The Energy Market Is Rigged And Evs Expose It Greg Jackson And Rory Sutherland

TITLE: The Energy Market Is Rigged. And EVs Expose It | Greg Jackson & Rory Sutherland CHANNEL: Everything Electric TECH DATE: 2026-04-27 ---TRANSCRIPT--- Hello and welcome to another episode of the Everything Electric podcast where today we have a really special episode for you and it is in a slightly different format. So I just wanted to jump in and share a couple of details with you. So, a couple of weekends ago, we had the privilege of filming a live podcast on Oxford Street, all thanks to Renault, and we were joined by Greg Jackson and Rory Southerntherland. That is what you’re about to hear. However, we had a lovely live audience. So, you will hear a little a little few smatterings from our our live audience. And this recording took place prior to the announcement from Ed Milliband Ed Milliban Ed Milliband earlier this week in which he announced the dellinking of the cost of renewables from the cost of gas. So if we sound a little bit tonedeaf on that particular subject that is why that news hadn’t yet happened. I as ever would be so delighted to hear what you think about this particular conversation. So do make sure to let us know in the comments. As ever, please do like and subscribe and um enjoy the episode.

Our three free YouTube channels on EVs and clean energy tech are funded by our fun-packed test drivetastic events in the North, West, and Greater London and our events down under. Next up, Everything Electric heads to Harriut and then Chelenham. All events include a B-2B EV day and commercial vehicles, too. This is really important context and I and I’m going to start with a slightly longer spiel than I would do otherwise. But I really want to set want to set the scene so that we get the absolute best from this discussion for all of you here. Because let’s face it, through virtue of being here and that little very scientific survey that we did, you’re already familiar with the objective superiority of the electric vehicle, its unrivaled efficiency, its role as the gateway drug to the kilowatt hour. You’re likely already playing Wolf of Wall Street with your various apps that you have showing your consumption, your generation, trading with the grid. And a future in which you have almost zero energy bills seems like an inevitability. Vehicle to grid is your utopia. And so with that context in this unprecedented weird environment in which we’re living where we’re living through a industrial revolution in real time and not just real time but unfolding in double speed. Things feel strange because yes we can see the inevitability of these clean energy technologies and yet we can also see the stupidity of a world that seems tethered to an oilbased war and the greatest threat to global energy security in history that may come with it. That triple shock of energy scarcity, food inflation, and GDP downturns. That freight train which promises to hit the global economy and potentially plunge 32 million people into poverty. Sounds bleak. I promise we’ll lift the tone up. But the US Iran war starkly reveals that electrification is a fundamental pillar of national security. And yet we’re in a bit of a bifocated moment. I’ve definitely not said that word correctly. bifocated moment. You know what I mean? The US is gutting EV and clean energy subsidies whilst Europe quietly retreats into sort of policy uncertainty. We’re bracing for data centers to double their energy consumption by 2030, driving a desperate surge in both clean energy, but also fossil fuel as well. We’re even debating sending that AI infrastructure into space. And yet half the world live without a flushing toilet. It’s a very bizarre time and it almost feels as if this new global economy is not going to be based on oil and gas production but in fact how much compute power do you have and the cost of that compute power as well. So whilst war is a brutal impetus for a paradigm shift it is the history that we seem to find ourselves living and here in the UK we have a lot of work to do. Nearly one in five households own a low low carbon technology, so EVs, solar panels, batteries, etc. But high income families are 1.6 times more likely to have made that leap. Heat pump adoption, we’re going to have a discussion about this, is stuck at a measly 1%. Not least is our spark gap, that price between um electricity and gas is so high. And that makes the tra the maths tricky for the average family. For every heat pump sold, 15 gas boilers are still being bolted to walls. And today, 45% of British adults are worried about paying their energy bills. So we do risk this weird thermostatic divide where people who are a little bit more affluent can enjoy zero energy bills whilst people who are less affluent could be crushed by them. But if the economics of this technology is this clear and the geopolitics this loud, why is this path still riddled with debate? Even on this panel, I know that we have differing views