The lights are on as I write this. After this week’s news, that feels like a minor miracle. An independent investigation into the National Energy System Operator - Neso, the body that keeps Britain’s electricity flowing - has found that control room staff use Word and Excel to produce key reports and track spare generating capacity. That includes monitoring blackout risk.
As we head for the most energy challenging winters since the 1970s, energy companies have been keeping important records in such a way that meant every new save wiped out the one before. Earlier versions were simply lost.
The lawyers called in after whistleblower complaints found no evidence that anyone deliberately hid blackout risks. Nobody needed to. When your record-keeping deletes its own history every time someone presses Save, the software does the hiding for you.
Neso says Word and Excel are not used to run the grid directly. That is meant to reassure us. It does the opposite.
The spreadsheet that became the system
I have worked in digital since newspapers first discovered the internet. Every organisation starts on spreadsheets. The trouble starts when the stopgap becomes the system. Someone builds it in a hurry, it works well enough, it becomes critical, and nobody dares touch it.
Broken at every level
Neso is no outlier. This is the country of the Post Office Horizon scandal and an NHS that clung to fax machines long after everyone else had moved on.
The pattern is always the same. The work that matters most gets the least investment.
British organisations will spend freely on what the public sees - the shiny app, the rebrand, the consultants’ report on digital transformation. They will not fund the plumbing, ironic given the state our water companies find themselves in. Audit trails, proper logging and resilience win no awards. They only get noticed when they fail.
The betting industry, whatever you think of it, knows exactly what is happening on its systems at every moment, because its money depends on it. It invests accordingly.
Keeping the country’s lights on apparently does not carry the same priority.
Somewhere in a control room tonight, someone will press Save on the shift report. Last night’s version will be gone. Sleep well.