The National Grid

yes, i noticed that national grid, which connotes electricity to me, was the body whom i had to ring to report smell of gas in the street.
i was often reporting this, after years ago hearing of a block of flats in putney destroyed by a gas explosion. people died.
at least one person said they had indeed smelt gas passing that building about half an hour earlier, en route to work.
anyway at one time i was reporting so often that i thought they might think i was some kind of hoaxer.
but they sent out someone to go probing between pavings, every time. and often digging would ensure.
my relative said they ought to pay me a retainer for the maintenance of my nose.
just realised, haven't called them for years. declining abilities?

I think many people are misunderstanding this story. National Grid originally just operated the electricity grid and was privatised in the 1980s along with the rest of the electicity industry. So it is not now governtment owned and hasn't been for over 30 years.

In 2002 it bought a company called Transco which owned and ran the gas transmission system. Transco was originally part of the nationalised British Gas, which was privatised as one large industry wide company in 1986, but split into 3 companies in the early 1990s. Transco being one of them.

Over the last few years National Grid has been selling off the gas transmission system, bit by bit. This new sale is of the remains of the gas transmission system it still owns. National Grid still owns all the electricity transmission network

It has now gone back to being a company whose prime business is distributing electricity. The main company, National Grid has not been sold off.

Looking at it long term, this is an astute business move. Our move to carbon free energy and away from hydrocarbons, means that one of two things will happen to the gas transmission system. Either, if gas consumption is reduced or stops and is not replaced, NG would be lumbered with managing a hugely sophisticated and potentially hazardous and very expensive transmission system, which is producing less and less income, or gas could be replaced by hydrogen as a fuel and it could transmit hydrogen around the country, but adapting the current gas transmission system to hydrogen transmission would be a hugely expensive and difficult job and there is no guarantee it will happen, so NG is being quite canny about offloading, what could possibly be , in the future a horrendously expensive white elephant.

NG has got a lot of money for it and with electricity being the fuel of the future. It now has a huge sum of money to invest in extending and improving the electricity grid.

So far, so good, but this is where it turns nasty - it is who NG have sold the gas transmission system to. They have sold it to Macquarie’s asset management arm and British Columbia Investment Management Corp. MQ is a large firm of venture capitalists with an unsavoury reputation.

More importantly, these venture capitalists, like many of the sovereign wealth funds are groups with large capital funds who buy up companies, not to build them and improve them, but milk them for everything they can and load them with debt. - and this is very bad news indeed. Bad news for the consumer, bad news for the country.

Here's the Sky News report on it:

news.sky.com/story/national-grid-slammed-for-4-2bn-sale-of-the-national-silver-to-foreign-investor-12576739

I feel utterly depressed by the damage being done to so much of which we were rightly proud, and could rely on.

Katie59

Madness, handing our basic infrastructure to foreign companies

Worse than foreign companies is foreign governments!

EDF is owned by the French state - we privatise our utilities to allow a foreign government to take control.

It gets more depressing with every day that passes. This government is completely destroying the UK that I have lived in all my life.

And very few people seem to care.

Madness, handing our basic infrastructure to foreign companies

I think you find this Australian company is backed by the Chinese, so ultimately it’s the Chinese who own our national grid.