because we read in the press that there were power problems, and you didn’t tell us.’”

UK Power Networks reassured me that “the electricity network is 99.99% reliable” — but that would leave a one-in-10,000 chance of failure at any time. And with millions of customers, that means plenty of room for problems. Halliday, like me, has the impression that UK power infrastructure is struggling to keep up with changing patterns of supply and demand. 

Decades of under-investment and planning delays have left the UK power grid out of date and sometimes struggling to cope. Old electricity power plants are shutting down faster than they can be replaced by new ones, leaving us regularly reliant on imported energy. Supply from intermittent renewable sources, requires different distribution infrastructure to keep the electricity flowing steadily when demand also fluctuates. Failure to regulate the frequency and voltage of power supply caused the massive Iberian Peninsula power outage earlier this year, according to a Spanish government report.

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May 2025 saw another power outage that hit multiple London Underground lines, on this occasion a National Grid cable fault that caused a fire at a substation. And of course the March substation fire caused Heathrow Airport to close for a day, with enormous impact on airlines and travelers, though no casualties. That catastrophic failure was traced to a known fault that went unrepaired for nearly seven years, compounded by the age of the substation and Heathrow’s assumption that such an event was a low-probability.

Are electricity suppliers complacent about the reliability of their systems? They maintain otherwise. UK Power Networks recently upgraded the Leicester Square substation to increase current reliability and future capacity. They’ve also adopted a “new technology” to reduce power cuts — consisting of steel support trusses for the poles carrying overhead power lines. You may giggle, but the power failure that hit Glyndebourne could perhaps have been prevented by such reinforcement. In general, suppliers are trying to anticipate and prevent unplanned power outages.

Nor are theatres content to relegate power outages to “low-probability events”. They don’t want to lose a single performance, says Halliday, so insurers insist on building redundancy into technical systems: sending the audience home, and refunding tickets, is the last thing they want. For every West End show’s lighting desk, “there’ll be a backup one sitting under the table, live, tracking along, ready to go. And other departments do that as well.”

Some theatres have back-up power supplies. Glyndebourne switched to battery storage when power outage hit Saul’s opening night, but in the absence of wind to turn the turbine, it wasn’t quite sufficient to finish the show. One newly-built London theatre has a generator on the roof, in case of power failure: clearly already enough of a problem in 2022 to merit an entire back up power system.

For Halliday, the question is why more venues don’t couple battery storage with solar panels, as festivals are starting to do. “I’ve become a bit obsessed with solar power,” he says. “It baffles me every time I walk past the National Theatre, for example, which is a big giant expanse of space that’s beautifully lit by the sunshine all day long. Why is that not covered in solar panels?”

So perhaps the unfairly maligned Glyndebourne windmill is not such a terrible idea. If the electricity distribution system fails, venues with their own generation and storage capacity will be able to say, “the show must go on”. Whether the transport system will still get us home afterwards is another question.

Earlier that day, a power outage originating in Spain had swept across the Iberian Peninsula and part of France. Traffic lights went down and trains stopped in their tracks, above and below ground. Given that the blackout lasted less than 12 hours, our response in hindsight appears slightly hysterical. But until that update at the supermarket, which we couldn’t verify in any case, we had no way of knowing it would be over so quickly. We had no mobile reception or Internet access of any kind, and so we couldn’t communicate with anyone outside the village.

Much as one would expect in an apocalyptic film, the information flowed just long enough to provide inklings of disaster. On WhatsApp, a fake news story claimed that Russia had launched a massive cyberattack across Europe. Speaking to neighbors, we heard that the cause was in fact some kind of atmospheric phenomenon, affecting not just southern Europe but also, bizarrely, Japan. Apparently, Portugal was going to be without power for days. Then, after an hour or two, our communication channels dried up. Before long, there was no water in the taps.

