James Watt: A separate condenser … allowed Watt to build steam engines that were more powerful, more efficient, more portable. ibid.
Queen Street Mill in Burnley: It’s home to over three hundred power looms, and it’s one of the first factories in the world. ibid.
By 1860 Lancashire produced half the cotton in the world. ibid.
Scientists were experimenting with Volta’s battery. ibid.
What Faraday had created here is the world’s first electricity generator. ibid.
The Savoy Theatre in London became the first public building in the world to fully exploit the wonders of electricity. ibid.
A golden age of electricity had begun. ibid.
The turbine is the last of our story of great inventions. ibid.
Take the Mail on Sunday’s report on the 1998 strike of electricians at the Jubilee Line Extension. ‘It’s the Winter of Discontent all over again’, it began, before describing strikers as ‘industrial gangsters’, ‘wreckers in donkey jackets and carrying placards’, ‘infiltrated by militant troublemakers’ and ‘surrounded by burly pickets’. (How do you infiltrate electricians? Do you hire a box of fuses and wander round muttering, ‘tut-tut, someone’s made a right mess of this’? Mark Steel, Reasons to be Cheerful
A massive and well coordinated cyber attack on the electric grid could devastate the economy and cause a large-scale loss of life. American Blackout, Dr Richard Andres, 2013
Reports are coming in of a massive grid failure that has taken power out along the east coast of the United States. ibid. Fox News
Nikola Tesla … catapulted our civilisation into the new age. The use of alternating current, radio, fluorescent lighting, remote control, and robots – a total of 700 patents. Phenomenon: The Lost Archives s1e9: The Lost Lightning: The Missing Secrets of Nikola Tesla
Tesla’s laboratory mysteriously burns to the ground. ibid.
Tesla promises … free energy for everyone. ibid.
The process of opting-out of your smart meter is like being bullied by kids at school. The Epic Saga of a Smart-Meter Opt-Out, 46:43 Youtube 2017
A waste … costing more not less, wasting more energy than they save, and even that the meters are an unjustifiable and unnecessary intrusion. ibid.
It’s sending out very high pulses. ibid.
Multiple hoops that you have to jump through in order to actually opt out. ibid.
Between $169-200. ibid.
Two Naperville Women Arrested After Trying To Block ‘Smart Meters’. ibid.
‘You will be required to pay other fees and charges …’ ibid. letter from electricity supplier
And left us there with no meter and no power in December in the cold with children. I was not a happy person that day. ibid.
We were lucky our house hadn’t burnt down. ibid.
I have to pay out of hours fees on top of their mistake … You don’t even know how much it is. ibid.
We’re in bureaucratic hell. ibid.
As the lights went out on the west coast, Enron’s wholesale services revenues quadrupled from $12 billion to $48 billion and double again three months later. The 2000s: The Platinum Age of Television VI, television news, Sky 2018
Who was responsible for the downfall of Enron? Only a few years ago Enron was the nation’s seventh largest corporation. Enron: The Smartest Guys in the Room 2005, written McLean & Elkind & Gibney
Ken Lay and Jeff Skilling had built their own plush state rooms. They were known as the smartest guys in the room. Captains of a ship too powerful to go down. ibid.
News of shredding at Enron raised more questions. ibid.
20,000 employees had lost their jobs. ibid.
In Washington, Lay became part of a new crusade to liberate businessmen from the rules and regulations of government. ibid.
George Bush senior helped secure billions in government subsidies for Enron International. ibid.
In 1987 two oil traders made bets for Enron on whether the price of oil would rise or fall ... Enron Oil always seemed to win. ibid.
At the board meeting the auditors told Lay that [Louis] Borget and his traders were manipulating earnings, destroying daily trading records and probably gambling way beyond their limits. ibid.
Lay encouraged his traders to gamble more. ibid.
Enron would become a kind of stock market for natural gas ... Transform energy into financial instruments that could be traded like stocks and bonds. ibid.
Market to market accounting allowed Enron to book future potential profits on the very day the deal was signed. ibid.
‘The insiders had sold off a billion dollars of their stock in the preceding several months.’ ibid. Bill Lerach, attorney for shareholders
Though Lou Pai flew away from Enron with $250 million the divisions he left behind lost a total of nearly $1 billion but Enron managed to disguise that fact. ibid.
Enron mounted a campaign to capture the hearts and minds of stock analysts. ibid.
The game was called Pump and Dump. Top execs would push the stock price up and then cash in their multi-million dollar options. ibid.
Enron had vast natural gas operations all over the world. They had cost billions to build and most were performing terribly. ibid.
The analysts weren’t analysing at all; they were willing to believe virtually anything Enron told them. ibid.
‘Enron has created the market to buy and sell bandwidth like a commodity. Ask why.’ ibid. Enron advert
Enron’s stock soared 34% in two days. ibid.
When Enron announced its latest plan to trade weather, people wondered whether it was good science or science fiction. ibid.
[Andrew] Fastow had to figure out a way to keep the stock price up by hiding the fact that Enron was thirty billion dollars in debt. ibid.
Traders soon discovered that by shutting down power plants they could create artificial shortages that would push prices even higher. ibid.
The year-long energy crisis would cost the state of California thirty billion dollars. ibid.
Ken Lay did have easy access to the Bush administration. ibid.
Jeff Skilling abruptly resigns. ibid.
The SEC launched an investigation when the Wall Street Journal published articles revealing Fastow’s murky deals. Enron announced massive financial restatements. ibid.
Enron’s accounting firm Arthur Anderson had begun destroying its Enron files. On October 23rd Anderson shredded more than one ton of paper. ibid.
Enron declared bankruptcy. ibid.
The truth about Britain’s electric car revolution. With pump prices at a record high, driving green has never been more popular. But we reveal that hundreds of charging points aren’t working. We discover your new hybrid could be worse than a diesel on some harmful emissions. And will a second-hand electric car keep you on the road? Is Britain really ready for the switch to an electric future? Dispatches: The Truth About Electric Cars, Channel 4 2021
‘The VOCs [Volitile Organic Compounds] that we found are in notable quantities.’ ibid. emissions analytics company
43% of all chargers are in London and the south-east. ibid.
The government had declared we must offset all carbon emissions by 2050. To get there, we’ll have to make some big changes, but surely there’s one we should be looking at sooner rather than later: electric cars. Should I Buy an Electric Car? Channel 5 2022
Thus far only 2% of 39 million cars in the UK are electric. ibid.
We know that costs are coming down and that charging networks will be improved. ibid.
Our new prime minister in facing a national crisis. What will Liz Truss do about soaring energy bills? Tonight, we investigate companies cashing in. And the extraordinary profits being made. While vulnerable families are pushed to the brink. Panorama: The Energy Crisis: Who’s Cashing In? BBC 2022
The crisis in the energy market has delivered a windfall for the energy producers. ibid.