If Brooke Weasley wanted to do a little night reading, she would turn on a light. The light would immediately receive power through the sub-station along 8th Ave North, surrounded by hedges and barbed wire fence located in Kranjahgrah Park. That power would originally be produced by UNES (United National Energy of Slokais) power plants, likely hydropower. In an ideal world, every Slokaisan would receive power quickly and efficiently and in the same way. Yet like many things in Slokais, local dynamics, environment and climate can affect this.
Founded in 1925, by Conservative Party president and industrial modernizer, David Livingstone. UNES was created to operate the electrical grid on a national scale, with UNES operating as a private company with federal oversight via an appointed executive commission. Issues arose over decades due to quality of service concerns as UNES had an exclusive monopoly and corruption within the organization. Provincial governments argued UNES often had little understanding of local demands and often built hydroelectric dams flooding communities with little notice of concern. By the 1950s, public trust in UNES was at a new-low, which President Juan Costa and his national-reformist movement took and ran with. UNES would be dissolved in 1955 and replaced with a variety of private companies receiving federal contracts. These power companies operated at a local level, and would often be owned by business leaders taking upon existing UNES power plants. These companies however had to set prices at a certain rate approved by the federal government.
The Great War destroyed Slokais’s power grid, leaving a new opportunity for change. George Semerajang and Howard Xiang, the two President’s in the post-war period, set about creating a hybrid of a public and private model for power generation. UNES was revitalized but simply as a collective entity meant to set standards, set policy and share resources between provinces in times of shortages. Many private companies joined UNES, although retained local authority on a provincial level. A case of this, is South Star Energy which is the electricity provider for South San Fernando Province, they are regulated by the province’s Public Works Ministry (PWM) and abide by federal directives in terms of policy. By 2000, 25 provinces were within the UNES system, however this soon changed under the administration of Sean Khan.
Sean Khan pushed for a switch away from coal to more renewables over a period of 5 to 10 years, a proposition deemed impossible by some provincial governments. Ambonar Province left UNES in 2005, with Diah Grah Energy, a private company owned by the Ambonar Church of God directly through an LLC. Diah Grah has since come into controversy for not cooperating with the Ministry of Energy and Natural Resources (ENR) and has been accused of failing to provide enough power to certain rural communities. Critics have also raised the fact that a religious organization owns a public utility firm.
In contrast to this, Far’wae Province, a small province in the northwest of Slokais switched from UNES Northern Energy to a local provider Al-Ransani. This is due to the environment of Far’awae consisting of small islands and having few natural resources and little funding to invest in solar and wind energy. Al-Ransani, instead, has personally taken up the cost of developing geo-thermal energy via the island’s many hot springs to power homes and businesses. Although not the only geo-thermal plant, Far’wae is the only province to be primarily powered by such an energy source.