Anxiety spread quickly. Outside our village, the quiet country road was backed-up with drivers rushing to fill their tanks. Some of the local grocery stores were stripped bare by panic-buyers. We kept our nerve for most of the afternoon, reassuring one another with uneasy jokes and casual speculation. After a while, though, we began asking questions. What if the stores didn’t open in the morning? What if there wasn’t any water left on the shelves? Doesn’t so-and-so down the road have a cistern, a solar panel, a Starlink connection? And so we persuaded ourselves that, actually, we had better err on the side of caution. That’s how we ended up at the supermarket, where two girls stationed at a closed door asked if we had cash, before ushering us inside. That is the nature of radical uncertainty, as typically seen in a bank run: you know you are probably overreacting, but why take the risk?

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Above all, the blackout was a lesson in how utterly dependent modern society is on a product that we never see directly, and rarely think about: the constant, reliable flow of electrons through copper and aluminum wires. The incident has raised serious questions about the future of Europe’s electricity systems. To meet their environmental goals, European countries are trying to electrify large parts of their economies, including cars, household heating and industrial processes. Data centers to provide computing power will mean further, big increases in electricity demand. At the same time, Europe is rapidly switching to renewable energy sources, notably wind and solar, to provide that electricity, and in many cases is shutting down the coal, gas and nuclear-powered alternatives. According to one estimate cited by the Financial Times, government targets mean that electricity will be responsible for 70% of the continent’s energy by 2050, up from around 20% today. More than 90% of that electricity could come from renewables.

This growing dependence on electricity comes with significant risks, including sabotage. Those who suspected hostile actors to be responsible for Monday’s blackout were not merely paranoid. Since the escalation of the war in Ukraine, numerous power cables running under the Baltic Sea have been targeted, prompting Estonia, Latvia and Lithuania to disconnect from the Russian grid. Centralized electricity networks are appealing targets for terrorists and adversaries, since bringing them down can paralyze a society, and sow chaos in the process. Thanks to the digitalization of grids, cyberattacks are increasingly plausible, and are in fact being reported with growing frequency.

The shift to green electricity also brings dangers that governments have been slow to mitigate. Battery technology for storing wind and solar power remains ineffective. This means that electricity becomes scarce — and expensive — when there is no wind or sun, but it also means that renewables can, at times, produce too much energy relative to demand, endangering the stability of the grid. By contrast, the output of gas and nuclear plants can be closely controlled to maintain a balanced supply, and their turbines are better at smoothing over disruptions. Last week, at a London conference attended by 60 countries, the International Energy Agency raised these issues as threats to energy security. In a confidential report seen by Bloomberg, the IEA warned against the “premature retirement” of less volatile energy sources that are needed to stabilize grids.

It appears likely that such vulnerabilities triggered the blackout in Spain. The country is a leading adopter of renewable energy, with 72% of its electricity coming from wind and solar in the moments before the outage struck. According to Red Eléctrica de España, the national grid operator, the crisis began when a solar plant in the southwest of the country disconnected suddenly. The cause was probably an oversupply of electricity, combined with a shortage of traditional plants that could have lowered their output in response. And this was foreseen: Red Eléctrica warned in February that, due to a “high penetration of renewable generation”, “severe” outages could be on the horizon.

Though it lasted less than a day, Monday’s power cut will cast a long shadow over the politics of Net Zero. Last year, the Spanish government confirmed its decision to retire the country’s five nuclear power plants, a move criticized by opposition parties on the Right. Unsurprisingly, Spain’s Prime Minister Pedro Sánchez this week vehemently denied that over-reliance on green energy was culpable for the blackout.

An almost identical exchange played out in Britain, with Keir Starmer adopting the same line as Sánchez, while Conservative leader Kemi Badenoch claimed that renewables were likely responsible. The blackout will certainly frighten Starmer’s Labour government, which is pushing for 95% of electricity to come from renewable sources by 2030. After all, the British grid came dangerously close to failure in January, when weak wind and solar generation struggled to meet high winter demand for electricity. The day after the Iberian power cut, former prime minister Tony Blair broke with his party by publicly stating that an ill-conceived rush for Net Zero was inviting a backlash that could “derail the whole agenda” of decarbonization.