on the relative merits of a heat pump and also potentially differing views on drilling in the North Sea. So, how do we part chart the path forward? Well, if you tuned out from this very long monologue that I seem to have done, we know the value of clean tech, but how on earth do we bloody well get on with it in a joined up kind of way? Well, that is what we are endeavoring to find out on this panel here. And I’m delighted to be joined by a frankly intimidating lineup. They need very little introduction. You know, of course, who these people are, but joining me, we have Greg Jackson, CBE, the founder and CEO of Octopus Energy Group, the UK’s largest energy supplier and a global energy and technology company that’s driving the affordable green energy system of the future. Your PR team gave me that. That was a bit of a mouthful. They could win and prove it to be honest. Rory Southerntherland, these were your own words and I like these. Alchemist and behavioral science impromp impario. That’s it. accidental Tik Tok star. That’s very much true. And founder of Oglev’s behavioral science division. And last, but by no means least, Robert Llewellyn, founder of the Fully Charged Show, now Everything Electric, and lifelong actor, presenter, and author, maybe the ultimate early adopter, and definitely responsible for encouraging thousands of people to pursue careers in engineering thanks to Scrap Peep Challenge, and thousands more to adopt clean energy technologies. He’s you’re looking rather sheepish there, but it’s definitely true. And between them, they offer game-changing solutions, a clear ability to see into the future, an unwavering love of logic to maximize the solutions that are benefit the most amount of people, and I think you all enjoy peppering a little bit of magic in there along the way as well. So, in the rest of this panel, I promise to say as little as I can, but we’re going to talk a little bit about the energy system at large. We’re then going to get into some home energy technologies before going on to our favorite subject, electric vehicles. So, enough of me, but to kick off, I guess I think it would be useful to assess what personally motivates you to talk on the subject of clean energy technologies. And under that umbrella, I am I’m referring of course to electric vehicles, solar, heat pumps, etc., etc. What personally motivates you in this space? And uh I’ll start with you, Greg. Yeah, sure. Okay, cool. Um, look, I I joined Greenpeace when I was 15. I was inspired by the way I used to, anyone who’s roughly my age will remember when you used to watch uh the news in an evening and have Greenpeace dingies up against oil rigs and people cl and I almost thought if you join Greenpeace, you got to do that. It was my first ever disappointing response to direct marketing when all you got was a caught in the newsletter. Uh but that but but the damage that each of us do to everyone else with our private decisions is something that really bothers me and I don’t think we should go back to the stone ages. I think that technology has solutions to a lot of these problems. And so for me the the real driving passion for a lot of what you’re talking about electrification generally is I think it lets us live the lives we want or even better ones whilst doing less harm to the planet and everybody else. and and I you know we’re now at a point where the economics of that have followed the science. It was inevitable and and now we’re battling the really just that the politics and the incumbent interest. Robert, it’s always hard to follow, Greg. I really understand that. Um, I think it was for me I think it was my slow but steady understanding of of what was happening in California in the early naughties. And it was just by chance and into working there and making the American version of Scrappy Junkyard Wars um that I became aware of things like the Californian Air Resource Board, the the American well Californian government’s push to reduce the the you know all those things. I went oh catalytic converters oh California unled petrol oh California. Oh hybrids California electric cars California. And it’s so strange now. They were way ahead of anywhere else in the world. Not now, but they were then. And that’s where the home of that and understanding that that technology came out of Silicon Valley out of computers and nerds in with computers, not uh Detroit or where the automotive industry was. There’s going to be some corrections on this, but that but that was my understanding. That was my understanding at the time. And I was that was fascinating because I then it it just changed my attitude to internal combustion changes which I grew up adoring. And in fact on the way here this afternoon I walked around a quiet street and I heard and I went why do I know that sound? Why is that still with me? And it was an Aston Martin of whatever the one is. It’s one I can’t remember the the name of it. I heard that exhaust tone and I know it in my DNA and I went ah and I can’t appreciate it anymore because what that’s doing that man’s having it was a man is having fun in that car and it’s it’s got an amazing throttle you know throaty roar and I can’t help thinking we’ve got to breathe in the he’s sticking out of his stupid exhaust pipes the tosser you know it’s kind of I can’t I can’t get beyond that anymore I cannot you know and I still think the human race should maintain lots of internal combustion engines for our great great great great grandchildren to see that and go you mean you had a thing a metal box that were explosions in it where it’s like the thing you were saying and then gas comes out well and it was the gas nice no it was poisonous and if you breathed it you died you know that is what we’ve all lived with and that’s what we’ve all grown up with but so that it was very much clean air and the and the efficiency when I understood the efficiency of an electric motor and batteries it just it just shot combustion engines in the head and that was the end of it. Shot combustion engines in the head. That’s that’s also that’s probably what we’ll call this episode. Please don’t. Rory, I I guess I’m I feel like there’s a few interesting things going on because you talk about so many different subjects, but you have a particular magic in the way that you talk about electric vehicles. Uh I’m I’m very interested in the um particularly when I write for the spectator and you read the comments. I’m very interested in the hostility that electric vehicles generate in certain people by the way which always fascinates me. Now I often wonder whether the Prius did a disservice to the whole category. Very likely because the Prius was driven by people who I think were disapproving of other motorists and were floating around on a kind of smug cloud of moral superiority. And I suddenly realized that everybody who used to write hostile things in my spectator articles when I praised electric cars and my conversion to electric cars is actually just physics. Yes. Okay. I mean the elegance of the electric motor in terms of efficiently um effectively transforming energy from any source into motive power at an extraordinary level of efficiency is just too beautiful. So I mean in a sense I suppose the internal combustion engine is loved because it’s like a Swiss watch. It’s an absurd way of telling the time. I mean, a a 20 pound Casio is actually more reliable, but given that 150 years of craftsmanship have been poured into perfecting this thing, we have to love it. It’s not as beautiful as a steam engine. By the way, a steam locomotive is more beautiful. It’s still more beautiful. And the steam engine also has a beautiful, we were talking about this earlier. There is an attribute to the steam engine which the internal combustion engine doesn’t have which may become more and more relevant which is a steam locomotive could run off any fuel source. So if you could produce heat you could produce motive power and the trains that went from the east coast of the United States to the west started off by running on coal which was plentiful on the east and as they neared the Rockies they switched to wood and lumber. Now, one point that I don’t think anybody thinks about in in electric car world is the fact that, you know, you can run electric car by burning rubber tires if you want to. I wouldn’t recommend it, but it’s still possible. Whereas, to quote Alan Partridge, um uh the the the internal combustion engine is a picky is a fussy eater. Do you remember that? You’re going to pay the price for being a fussy eater. Basically, unless it comes through the straits of Hormuz, it’s not really happy. And that strikes me as something that is fundamentally exciting. Now the moral superiority problem I think is actually the result of a misunderstanding because most people post Prius who bought electric cars genuinely bought them because they like the technology or they thought they were better cars. Yeah. And I don’t spend any time driving my electric car disdaining the people uh who are driving internal combustion engines except well they’re too slow to be honest. Um, the only smug moment I do have, which I can’t help, is that when you watch people filling up with petrol at a pump, you feel a bit like a pimeatlogist watching bonobos poking at a termite mound with a stick. You know, it looks like a kind of primitive behavior which some people are still engaged in. Okay, but they are using a tool. But apart from that, you know, I genuinely think they’re good enough to sell on their own merits. We ought to be honest. As an advertising guy, I’d always say that there are JP Morgan said this. Uh for everything people do, there are two reasons. Uh there’s a good reason and there’s the real reason. And a large part of why people want to own solar panels, I suspect, is not really to save money or to save the planet. It’s for the geeky joy of knowing you’re driving around on sunshine. Now, my argument is I I think we should just amplify that