The only way to beat the blackouts is smart, clean, affordable energy | Caroline Lucas

The hugely expensive and polluting power stations the government is planning won't solve the systemic problems of an inefficient, over-centralised energy system

The National Grid's urgent request for extra generation this week has been widely hyped as an emergency, with the country at risk from blackouts.

On closer examination, it turns out that the National Grid has been calmly explaining that a "notification of inadequate system margin" (NISM) is not a last resort. It's simply part of the standard toolkit for balancing supply and demand, issued this time because of multiple breakdowns at some large power stations. Given that almost all the UK's coal-fired power stations are over 40 years old, it's not terribly clear why anyone would expect them to be particularly reliable in the first place. But even if, behind the hysteria, we didn't come that close to an outage, this episode should nevertheless serve as a wake-up call to a government beset by short-term, last-century thinking on energy.