“I think the grid is going to fall over this winter; I’ve bought a generator just in case.”

It’s a bit disconcerting hearing these words when you’re being shown around one of the country’s key gas-fired power stations by a senior engineer. You read similar views on a daily basis, but this conversation was two decades ago, when the penetration of renewables on the grid was a mere 2% – and 90% of that was hydropower. And in those intervening  20 years, a whole industry has grown up on predicting, with varying levels of authority, that everything will go kaput because of our “headlong dash to Net Zero.” And yet, 20 years on, it hasn’t (fingers crossed) come to pass.

Except it has, but it’s definitely not Net Zero to blame. We have blackouts every winter due to storms – you know the ones whose frequency and intensity is increasing as the climate heats. Each power failure makes a headline at the time (like yesterday – see pic), but, once connections have been restored, life just goes on as normal. OK, they’re smaller than a national grid failure, but they happen several times every year. No grave opinion pieces and editorials, no scare stories, no ‘reply guys’ flooding social media. It’s just seen as par for the course.

Part of this can be put down to the way we naturally perceive risk – we’ll ignore a large number of small scale impacts, but tremble with fear at the mere thought of one large very unlikely one. A more cynical point of view is there is little or no perceived political or financial gain from mitigating climate change, so no-one gets paid to write articles or post on social media.

I say perceived as we’ve known for decades that the costs of climate change impacts will be an order of magnitude bigger than the cost of avoiding it, but that doesn’t make for a good headline.