because one of my arguments is actually if people do the right thing for the wrong reasons, doesn’t matter. And that’s my great argument. I don’t really mind why people do this provided they do. And I’ll be absolutely honest with you. You know, I’m not that fond of polar bears. They look bloody dangerous if I’m being honest. Okay. But the idea of driving around knowing that the sun in the sky is actually powering my trip to the shops, you know, apart from any other, you know, positive externalities is just a great feeling. And we shouldn’t we should try and amplify that as much as we can. Well, we’re going to pick up on so many of these things because I think that sense of of getting a really good deal is something that motivates us. As much as we’d like to pretend that the environment is our primary motivator, ultimately if it’s going to save us money as well, that’s probably what forces us to act. Now, I want to just pause on the current energy crisis that we find ourselves in. And Greg, I imagine that the last few weeks have been quite busy for you. So, I wonder if you could just frame for us how whatever’s going on in the Middle East has changed your immediate priorities at Octopus. um and how it’s changed your day-to-day and some of the things of you of how you need to support your customers in the short term. The irony is that while we’re watching this happening on the news and look there are so many levels of right? Let’s just be really clear. you basically got I’m not going to be political but I mean honestly but the um uh the the irony is that while this is happening we’re currently mailing millions of people largely saying energy costs are coming down right um because the government have started taking levies off electricity bills a very good and important thing and by the way I cannot tell you like the funnily enough the customer satisfa every time we send um a price change email it has a satis satisfaction rating like how do you rate the usefulness, how do you feel about this and so on. Uh, funnily enough, uh, we’re having currently seeing the highest ever satisfaction ratings on on price changes because costs are coming down because the government are finally taking some of the structural costs out of electricity. There is so much more to go. To be absolutely clear, in France, electricity is uh twice the price of gas. In the UK, it’s four times. I mean, broadly speaking, in bits of Scandinavia, it’s by way. There you go. That was your externality, wasn’t it? That was actually that was actually an electric one with this loudspeaker. But the um I’ve got to say I’ve got an electric motorbike and the only thing I miss is not being able to rev in traffic to let people know you’re there. But anyway, different but yeah, back on this. Uh in Scandinavia, electricity can be as little as 1.15 times more expensive than gas. In the UK, it’s four times. And the vast majority of that is policy cost and very bad market design. It’s good that those things are being tackled. In terms of what’s going straight at home, uh because most energy is hedged in advance, it’s bought in advance. We will see the price rises as of July. Um for some people it’s coming sooner depending on what kind of tariffs on. Uh but so far it is genuinely a fraction as bad as we saw when Russia invaded Ukraine, but it’s a very very different shape. So if it doesn’t get res oil and gas in ships moves at the same speed as a bicycle. So if the bicycle stopped leaving uh the Middle East about 6 weeks ago and some start now, it will still still take six weeks for them to get here. In the meanwhile, there’s an awful lot of kind of backend rewiring of where you get where oil and gas are going to kind of keep supply. But you are at a point where if it doesn’t get resolved at some point supply just stops coming um at which point you may see the UK’s got we’re very well connected with a lot of sources but some countries are already doing rationing and things like that right and it may affect different things like jet fuel and diesel differently than petrol. The big big picture though, the big picture is I mean I just sent a video to customers a couple days ago saying look here we go again because it’s only three years since the Russian invasion of Ukraine similarly caused this and I think it is a shocking audacity of the fossil fuel industry to try and pretend that the answer is more fossil fuels right uh because the reality of the of fossil fuels is uh the great big oil and gas majors will not uh invest in in uh production facilities unless they’re going to get high utilization. There is never going to be spare capacity at any scale in the world of oil and gas. As soon as they get spare capacity, they start shutting stuff down. They restrict supply. Um and what that means is we as long as you’re dependent on uh oil and gas, you’re always at risk of any part of the supply chain being uh strangled. And and so the the the lie of oil and gas is that uh you know if we invest in more supply