What caused the London power blackout?

Today’s Financial Times offers an interesting Op-Ed (registration and subscription required), here are two bottom lines:

First, since the 1990s the rate of investment in the British electricity grid has nearly doubled.

Second, British electricity is more reliable than ever before:

The halcyon days when ‘things were better’ never existed. Since privatisation, the number of power cuts has fallen by 10 per cent and the duration of those cuts has fallen by nearly a third.

OK, the author is Callum McCarthy, chief energy regulator in the UK, and he presumably has a vested interest in defending the status quo. And I don’t understand his convoluted take on overcapacity and price history, as I read McCarthy he is committed to both high and low prices at the same time, these equivocations make me more skeptical about his conclusions. Still, his perspective deserves wider circulation.

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