Back to the future

This Guardian article is a really good bookmarkworthy guide to the nuke power debate. In it there's this interesting remark which really opens up one of the issues that I have been vexed about for some time. "One of the great failures of Britain's electricity market is that the companies which supply households with electricity compete to sell electricity at the lowest price, rather than competing to power, heat and light our homes at the lowest price. It's as if restaurants competed to stuff customers with the cheapest possible food without either party noticing or caring that, each time, two-thirds of the meal was left on the plate."
That last simile is worth remembering. We need to change the structure of our power supply markets from supply of a commodities to the offering of services to maintain warmth, light and the ability to run gadgets. In that kind of market it starts to make sense for a company to offer you a treadmill for your health, warmth and to generate some domestic power, for example.
Guardian Unlimited | Special reports | Back to the future: