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Language: en

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Here, below London, 32km of new tunnels are
nearly finished.

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But these aren't for people: they're for power.

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Cables carrying 400,000 volts will run through
here,

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supporting the city as it keeps growing

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and keeps demanding more and more electricity.

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This project cost a billion pounds,

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all to keep the lights on.

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So how did we get to this?

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Back in the 1920s, electricity was generated
by hundreds of small companies

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in towns and cities across the country.

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They were all different and mostly incompatible:

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London alone had 24 voltages and 10 frequencies.

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So if you moved to the next street over,

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you might have to replace all your light bulbs.

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If you had any light bulbs, that is:

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the cost of electricity was out of reach of
nearly everyone.

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Now the answer might have been to do what
other countries in Europe were doing:

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set up and enforce standards, regulate prices,

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maybe even nationalise the power companies.

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And bring the price down for everyone --

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people and business. Good plan in theory,

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but the trouble was that the Prime Minister
at the time was Stanley Baldwin,

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and he led the Conservative party. Politically,

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he couldn't just assume control of private
corporations!

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That was socialist.

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That was something that the Other Side did.

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So the solution was a very clever and very
British compromise:

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the National Gridiron, later just National
Grid.

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The Central Electricity Board,

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backed up by the government and run privately,

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would construct and own the central infrastructure.

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It would build a network of transmission lines
sweeping across the country.

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The Grid would reduce the risk for the private
generating companies

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and let them reach a much, much, larger market.

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If they wanted to connect and reach everyone,

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they had to meet the Grid's standards for
frequency,

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for voltage, and for reliability.

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The greatest story I found while I was researching
this is that

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originally, there were six separate grid areas

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spread all around the country, all run individually.

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It was judged too risky by their managers

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to actually connect them all into one National
Grid.

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But it was theoretically possible.

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Sometimes two or maybe even three of those
grid areas were connected

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to help out if one power station somewhere
went down.

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So on the night of 29th October, 1937, without
any permission,

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the engineers in the control rooms quietly
decided

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to connect the whole country together for
an hour or two

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and see what would happen.

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And it worked. And a year later,

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even their managers agreed: it was the only way

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to make sure the lights stayed on everywhere.

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And so while the level of regulation,

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and the level of privatisation,

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has changed over the years --

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as it has in pretty much every country in
the world --

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and while the technology has developed to
the point

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that instead of laying transmission lines,

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we are now in billion-pound tunnelling projects
60m under London,

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that mostly-private grid is what we still
have today.

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It's listed on the London Stock Exchange.

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If history had turned out differently,

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perhaps this tunnel would have been a government
operation:

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but even if it was,

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we'd have still needed this to keep the lights
on.

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Thank you very much to the National Grid

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and all the folks who've helped bring me down
to the Power Tunnels,

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along with Geoff from Londonist,

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who's done a video about these tunnels themselves

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and all the infrastructure around me.

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Go check that out on his channel!

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