Meanwhile, electricity is also creating tensions between European countries. A system dominated by renewables will require a shared electricity market underpinned by an extensive network of transmission cables, allowing electrons to flow from areas with wind and sun to those without. That arrangement is still taking shape, but it’s already apparent that consumers don’t like paying more for electricity because demand is spiking elsewhere. In December, for instance, when Germany and Denmark suffered a period of dark doldrums — cold, cloudy, windless weather — their neighbors baulked at meeting the shortfall in generation. Norway’s governing parties pledged to sever its electricity connections with Denmark, while Sweden demanded that Germany restructure its electricity market to prevent competition from high-demand industrial regions — a request that was backed up this week by the organization overseeing Europe’s grids. The Swedish economy minister also took the opportunity to criticize Germany for voluntarily shuttering its nuclear energy capacity. In France, meanwhile, the opposition National Rally has pledged to exit from the EU’s system of cross-border electricity trading.

The problems posed by renewables are not insurmountable, but they require a measured and honest approach, not a blind dash for quotable statistics. I write this as a supporter of green energy in principle. We should begin with a recognition that, as the energy analyst Javier Blas writes, “grid design, policy and risk mapping aren’t yet up to the task of handling too much power from renewable sources”. Rather than closing down gas and nuclear plants, governments will, for the time being, need more of them to provide resilience and backup sources of electricity. They will need to limit the share of solar and wind generation to prevent grids from becoming fragile. And they will have to upgrade infrastructure to incorporate renewables properly, while improving storage and flexibility.

This will only work if the associated costs and risks are negotiated with the public. Ofgem, Britain’s energy regulator, announced on Wednesday that it would “need hundreds of billions of dollars in investment to build the capabilities needed to run a clean power system and decarbonize the economy”. These upgrades will add further costs to consumers. Seeing your electricity bill go through the roof — even as your local environment is overwhelmed by pylons and solar panels — is bad enough; it is considerably worse when your government refuses to acknowledge there are any downsides to the green transition.

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By Wessie du Toit

The political consensus around Europe’s sustainability agenda has been fraying for some time, but more major blackouts will prove fatal. Decarbonization has become so politicized that even if renewables are not actually responsible for the failures in question, they will be discredited by association.

An even more pressing question, though, is how to safeguard against our growing dependence on electricity more generally. The Portuguese town I visited during the blackout showed an impressive degree of resilience, because it could fall back on older technologies. Within hours, uniformed wardens were directing traffic at the gas station, where drivers did manage to refuel their cars. Here and in other local businesses, a key factor was that people still used and accepted cash. Now imagine a scenario in which the majority of vehicles, virtually all payments, and even central heating systems are dependent on electricity. Imagine that government and basic services have become heavily reliant on artificial intelligence software. Adaptation would be more difficult, and the sense of panic considerably greater.

In an ideal world, we would try to ensure that manual and mechanical systems don’t disappear from society entirely, providing a backup to digital and electrical technologies. But this seems overly optimistic. All the more reason, then, for governments to prioritize the robustness and security of our electricity networks, ensuring, among other things, that they stay ahead of the competition in the fast-evolving realm of cybersecurity. As for businesses and communities, a diesel generator or solar module for use in emergencies would not go amiss.

As I quickly realized during the outage in Portugal, what makes such situations different today compared with the recent past is the degree to which we have become conditioned to a constant flow of information. We are now so accustomed to engaging with the news on an hour-by-hour basis, if not a minute-by-minute one, that losing this link to the outside world can be profoundly disorienting and even panic-inducing. When a sudden, unexplained event ruptures the fabric of normality, it soon becomes apparent that the whole edifice of society rests on a fragile foundation of trust. Were a world of media junkies to be plunged into silence, that trust might not last very long.

What could this mean in practice? To put it simply, if he were so inclined, President Xi Jinping could, at the flick of a button, turn off the lights at 10 Downing Street — not to mention freeze Britain’s financial system and paralyse its hospitals.

Perhaps that’s why there has been such a concerted effort by British politicians in recent weeks  to address their country’s dependence on trade with Beijing. These efforts are certainly well-intentioned, but as someone who has spent years charting China’s silent campaign of global interference and subversion, I fear they could be too late. In my recent book, Hidden Hand, my co-author Mareike Ohlberg and I detailed the threat the Chinese Communist Party poses to Western democracy. Here, for the first time, a small but disproportionately concerning new aspect of that can be revealed: how China is slowly taking over Britain’s nuclear power and electricity systems.

