White House Chronicle

News Analysis With a Sense of Humor

Wind of Change Challenging Utilities

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On Feb. 3, 1960 in Cape Town, British Prime Minister Harold Macmillan shook up what was still the British Empire in Africa by telling the Parliament of South Africa that “the wind of change is blowing through this continent.”

His remarks weren’t well received by those who that thought it was premature, and that Britain would rule much of Africa for generations. The British ruling class in Africa – the established order — was shaken.

But Macmillan’s speech was, in fact, a tacit recognition of the inevitable. It was the signaling of a brave new world in which Britain would grant independence to countries from Nigeria to Botswana and Kenya to Malawi. Britain would not attempt to hold the Empire together. His speech was seminal, in that Britain had signaled that things would never ever be the same.

To me, the appearance of investor and entrepreneur Elon Musk at the Edison Electric Institute’s annual convention in New Orleans was a “wind of change” moment for the august electric utility. It was a signal that the industry was coming to terms, or trying to come to terms, with new forces that are challenging it as a business proposition in a way that it hasn’t been challenged in a history of more than 100 years.

But whereas Britain could swallow its pride and start a withdrawal from its former possessions, the electric industry faces quite a different challenge: How can it serve its customers and honor its compact with them when people like Musk, who is the non-executive chairman of the aggressive company SolarCity, and a passionate advocate of solar electricity, and Google are moving into the electric space?

At EEI’s annual convention, Musk didn’t tell his audience what he thought would happen to the utilities as their best customers opted to leave the grid, or to rely on it only in emergencies, while insisting that they should be allowed to sell their own excess generation back to the grid. Musk also didn’t venture an opinion on the future of the grid — and his interlocutor, Ted Craver, chairman and CEO of Rosemead, Calif.-based Edison International, didn’t press him.

Instead Musk talked glowingly about the electrification of transportation, implying — but not saying outright — that the electric pie would grow with new technologies like his Tesla Motors’ electric car.

The CEOs of EEI’s board were ready for the press by the time they held a briefing a day after Musk’s opening appearance. They spoke of “meeting the challenges as we have always met the challenges” and of “evolving” with the new realities. Gone from recent EEI annual meetings was CEO talk of their business model being “broken.”

The great dark cloud hanging over the industry is that of social justice. As the move to renewables becomes a flood, enthusiastically endorsed by such disparate groups as the Tea Party and environmentalists, the Christian right and morally superior homeowners, and companies like SolarCity and First Solar, the poor may have difficulty keeping their heads above water.

The grid, the lifeline of U.S. social cohesion, remains at threat. Utilities are jumping into the solar business, but they have yet to reveal how selling or leasing rooftop units — as the Southern Company is about to do in Georgia — is going to save the grid, or how the poor and city dwellers are going to be saved from having to pay more and more for the grid while suburban fat cats enjoy their sense that they’re saving the planet.

My sense is that in 10 years, things will look worse than they do today; that an ill wind of change will have reduced some utilities to the pitiful state of Amtrak — a transportation necessity that has gobbled up public money but hasn’t restored the glory days of rail travel.

People like myself — I live in an apartment building — have reason to fear the coming solar electric world, for we will be left out in the cold. The sun will not be shining on those of us who still need the grid. It needs to be defended. — This column was previously published in Public Utilities Fortnightly.

Tea Party Inspires Memories of Another Time

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I should feel quite at home at the tea parties. I was present at the last round of them. It was another country and another time, but the anger was as genuine, the sense of betrayal by the political class was as real, and the idea of an endangered heritage was as painful.

Also, then as now, there was a certain disconnect from reality.

The place of these tea parties was throughout the dwindling British Empire. There, middle-aged people, who had spread the concept of British exceptionalism and borne the Second World War, felt everything they had built and fought for was slipping away.

What was seen as a terrible leftward drift was opposed virulently by a phalanx of patriotic organizations, but most notably the League of Empire Loyalists, founded in 1954.

The Loyalists were good yeomen who loved the Britain they believed had existed and was endangered, along with the position of Britain as the world’s dominant power. They believed in Britain’s special writ to civilize the world, police it and sometimes settle it. Compared to the militarists of the 18th and 19th centuries, these were soft imperialists but believers nonetheless, held together in a loose federation throughout the British colonies and dominions.

In Britain, the Loyalists formed a political bloc on the far right of the Conservative Party. They were on the fringe in Britain, but they were taken seriously in the colonies as a legitimate expression of wide discontent with the decline of British traditions, British leadership in business and British moral authority.

Loyalists inside and outside Britain railed against politicians in London, much as today’s Tea Party activists rail against Washington.

In Britain, support for the Loyalists was limited because so much had already changed. The British public had already accepted the dissolution of the empire; after all, its jewel, India, was gone.

Although the Loyalists raged against non-white immigration into Britain, this had not yet been identified by most people as a society-changing occurrence. Mainline British Conservatives feared that the leader of the loyalists, Arthur Chesterton, had been a fascist sympathizer in the 1930s. Even though he had broken with the fascists and written a book about it, he was still suspect.

Where I was in Rhodesia, the Loyalists were seen as the hope for saving Britain, of returning her to greatness and somehow turning the clock back to “the good old days,” whenever they were imagined to have been. Many, including my parents, believed the Loyalists would bring about a glorious new Elizabethan era under the young Elizabeth II, who had been crowned a year before the founding of the League of Empire Loyalists.

For those outside of the British Isles, the league was back to the future. But in London and across Britain, the Loyalists were just a right-wing pressure group (known in Britain as a “ginger group”), claiming support from a handful of Conservative Members of Parliament but shunned by the Tory leadership. In the United Kingdom, they were sidelined as “Colonel Blimps,” a satirical comic figure who ridiculed the conservative middle class and had been enshrined in criticism by George Orwell.

The League of Empire Loyalists lasted 10 years, but its aspirations were sealed after six years with Prime Minister Harold Macmillan’s “wind of change” speech. The league’s domestic issues — the fight against socialism, the uncontrolled flood of immigrants from Asia and the Caribbean, and the growing power of the unions — were taken up by more sophisticated entities, like The Monday Club, operating inside the Conservative Party.

There is a limit to the analogy of the Tea Party movement to the Loyalist movement of the 1950s and 1960s. But the people are eerily the same. They share a decency, the sense of being let down and the feeling that something has to be done. In the British case, nothing was done until Margaret Thatcher much later addressed some of the concerns of the Loyalists (unions, state ownership, immigration and global stature). She did not bring back the empire, but she did make the Brits feel a lot better about not having it anymore.

Who will do that for the good people of the Tea Party movement?