My grandparents had a quite substantial house in Tynemouth, Northumberland in which they had brought up seven children and were very far from being wealthy.  They did not have electricity installed until the late thirties after the family had grown up and gone.  Until then Monday was washing day and for the womenfolk a huge drudgery. There were no vacuum cleaners. Just keeping the house clean was enormous hands and knees labour. In the large families of those days at least one of the girls would be retained at home to take part in all this, without any prospect of higher education or an interesting job.

When I returned from WW2,  married , with a newly born son, although we had little spare money one of our first purchases was a state of the art washing machine and vacuum cleaner both of which I purchased at a very substantial discount because I worked for a huge electrical firm who included the manufacture of such domestic items.

Now in my very old age I am able to live on my own and do my own laundry and house cleaning , refrigerate and freeze my food  and cook effortlessly and quickly in a microwave oven.

All this was first enabled by the  Electricity (Supply) Act 1926 which formed the Central Electricity Board  with draconian powers and built the 132 kV national grid and its dependent distribution networks so  rapidly.Today's loss-minimising 400 kV grid is based mainly on overhead lines because undergrounding would cost 23 times the capital cost and make repairs much more expensive and lengthy.

Those members of the general public who complain about the national grid are obviously completely oblivious to the enormous advantages the grid has brought, particularly to the women of this country who have been freed from the old domestic slavery of pre-national grid Britain. And it was electrical engineers who brought it about.

Whoever wrote in the above Guardian article that :-

“Eventually, microgeneration might reduce the need for long-distance transmission. Britain's old grid was built quickly and unthinkingly; its new one should be greener, offshore and underground.”

has no comprehension of the totally benign impact of electricity not only in the UK but worldwide and of the huge reductions in cost made by the Electricity (Supply) Act 1926 .

By 1938 the proportion of spare plant had been reduced from 80 per cent to about 15 per cent and the resultant capital saving amounted to 75 per cent of the cost of building the grid. The economies of scale made by the abolition of hundreds of small inefficient power stations and introduction in their place of a few huge, new ,  "selected" power stations with their much higher thermal efficiency caused generation costs to fall by 24 per cent. (quoted verbatim from the Electricity Council's "Chronology of electricity supply in the United Kingdom")

Far from being built "unthinkingly" the national grid and its "selected" stations were planned by two of the UK's most brilliant consulting engineers, Charles Merz and John Kennedy,

in record time and executed entirely under the engineer-led Central Electricity Board, whose leaders (at  first largely Scots because that's where Lord Weir came from!)  were able in those days to resist any interference by politicians. These men ensured that  Lord Weir's Report, written within one year, could be passed unchanged by Parliament into legislation as the Electricity (Supply) Act 1926.