A third winter, planned rather than survived

Three winters in, the response had become a method rather than a scramble. That is worth recording, because a method can be improved and a scramble can only be repeated.

Four elements carried it. Electricity imports across the European interconnection, available because of a decision taken in three weeks in March 2022. Distributed generation installed at critical loads — hospitals, water utilities, heating plants — so that a strike on central capacity does not take a district off supply. Physical protection engineered around the substations that matter most. And spare autotransformers, breakers and switchgear held in stock in advance rather than sourced under emergency conditions.

What partners funded

All four, in different proportions, alongside the repair crews and the fuel. The Energy Community support fund and bilateral donations financed equipment; the interconnection was an engineering and regulatory achievement rather than a financial one.

The honest note

None of this made the winter comfortable. There were outages, they were sometimes long, and households and businesses planned around published schedules. What it did was make the winter survivable and predictable, which are different things from comfortable and are the things that matter.

I ran a business through three of these now. The first was improvisation, the second was preparation, and the third was routine. Routine is what you want.