Three Wise Men, Zero Inertia

With apologies to TS Eliot…

A cold coming we had of it,
Just the worst time of year
For Dunkelflaute, and such a still one
The cold deep, and the weather sharp
The very dead of winter.
And the ministers restless, decisions delayed,
Budgets soften, like melting snow.
There were times we regretted
High system margins and abundant firm power
Frequency stable, inertia high.
Then regulators cursing and grumbling
And running away, and wanting the wind to blow and hard,
And the lights winking out, demand control in effect
And the cities hostile and people unfriendly
And the last gas plants open are charging high prices
A hard time we had of it
At the end we preferred the lost reactors,
To green delusions
With the voices ringing in our ears, saying
That this was all folly.

Then at dawn we came down to a new consultation
Weak, with wishful thinking, smelling of desperation
With a battery dead  and a windmill still in the darkness
And pylons on the low sky,
And an old engineer slinks away from the office.
Then we came to a control room with ancient broken software
An office lit with vision statements, a bright-green new future
A grid without any spinning mass,
But there was no information, of how it would function
We pressed on, wondering if was always so weird
Finding the place; it was in no way, satisfactory.

All this was a long time ago, I remember
Would I could do it again, but set down
This set down
This: were we led all that way for
Birth or Death? There was a Birth, certainly,
Of a world without evidence and no shadow of doubt
But Death too, the quiet death of prudence,
Hard and bitter agony for us, blackouts and cuts.
We returned to our places, these fiefdoms
No longer at ease in the net zero assumptions,
With an alien people clutching their gods.
I should be glad of another way.

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