The major power cut that affected millions of people in Europe - in Germany, France, Italy, Austria, Belgium and Spain - has caused many high profile politicians to call for a new European power authority. For example, Romano Prodi said that there is a contradiction between having European power links and no single European Authority.
Energy has become one of the priority areas for the EU and its agenda on all levels is dominated by issues of how best to secure energy supply. It is perfectly reasonable to establish a single authority to coordinate European energy policy to prevent major power cuts like the one over the weekend. However, setting up such a body will undoubtedly prove tricky. All members would have to agree to its functions and remit and reaching an agreement on such a strategically important issue would be time consuming and riddled with implications.
It is right to assume that the new EU energy authority would be heavily regulated and European energy companies' legislative burden would increase significantly. The amount of regulation already pouring out of Brussles is quite incomprehensible and the prospect of further rules must be a threatening prospect for many businesses. The EU produces hundreds of consultations and documents (some of them perfectly reasonable) containing far too much centralised micro-management to grind anyone down into antipathy. The EU should consider the impracticality of high volume of regulation and legislation in favour of the positive forces of free market.
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Diffuse not central control is the secret to resilience
It's not just about levels of regulation, but about whether centralised systems are effective. The internet was designed to be as resilient as possible (to military standards) by ensuring that it was completely decentralised and had no single authority running it. That is a very much better model than trying to manage complex systems from a central authority.
Is it reasonable to assume that "a single authority coordinating European energy policy" would prevent this sort of system failure? Have national authorities been any more successful in preventing brown-outs within their boundaries? Notional control over the system does not mean that local problems, which are the cause of network failures like this, are more likely to be identified. What is needed above all are standards for interconnection and design of resilient systems with multiple redundancies. That could be agreed by intranational (or intra-company) negotiation as much as it could by imposition from above by a supranational organisation. In fact, the creation of ever higher levels of authority is more likely to diminish local accountability and the effective transmission of information to the bosses, as the people on the ground find themselves ever more remote from the seats of power.
By Prodi's logic, all aspects of European life in which there is cross-border activity require single European Authorities to govern them. And as our electricity networks link outside the boundaries of the European Union, perhaps we should have a single Central Authority that covers all countries whose networks are interconnecting? It is understandable that an incompetent leader of a basket-case economy might like to palm off his problems to higher authorities, but anyone who looks at the mess of the Italian budget will know exactly what to think of any opinion of Mr Prodi's on how to run things effectively - listen to what he has to say and assume the exact opposite is probably the case.
Centralised control, as per the Soviet Union or Communist China, has historically provided very much less reliable systems. The thought that the solution to operational difficulties is ever greater central control is natural but fundamentally mistaken. Resilient systems that allow individuals to take responsibility and act appropriately, whilst avoiding single points of failure, are the key to stability.