then we’ll stop these things happening in future. It’s just not the case. We invest in more supply in the future the prices will drop and then they’ll stop producing and we’ll be at their mercy again. And I think one of the great discoveries of the world of electrification uh and and you already um heard it uh from Rory is there are so many sources of electricity now. literally your rooftop, uh your neighbors rooftop, uh a field outside your town or village, uh the North Sea, uh other bits of our coast, interconnectors to other countries. You’ve got so many layers um and and and oh, and gas of course as well, by the way, right? And biomass and hydro um and French nuclear because it comes through the interconnectors. We’ve got so much more resilience in electricity. So the biggest lesson, you know, has just got to be like the only guest was like an abusive partner. They keep coming back saying it’s going to be different this time. It’s never going to be different. Right? I was born in 1971 and uh when I was two or three there’s all these photos of our family with like candles because like fossil fuel crises never stop happening and we can now end them. And what you’re really seeing actually you mentioned the word bifocation. There are some countries that are just not seeing this anymore. Norway um you know uh its economy is so electric I think what was it they sold 16 fossil fuel cars there last month was it right 97% of all the cars being sold are electric right um uh heat pumps the majority heating source uh direct to electric create another bunch um they’re just not as affected by this stuff huge investment in renewables um and by the way uh not just wind sorry not just sol tons of wind as a result not seeing these cost increases that we So I think that um uh the of course when the world’s most powerful industry is threatened they are seeing demand like that you you now have measurable demand reduction because of electric vehicles right and they are very threatened and they’re mobilizing an army that makes what the tobacco industry did look like child’s play this is an industry it’s so powerful governments go to war right that’s how powerful the fossil fuel industry is and so when you talk earlier about sort of the the backlash. It It’s not necessarily people are cynically doing this, but you know, if you look at every driver’s group, right? Where’s the funding ultimately coming from, right? You know, the the the the people that try to somehow paint cyclist as the biggest problem on a road, right? You know, I cycled here. I can tell you is it was a lot quicker, easier, and more pleasant. Anyway, point being um I think we the big lesson is we have to electrify and you will hear more horseshit arguments against it, more horseshit promises and we have to be brutal now in responding to it. Yeah. Well, I think yeah, I I thought that might be coming. Well, I think there’s some really interesting things that I want to pick up. not least I know that there’ll be many questions about marginal pricing and you know getting our electricity not tied to the cost of um natural gas but I think the other thing that you you mentioned there is that you know the oil and gas industry can exist because of supply and demand economics and actually if we take something like the zero bills homes from octopus as an example customers can enjoy a zero bill home because octopus is there thanks to a kraken sort of gently trading those things as they sort of fluctuate throughout the day so it’s very possible that we’re heading towards this world and we can see that on a totally distributed decentralized system plus we’ve got you know larger scale um solar generation, wind generation, battery storage etc. where actually the value of this energy market is not so much the supply and demand traditional economics we’ve seen but is actually in trading the service and so for people like BP Shell etc etc how do they make money in this future world how do they make money how will they survive first of all you know I mentioned the tobacco industry earlier I think it’s really analogous uh when we first discovered that tobacco caused caused a lot of illnesses. Um the tobacco industry first denied it, right? Um uh there were literally adverts for that had doctors in them going my doctor smokes camel away, right? Um they then they then started acknowledging tacitly there was an issue. So uh they had low tar and filters because somehow this would prevent you getting cancer. Obviously it was it was a marketing stick. Um and and then uh they started heading to poorer countries as life got harder in richer countries. Um uh the interesting thing is that when the tobacco industry stopped fighting it and just admitted, look, cigarettes uh may kill you, but they’re quite fun, right? They had 30 years of being the highest return on the stock market as a sector because it’s actually like honesty turns out to be a more profitable business than lying in the long run. And I think in the same way