An electrical morning

There was a rare electricity outage in the Sunbury-to-Hideout section of Kilcullen on Thursday morning, which obviously included your editor's home being without power from the very early hours through to lunchtime, writes Brian Byrne.

By one of those ironies of life, I was scheduled to visit the Eirgrid National Control Centre on the same day, which is where the whole island's electricity system is managed (and managed very well). I'm pictured above in the Centre with John Lowry, Grid Link Project Manager, Eirgrid.

We take our electricity system so much for granted, it was quite fascinating to get an insight into how it is managed, and also how important it is not just to each of our homes, but to the economy of the country as a whole. And how necessary is the €3.2bn investment being put into the national electricity infrastructure by 2020.

Over the next few weeks I'll do a series of short pieces based on the briefing. Not at all off-topic, as very little of what we do every day would be possible without that invisible energy source.

(For instance, my wake-up coffee yesterday morning had to come from Fraser's Filling Station: they didn't have enough emergency power for their pumps, but the coffee machine was going full blast.)

And without the wonder of electricity and the efficiency of its supply, you wouldn't be able to read this now ...