First there was Trump. Then Badenoch and now Blair. Even the unions are getting in on it.
“Is net zero at present unworkable?”
That’s the question i put to Robert Groves, the ex-submariner who has been at the helm of Smartest Energy for more than a decade.
Robert said: “Well, we’re doing this at just the wrong time for an easy answer, aren’t we? Look, if we work on the basis that the science is still the right science and that we sooner or later have to, it’s just a question of then of how we do it and how quickly we do it.
“Now, I think the consequences of the current approach of net zero targets by 2050 or whatever, they might be using science based targets as the metric for whether you’ve done that, whichever way you do it, it’s going to be expensive.
“I think we’re starting to understand that.
“We’re also starting to understand it’s complex and the way we’ve done things in the past won’t work anymore as we’re starting to see perhaps, when we find out what happened in Spain, (the recent black out), so from my perspective, my view and my company’s view, I think we’re still going down the right pathway… But we’re having a more well-considered thought process.”
The black out in Spain which is still being investigated and the fire at Heathrow airport, have brought into mind the issue of contingency when more renewables are on stream and we lose the inertia of gas and coal. So are they warnings of the fragility of net zero when it comes to stable supply?
Robert doesn’t think so.
“There’s always going to be a few hiccups on the ways in that. And we’ve been very comfortable in a hydrocarbon legacy environment with a low risk system to operate and with an energy transition. There’s got to be also a cultural transition in our understanding of how we manage that complexity. And not everyone’s going to do it perfectly.
“There will be mistakes, there will be hiccups both at a national level, i.e. a grid level and then locally with companies. And I think we saw both of those perhaps with the Spanish grid and then with the Heathrow blackout. But look, we know what we have to do. We know what the tools are that are available to us.
“What we really need is political leadership, because the politics are always the economics. Once we’ve got that, we need industry regulation to set the direction of travel for grid operators and to prioritise them, and then we just need to get on with it. And I think in some markets we’re doing that very well. Other markets well, the political message might be slower to respond or moving the other way and they’re perhaps less keen to go down that way.”
Plenty more nuggets from Robert as we chatted about the transition so please listen to the podcast and subscribe too!