for the oil and gas industry. Look, I I fly a lot. If we’ve got an international business, right, it’s going to be a long time before we can replace long haul aviation with something that isn’t fossil fuel based, right? They’ve got decades of business in that. Frankly, they’ve got decades in businesses. As you know, we there are plenty of trucks that have just been bought this year that are going to be running for another 10, 15 years. Plenty of cars. So, as a runoff business, you can do very, very well. But the bigger picture thing really is it’s not our problem, right? I I don’t remember uh Argos being able to campaign and say like, you know, how are we going to survive in a world of Amazon, right? They just had to try and compete. And I think that uh if in every other sector we kind of let the competition happen, it is bizarre to me that suddenly it is it is a social requirement, a political need to maintain a sector that by the way is doing more damage to our planet, right? And I’m not castigating the sector, you know, as I said, I fly, I use it, but it doesn’t have a god-given right to carry on as it is. Um, I think by the way and and really I mean I know people at BP and Shell very well. Some really great people by the way. Unbelievably incredible businesses. I think one of the things that you guys sometimes talk about is if we lived in an electric world and someone came along and proposed the petrol car, right? You got that that’s nonsense. You were talking there about the explosions or the little but you know can you can you charge it at home? No. Don’t be ridiculous. You can’t give it here. By the way, that’s a great example. I’m talking about the nonsense. Right. So I all the time people go to me oh but not everyone can charge at home. Like no one can charge a petrol car at home, right? But but the science and engineering of the oil industry is amazing. They they drill kilometers under the ground. Unbelievable stuff they do that divers going anyway all that stuff. The point really being they’re incredible companies. Uh but what you see in in almost any sector that goes through change is incumbent struggle. So we think about for example in the media sector when it started going online Rbert Murdoch unbelievably successful media baron regardless of what you think of some of the output uh bought MySpace and within two years it was dead right and it it took uh News Group like maybe 20 years to learn how to make money online. Shell and BP will get there in this world probably but the more pressure comes on them from actually forcing change the more they’ll have to do it in the ways that will actually be beneficial. uh at the same time there are enormous new I think you mentioned there that for example optimization as an industry doesn’t really exist in fossil fuel hugely important in electricity there are loads of companies big and small and Britain’s been a real breeding ground for them that are now taking optimization services around the world if you go to the US the companies that are working past utilities to try and optimize electrification are often very British because we’ve had because we got high energy costs optimization is more important here the skills you learn here then work really well elsewhere Um I know that when we’ve had a conversation previously, you had because maybe I shouldn’t be saying this. Maybe we’ll edit this out. We’ll find out. You had to do some work with the um uh cigarette industry many many decades ago. I I’ve never I’ve only worked on vaping campaigns. Uh so one of the things I think is important is the concept of harm reduction. Okay, which is sometimes where I would criticize either idealists or sometimes scientists is they design for perfect and anything less than that uh is considered a compromise. And I remember talking to someone it was an academic actually um so so my influence in the vaping world was going to the government’s behavioral insights team criy back in the 90s and saying there’s this new technology called electronic cigarettes. Uh I had two predictions. One, it might be the biggest thing in helping people quit smoking in well in ever. Okay. My second prediction was that everybody conventional in the anti-smoking campaign groups would try and ban it because they’d see it as an inferior substitute for quitting altogether. And my argument was not enough, which Ash also adopted, who are a fanatical anti-smoking group. They simply said, “Our job is to stop people dying. It’s not to stop people consuming nicotine. They’re two different things.” And one thing I I’ve noticed in this world is that people tend to plan for this sort of perfectionism. I’m pretty comfortable with a degree, I don’t know, with a degree of gas generation. Picking up a bit of load from time to time doesn’t seem to be that problematic. Um, I would prefer it if the money we made was put into innovation and scientific research because we have we have a greater comparative advantage in the UK in terms of being able to