It's a great hobby of mine just to learn how things work. Mostly things like infrastructure and the engineering that goes into it but iv'e noticed over a few years that mainly our water/sewage/drainage systems and telecommunications systems are going downhill.
Now, this is expected really and wouldn't be much cause for concern because of the pretty bad state the UK is in right now but only really since 2020 these two things are almost being covered up for how bad of a state they actually are in and i'm seeing alot of similarities with the same systems in South Africa.
The electricity grid is somewhat in a bad state mainly because the pylons and substations are just getting old but we have one of the best systems in the world for the electricity so we can replace small bits here and there with not much a problem (electricity demand is up for alot of reasons but luckily we had that in mind when building/replacing them, maybe not to this extent but were fine...for now anyway). But it can take months or even years for our drainage and telecoms systems to have the smallest fix.
This is just something that i've been thinking about for a while and although i'd say im pretty good at this stuff, i'm definetly not the expert so take it with a grain of salt but i was expecting a disease outbreak to happen soon from the pipes, tunnels and plants (which happened in Devon and will definetly happen again more often). But yeah, it's in a pretty bad state and even if we start fixing it now, it will take decades to get it back to what it once was.
As for telecoms... although where i live we had no phone service and internet for nearly two months from December to January, it is actually crazy how most of these telecos towers are even still standing, nevermid just clinging on to life and working. These things have been neglected for along time and the equipment on them are mostly cheaply made in China but because there are so many masts and towers, it dosen't matter if 5 or so break because theres always more to connect to. It's not too out there to wonder if the companies that own these will go bankrupt and may even possibly be nationalised sometime in this decade.
It probably won't matter with how fast satellite communications are advancing and the broader 6G the shift away from physical hardwire after the failure of 5G. We're incredibly fortunate that the telecoms industry doesn't behave anything like our utilities and it's probably helped in that by being a broadly international effort.
The National Grid needs to do a lot of work in the coming years to cope with the increase in demand from EVs and electric heating.
Hydrogen might end up being a workable compromise for heating and replacing heavier ICEs. There can be efficiency savings to generate offshore electricity with a turbine and then, instead of sending the energy down a wire, converting it into hydrogen through electrolysis at source and sending that instead.
