Introduction

This book is a study of crisis management in the electricity supply industry over about seventy years. The successive crises were all serious because of the industry’s extreme vulnerability. The most serious were a result of the coal strikes of 1972, 1974 and 1984–5 because they were organised by the National Union of Mineworkers, one of the most powerful trade unions at the time, and because that union sought to win its conflicts with the Coal Board by stopping electricity supply. The last of these strikes is inevitably attracting public attention this year, its tenth anniversary, but the book extends much further, revealing an electricity supply industry that, through changing times and forms of organisation, planned, adapted and improvised to fulfil its statutory responsibility to keep the lights on.