On the face of it, you could be forgiven for wondering why Chinese investment is so troubling. Why should we care that its businesses are investing in Britain, when those from other countries — including a number of unpleasant ones — do the same? The answer is straightforward. China is different because its businesses can be, and are, used as an extension of the ruling Chinese Communist Party. Referred to as a “party-corporate conglomerate”, there is a deep intermingling of China’s business elite with the “red aristocracy” — that is, the Communist Party families that rule the nation. Even President Xi, who pledged to crack down on corruption following the CCP’s 18^th National Congress in 2012, has family members with secret offshore bank accounts and hundreds of millions in assets squirrelled away.

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At its heart, however, the party-corporate conglomerate is built on the strength of China’s powerful state-owned enterprises. While we in the West once believed that, under the auspices of “globalisation”, drawing China into the global economy would see independent private enterprise prevail, under Xi the opposite has occurred. In 2016, for example, President Xi declared that the party’s leadership is the “root and soul” of state-owned companies and they should “become important forces to implement” the decisions of the party.

More worryingly, the following year China’s parliament passed a law that obliges all Chinese citizens overseas to provide assistance to the country’s intelligence services if requested: Article Seven stipulates that “any organisation or citizen shall support, assist, and cooperate with state intelligence work according to law.” And that applies to heads of Chinese corporations as much as to any other citizen. If China’s shadowy Ministry of State Security tells the boss of Huawei in Britain to do some spying, then he is obliged to obey. Anyone who dared to refuse could be escorted back to China quick-smart — never to be seen again.

Such occurrences are, however, rare. Chinese companies have Communist Party cells active inside them — the secretary of the cell is the most powerful person in the company. After all, he (and it normally is a he) represents the masters in Beijing and can over-rule the company’s board. However, conflict between a company board and party cell is hardly common. In 2016, President Xi decreed that the positions of party secretary and chairman of a Chinese company’s board should be occupied by the same person.

All of this applies to the state-owned China General Nuclear Power Group (CGN), which owns a third of the nuclear power station being built at Hinkley Point and hopes to be involved in the construction of two more nuclear plants, at Sizewell in Suffolk and Bradwell in Essex. The personnel of CGN is typical of any CCP-sponsored company. Until a few months ago, its chairman in Shenzhen was a man called He Yu, who doubled as the secretary of the company’s Communist Party cell. He was instrumental in securing CGN’s investment in the Hinkley power plant.

His replacement, Yang Changli, was appointed secretary of the party committee and chairman of the CGN’s board in July 2020. As business executives, their aim is to advance CGN’s commercial interests, but as senior cadres of the CCP their first loyalty must be to the party.

Nor are He and Yang the only ones at CGN with disturbing ties to the CCP. Outside of China, Zheng Dongshan, the man who runs its UK subsidiary, has also been a member of the parent company’s “CCP Leadership Group”. However, before he arrived in Britain in 2017, “Comrade Zheng” took the precaution of resigning from his party positions. Even so, it’s safe to say that he still toes the party line. If Beijing asks CGN UK to do something, then it must — even if it could spell disaster for the UK.

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Allegations of its connections to the CCP probably explain CGN UK’s recent attempt to create an acceptable face for the company to the British public. In 2019, it set up a UK advisory board featuring knights of the realm, including former Chairman of Crossrail Sir Terry Morgan and once top civil servant Sir Brian Bender. Like Huawei’s local board, which bristles with titles (Lord Brown, Dame Helen Alexander, Sir Andrew Cahn, Sir Michael Rake), they are, in effect, there to help the company’s public relations.

And CGN needs all the good PR it can get. In 2017 a CGN engineer was jailed in Tennessee after he was convicted of enlisting US experts to transfer to CGN sensitive American nuclear technology with military uses. It clearly rattled the White House, which blacklisted the company two years ago, accusing it of stealing American nuclear technology. Only recently, FBI director Christopher Wray said that the bureau has around 1,000 active investigations into technology theft carried out for the benefit of China.

