What if we cared about the future?

Robin McAlpine

London is due many thanks to Joseph Bazalgette. As you may know, he was the man who designed London's sewer system, and he did something which is unimaginable now – he future-proofed it. He worked out the size of the sewers London needed, concluded London would get bigger, concluded sewers shouldn't be built in two goes and so simply doubled the size.

The outcome of this was the Swinging Sixties didn't need you to wade through sewage to get down Carnaby Street. Had he not over-specified the sewers, they would have reached overflow point by the middle of the 20th century. Now? In Scotland we can't successfully build a school big enough for the children already at it.

What I want to write about here is the mindset that says 'I want to leave a positive legacy for the next generation' and the mindset that says 'to hell with it, the next generation can deal with it'. Which are we? Not the former. Joseph Bazalgette would never get anywhere near interview stage if Scotland put a contract for a new sewer system on its procurement portal today. 

I was thinking about this because of a daft laddie conversation with someone who knows a lot more than me, and an email in response to a previous newsletter piece. Both were about the National Grid which is about to get a major upgrade to facilitate decarbonisation of electricity supply. Common Weal has been doing a lot of policy work on this (major paper to publish soon) and one of our readers is going to be stuck with the consequences.

Our reader is getting a new array of mega-pylons in her immediate area. These are enormous and it's a stretch to find much beauty in them. But we need that copper up there because we need to get that wind energy into the grid. This is what prompts my questions.

I asked someone who used to run a national electricity grid why we didn't just bury the cables. The answer is easy – it costs three times as much. OK, but about a third of the total cost of our electricity grid is maintenance on cables. Of course it is – they are comparatively thin wires strung way up high in a stormy country.

Ah but, said my expert, there would be plenty maintenance of underground cabling too. I asked why? The answer (as I understand it) is that thin cables like that are still vulnerable, as are all their junctions and connections. Aye, but why make them thin? You need to do that if you're hanging them 50 metres in the air and weight is a big issue, but not if you bury them.

So make the cabling thicker and you'd have less maintenance, though of course this increases the cost further. But if you don't need to squeeze your electricity down thin cables, do you need to use copper? Not really. Aluminium has 60 per cent of the conductivity of copper (so you lose a bit more energy along the cables) but it is a quarter of the price of copper and is much lighter to transport.

So the rule is that you'd struggle to run a grid from aluminium strung out between pylons, which is why we don't do it. But you don't have that restriction in the ground. Putting thick aluminium cabling underground would be more expensive than hanging copper from pylons, but it would be much more durable, would require much less maintenance and would be able to cope with rapidly increasing demand in the future if we have not predicted our future use accurately.

The conversation got even more technical from there so I won't go on because I'll misrepresent the arguments. The point is not that I've come up with a brilliant wheeze to 'solve electricity' that no-one else has thought of. It might not be a good idea for other reasons. But this is something like what I think our electricity grid would look like if it was being designed by a Joseph Bazalgette character.

The outcome would be a grid with perhaps three times the capacity of the one we are building now but for something like same price as if we were putting that one in underground rather than over pylons. And without lightning, wind, landslides, birds and all the rest, the maintenance bill would be negligible (for the transmission side of things – distribution is different, as I keep being reminded...).

What we're doing is leaving ourselves a bigger bill tomorrow and the day after, and an even bigger bill for our children, and if there is any need to expand capacity in 30 or 40 years we leave a much bigger bill for our grandchildren. Oh, and the future-proofed method doesn't spoil beautiful views or anger people who have to live with the infrastructure. There is no big charitable fund to buy community consent for pylons like there is for wind farms.

The most acute example of our 'patch it up and make do' approach must surely be the Rest and Be Thankful where, seemingly to avoid one big engineering bill we have been pursuing smaller-scale project after smaller-scale project to prevent landslides closing the road (£16 million just for consultants...). They have failed, but they have still accumulated a cost that could almost certainly have built a tunnel in the first place. Which would have been Job done.

I've been thinking about this a lot of late. For my own entertainment I have been building an eco-utopia in my head (yes, I know...). One of my conclusions is simple; a good society is a low-maintenance society. You'll always need maintenance and when it needs done it needs done properly.

But if you build everything in a shoddy way then in truth you spend its lifecycle not so much maintaining it as repairing and repairing the poor quality work. And by shoddy I don't just mean not fit for purpose, I mean built in a way that it might be fit for purpose at first but everyone knows it won't still be fit for purpose by the end of its reasonable lifespan.

So if you spend just a little more at the outset to produce a better outcome, in the long run it almost certainly saves money, time and effort. But (and this is one of the fundamental problems with neoliberal capitalism) it may not save you money. It might be the next generation that benefits. The neoliberal assault on the idea of capital borrowing is the problem.

We still behave as if infrastructure which should be built to survive a hundred years ought to be paid for in ten. It's almost like we're saying 'sod my grandchildren – why should I pay tax to build a school big enough so that when their kids go there is a desk for them?', or 'to hell with the 2050s, if they want electricity they can redo all the grid at their own expense'.

It is the stupidity of money, the corrosive mess that is the financialisation-of-everything, the reductive failure of short-termism. It is exactly the same principle behind our disposable consumerism – buy a less good thing that you'll need to replace three times over the same time that one thing costing 30 per cent more would keep working.

It is the false effect of money. A million pounds can buy you a carbon negative, close-to-passivhaus-standard terrace of five houses or it can buy you a trip into space on a commercial rocket. And the day after you come back from your space trip, the houses are still there. They're still there 50 years later.

Money-is-money-is-money, right? But the things you buy with money behave very differently. Some have intrinsic value that endures, some have intrinsic value that increases, some have intrinsic value that disappears. But the money is the same. 

So in this financialised world it makes 'sense' to have the Scottish Futures Trust which is there to find clever-clever financial tricks and schemes to build public infrastructure in the private sector on a cost-saving basis. In a sane world you'd design infrastructure to be as future-proofed as possible and you'd spread the cost over its lifetime, without even thinking about it, because it is a real, meaningful capital investment with real, meaningful returns over its duration.

After all, that's what the Victorians did and there is so much to thank them for. Us? Really, what do you think our children will thank us for building? Probably that one bridge, certainly not the hospitals or many of the schools or sports centres or the electricity grid. Instead they're going to look at what we did and think 'those tight-fisted bastards left it all on us'. 

It isn't much of a legacy, is it? The economics don't make sense, the finance doesn't make sense, the social and economic impact don't make sense – and yet still we build a substandard future. Expensive-to-maintain electricity pylons that do so much to impact on parts of rural Scotland do not need to be there. There is a better option, if we were a better generation.

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