Power chiefs warn of massive blackouts

Power chiefs today warned that Britain faces widespread blackouts even more severe than the summer power cut that brought misery to millions of Londoners.

The blackouts will begin within four years, they predict, unless the Government intervenes to encourage electricity generators to build new power stations.

Unless urgent action is taken to replace a dozen "dirty" power stations facing the axe under environmental clean-up plans, electricity shortages of the sort that hit California in 2000, causing prices to double, could become "a regular occurrence".

Scottish Power chief executive Ian Russell is one of several power bosses predicting a crisis as older power stations such as Tilbury B in Essex, Kingsnorth in Kent and Didcot A in Oxfordshire come to the end of their useful lives.

Calling on Energy Minister Stephen Timms to reconsider his Department's hard line against intervention in the electricity industry, he said: "We need something to ensure there is enough generation over the long term"

In London at the end of August hundreds of thousands of commuters were trapped on trains, 250,000 underground. Others were stranded in lifts. At the time, Mayor Ken Livingstone called it "an absolute disgrace".

National Grid said an "oversensitive automatic protection relay" shut off supplies to three power stations on 28 August, leaving 410,000 homes and businesses without electricity and paralysing the Underground and train services.