Of course, there is nothing to suggest that CGN has any plans to steal commercial secrets relating to Britain’s nuclear energy system. But it is still worth noting the recent warning by a senior US official to the UK government not to engage with CGN because the company is part of Beijing’s efforts to use civilian nuclear technology for military purposes. It is part, he explained, of Xi Jinping’s program of “civil-military fusion” ­— that is, to break down barriers between civil and military institutions to allow personnel and technology to be shared.

Meanwhile, the role of Chinese companies in keeping Britain’s lights on goes well beyond CGN’s role in nuclear energy. In recent years, they have also invested heavily in solar and wind power, the future of Britain’s energy supply. CGN itself owns two wind farms in Britain.

Perhaps more importantly, Chinese state-owned company China Huaneng Group is currently building Europe’s largest battery storage facility in Wiltshire. As Britain shifts to renewable energy, battery storage will be essential to the stability of the whole system. So who constructs it is a question that should concern us all.

And yet, true to form, the chairman of China Huaneng Group, Shu Yinbiao, is also the company’s Communist Party secretary. To be fair to Shu, he certainly isn’t as involved as the company’s former boss Li Xiaopeng, the “princeling” son of the former prime minister Li Peng, known as the Butcher of Beijing after he sent in the tanks to crush students protesting in Tiananmen Square in 1989. Li Xiaopeng, who remains on the board of China Huaneng, is now a top Communist Party official in Beijing, a member of the Central Committee of the CCP and Xi Jinping’s Minister of Transport.

However, the security risk of China’s investment in the generation of Britain’s electricity pales in comparison to the threat it poses to Britain’s electricity distribution system, the transmission networks that get the electrons from the power plants to the power points in your home.

Here, Britain already had a serious problem. When the London Electricity Board was privatised in 1990, it was bought by an American company, which was later sold to EDF, the French company, which in 2010 was bought by Cheung Kong Group. This Hong Kong conglomerate is owned by the legendary billionaire Li Ka-shing.

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The shrewd tycoon has kept Beijing at arm’s length. But he has also been willing to get into bed with the China International Trust Investment Corporation (CITIC), the huge state-owned conglomerate known for its links with China’s military and intelligence services. One Western intelligence expert wrote that CITIC was “swarming with secret agents”. True or not, by operating as CITIC’s “long-term ally” and sponsor, Li Ka-shing facilitated the CCP’s venture into global capitalism: CITIC now owns a vast property portfolio across Western capitals, including a high-end residential development in Mayfair.

Since then, Li Ka-shing has passed control of the CK Group to his son Victor Li, who has further embedded the CCP within the company. In 2018 he was appointed an executive member of the the Chinese People’s Political Consultative Conference, sometimes referred to as China’s upper house. A vital element of the CCP’s overseas influence operations, the Conference describes itself as “an organisation of the patriotic United Front of the Chinese people”.

But it is in Britain where Victor has reaped the most success. In addition to its monopoly on the supply of gas to the north of England and across Wales and southwest England, his CK Group also enjoys a monopoly on the supply of electricity to London through a company called UK Power Networks, the old London Electricity Board. It also controls electricity distribution in the south and south-east England.

Such a startling fact bears repeating: CK Group, with its close ties to the Chinese Communist Party, is responsible for supplying electricity to everything that makes London function — its road transport system, its rail network, its office buildings, ATMs and even the Bank of England. Imagine if CK Group were to be weaponised: all of these and more could suddenly grind to a halt. It’s a terrifying prospect, one that could have been plucked straight from a Hollywood playbook. All it would take is a phone call from Beijing, a flick of a button and much of Britain could descend into darkness.

Artificial intelligence might put paid to us too. But how? Until recently, there were two basic scenarios: one in which a super-smart computer decides the world is better off without humans – and turns against us, Terminator style; the other in which a powerful, but essentially mindless, AI system follows some poorly thought-out instructions to the letter – heedless of unforeseen and calamitous side-effects. This is the Magician’s Apprentice scenario, which Tom Chivers considers here.

