Boris Johnson’s government is shuffling towards a gigantic cliff edge which has nothing to do with Brexit. The looming disaster can be summed up in one word: renewables.

The clue came in the form of the widespread power cuts that Britain experienced at the end of last week. A million people were affected, with rail services disrupted and passengers stuck on trains for many hours.

Quickly the Establishment propaganda machine cranked into gear. This was, a National Grid spokesman told us, a “very, very rare event”. Also, he reassured us — classic distraction technique, this — there was “no malicious intent or cyberattack involved.”

OK then. So what did cause this blackout which, as Richard North rightly says here, was a national “disgrace” and “the sort of thing we expect in train-wreck economies such as Venezuela”?

Well the current official answer is “We don’t know, pending an inquiry.”

Unofficially, though, it’s bleeding obvious. Britain’s National Grid — and by extension the nation’s electricity supply — has been horribly compromised by the dash for renewable energy. The more unreliables — wind turbines, especially — are added to the grid, the more unstable the system will become.

Friday’s power cuts, far from being a freak event, are merely a taste of worse to come.

That’s because brownouts and blackouts aren’t a bug of electricity systems heavily dependent on renewable energy. They’re a feature.

And it’s not as though wiser heads haven’t been saying this for years.

Christopher Booker, for example, writing in 2009, described successive governments’ embrace of wind energy as “the maddest thing that has happened in our lifetime.”

He wrote:

Let us be clear: Britain is facing an unprecedented crisis. Before long, we will lose 40 per cent of our generating capacity. And unless we come up quickly with an alternative, the lights WILL go out.

Well on Friday the lights did go out. And the big question now is: will the government try to paper over the cracks or will it turn a crisis into an opportunity?

Perhaps the best thing about those power cuts is that they couldn’t have come at a more inopportune moment for the renewables industry.

With Boris Johnson’s administration having foolishly committed itself to Theresa May’s Net Zero carbon emissions by 2050 policy, Big Wind — and its many supporters in the mainstream media — had been positioning itself for a bonanza of new contracts.

Only the Sunday before last, the Mail on Sunday (bizarrely, because it’s normally quite sceptical on environmental issues) ran a massive puff piece in its business section on the “lobbying offensive” being conducted by the wind industry:

Energy firms have launched a lobbying offensive that could result in a new generation of wind turbines being built in rural Britain. Executives at major power companies are urging the Government to lift the restrictions which currently block the building of onshore windfarms. Their demands could trigger the construction of a swathe of giant turbines as the country battles to meet ambitious targets to slash carbon emissions and to provide the power for electric vehicles.

If it hadn’t been for Friday’s blackout, they might have got away with it too. But now, if she plays her cards right, Energy Secretary Andrea Leadsom might yet be able to nip their nefarious scheme in the bud.

Yesterday’s power outages caused enormous disruption – National Grid must urgently review and report to Ofgem. I will also be commissioning the government’s Energy Emergencies Executive Committee to consider the incident. — Andrea Leadsom MP (@andrealeadsom) August 10, 2019

The key here will to be ensure that the review is fair, transparent and not a greenwash — something that seems rather unlikely given that the National Grid is a parti pris organisation fully committed to the green agenda.

If the review is conducted with any rigour, I find it hard to imagine it could reach any other conclusion than that renewables are making the grid less and less stable and that the idea of incorporating still more wind projects into this overloaded system should be an absolute no-no.

This will rather depend, I think, on Leadsom’s strength of will — and also on the support she gets from fellow pragmatists within the Cabinet such as Priti Patel, Jacob Rees Mogg, and Liz Truss.

Up until now — in support of the Boris Johnson administration’s green virtue signalling gestures — even climate sceptical Cabinet members have been forced to pretend that they’re on board with the renewables suicide-by-virtue-signalling programme.

Only the day before the blackout, Leadsom herself was busily retweeting some nonsense from the Department for Business, Energy and Industrial Strategy (BEIS), bigging up Net Zero, COP26, and the wind industry.

As one of the UK’s most sustainable cities, Glasgow is the right place to host #COP26 if the country’s bid is successful, showcasing the UK’s commitment to tackling #climatechange as we move to #netzero https://t.co/pwqA6NewE7 https://t.co/o3pABE9G42 — Dept for BEIS (@beisgovuk) August 9, 2019

She can’t surely believe this drivel. Leadsom’s South Northamptonshire constituency has been hideously blighted with bat-chomping, bird-slicing eco-crucifixes. She is perfectly aware of their shortcomings: the environmental damage they do, the avian fauna they kill, the views and property values they blight, their inflationary effect on energy prices, and so on.

Leadsom is far from alone in understanding all this. But like her fellow renewables sceptics in the Cabinet, she is trapped by collective responsibility into supporting green policies which — if they ever get off the ground — will do so much damage to Britain’s economy, energy infrastructure, and environment that it will likely offset most of the benefits Britain gains from leaving the European Union.

Even the Prime Minister knows in his heart of hearts that renewables are a disaster and that fracking is the way forward. But having committed so wholeheartedly to the green agenda, he desperately needs to find a way out of Britain’s impending renewables-driven catastrophe — ever-higher prices, greater instability, more devastated countryside, more dead bats and birds, more disgruntled country folk, more blackouts and brownouts — in a way that enables him to save face and not look as if he has suddenly been bought by the evil, cackling fossil fuel lobby (which only exists in greenies’ warped imaginations).

Friday’s blackouts could yet prove a blessing in disguise.