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Now, thanks to a piece of timely research by researchers at the University of Massachusetts, Amherst, a third scenario presents itself – AI will kill us through global warming, because the neural networks used to train AI models use so much energy.

The findings are the subject of an MIT Technology Review article by Karen Hao:

“In a new paper, researchers at the University of Massachusetts, Amherst, performed a life cycle assessment for training several common large AI models. They found that the process can emit more than 626,000 pounds of carbon dioxide equivalent—nearly five times the lifetime emissions of the average American car (and that includes manufacture of the car itself).”

By way of further comparison, the average human being generates 11,023 pounds of CO2 in the course of a year, and the average American human being 36,156 pounds.

Machine learning is so energy hungry because it works through what Hao describes as “exhaustive trial and error.” This requires the application of colossal quantities of brute processing power – and therefore lots and lots of electricity.

We tend to think of digital technologies as belonging to the clean, green, ‘dematerialised’ economy of the future – completely different from the smoke-belching heavy industries of the past.

But cyberspace is an energy-hog too. For instance, it’s estimated that the data-processing tasks required to make Bitcoin work consumed 30 terawatt hours of electricity in 2017 – about the same as the whole of the Republic of Ireland. Meanwhile the global banking system consumes around 100 terawatt hours.

How much could AI add to the load? The comparison that the researchers make to the emissions of a car is alarming, but of course there are many more cars in the world (more than a billion) than neural networks. The question therefore is whether we can foresee a future in which artificially intelligent, machine learning systems are so numerous that they make a significant difference to the world’s carbon footprint.

Here we need to distinguish between the neural networks on which AI models are trained and the software products derived from that training. For instance the digital assistants that can (sort of) understand what you say to them are not using vast amounts of computer processing power to do their jobs, most of the hard work (of figuring out how to process human speech) has already been done in some lab somewhere, on an immensely more powerful (and energy-hungry) computer than what’s in your phone.

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However, these assistants are still very limited in their capabilities. Fast forward a few decades and the world might be full of super-sophisticated AI agents, that either replace or greatly enhance the work that people do. This would be an economy, indeed a civilisation, in which machine learning is ubiquitous and continuous.

While we spend a lot of time thinking about the impact of all that artificial intelligence on human society, we also need to think about the natural resources required to turn the global economy into a planet-sized learning machine. Of course, the environmental impact will be lessened if the electricity it all runs on is derived from renewable low carbon sources. So let’s hope that wind and solar power keeps on getting cheaper.

An expansion of machine learning could also help with balancing out the variable supply of renewable power. Because of physics, there’s a limit to how far electricity can be moved from where it’s generated to where it’s needed. So the power needed to light up a city, charge an electric car or run a factory, needs to come from a reasonably local source (at most, hundreds of miles away – not thousands).

These constraints, however, don’t apply to data. If you need some heavy-duty processing done, then where in the world it physically happens is not a primary consideration. The demand for processing (and the associated energy use) can originate in one place and be supplied from another. As long as we have flexible ‘cloud’ computing systems that can match supply and demand just about anywhere on the planet, then we should be able to exploit surpluses (and compensate for deficiencies) of renewable energy wherever they occur.

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However, we also need big leaps in the efficiency of machine learning technology – i.e. it must be able to achieve more with less processing capacity. This isn’t just for environmental reasons.

Karen Hao quotes Emma Strubell – lead author of the University of Massachusetts, Amherst research:

“The results underscore another growing problem in AI, too: the sheer intensity of resources now required to produce paper-worthy results has made it increasingly challenging for people working in academia to continue contributing to research.

“‘This trend toward training huge models on tons of data is not feasible for academics—grad students especially, because we don’t have the computational resources,’ says Strubell. ‘So there’s an issue of equitable access between researchers in academia versus researchers in industry.’”

This is an important point. Unless the resource efficiency of machine learning improves, then its rate of progress will be impeded and the direction of its development skewed to the objectives of those who can most afford the computer time and the electricity bills.

A technology that will remake the global economy and that could be a great leveller, would instead entrench existing inequalities.