come up with really good inventions than we do in being able to reduce the world’s carbon output. We’re only 1% of carbon output. We’re probably over 150 years 25% of meaningful world changing inventions. If you if you go to the um uh Royal Institution about quarter of a mile away in the basement, I don’t know why it’s in the basement is Faraday’s first electric motor which which should be a source of pilgrimage to people. Okay. So there is a bit of me which goes I don’t particularly want a country that produces 1% of the world’s carbon to get involved in this symbolic hairshirted act which damages our economy moves manufacturing offshore to places where they’re using even dirtier energy just so Ed’s metrics can look cute. Okay. So you know that metric of your own carbon emissions which don’t account for imported gas strikes me as just a total nonsense. I mean, you know what? I mean, the Norwegians are to some extent buying all those electric cars on our dollar, you know. Okay, we’re buying their gas and they’re swaning around in some electric car at our expense. Can I just say one thing? I I presented two times the Norwegian EV Association annual meeting thing when I was on stage introducing the speakers and I the second time I went I did I thought an amusing skit about the fact that I we all hate Norwegians because we give you so muching money for your oil and gas while you pon around in your electric cars you and I interestingly I was never invited back I think it’s taking place they laughed at the time yes was it a haha haha haha This episode is brought to you by Honguk. The Hongok Ion tire is built exclusively for electric vehicles. Engineered to deliver what EV drivers need most. Confident grip, quietness, energy efficiency, and long mileage. As the official tire partner of Formula E, Honk Hook proves its EV technology is at the highest level of performance and brings that same innovation to every ION tire on the road. You know, you know that person who said, “If I came back, I’d come back as the bond market because you can do anything you like.” If I came back, I’d come back as a country of about 3 to four million people in the 21st century because no one beats up on you because it’s a bad look. You see what I mean? You know, if you’re Ireland with tax evasion or you’re Norway with fossil fuel production, everyone loves you. Everyone loves you cuz you there only three million of you would look really, really mean to get nasty. And so we do actually let them off the hook to a remarkable extent, I think. So my point would be I’m not sure I wouldn’t rather boil burn our own gas and then tax it and then put the money towards innovation because the other problem which I do accept from people like Martin Wolf is that we’ve set quite a bad example because other countries have looked at what we’ve attempted to do in reducing our carbon emissions. We’ve ended up with very high energy costs. So not many people are going to follow our lead. So, if our hope was that we’re going to set a precedent, my other I suppose my what would my other question be? I mean, I think um uh no, but but I’ll leave it at that. It’s not a great precedent to set and actually innovation is probably a better use of the money uh than purely self-sacrifice. I think Greg, I can I can see your mind worring. Any thoughts? By the way, I mean, the way we charge for electricity is the stupid thing which we could change really quickly, which you know much more about than me. So it seems to be a system where you go out to the pub and if nine of you order a pint of beer and one of you orders a bottle of chat protruse, everybody pays for a bottle of chat protruse. That’s more or less how it works. Worse than that. It makes it up. It’s marginal pricing. Yeah. I think that is the most elegant description of marginal pricing I’ve ever heard. I tried to tell it with fruit. Yours is better. Yeah. Um Greg, well look, I first of all, I couldn’t agree more on the gas point, right? Yeah. The light really came on for me a few years ago. You talked about the efficiency of EVs. If all of the electricity that powers an EV is coming from gas generation, it still has lower emissions than a petrol car. Even more amazing, if all of the electricity that powers a heat pump comes from gas, it has lower emissions than a gas boiler. It uses less gas than a gas boiler. That’s how efficient electricity is. Yes. So at the margin honestly uh if having like when people always say your point about perfection is so important right everything that’s a new technology in this space you get held to a standard of perfection that doesn’t apply elsewhere yes you’re right they always go like ah but not everyone can afford an EV I grew up in a family that can’t afford a car right I didn’t hear that objection from the car industry from the it’s not it’s unfair if you can’t afford a car by the way can I just say to everybody listening because I learned this the hard Everybody who tries to get a home charger installed at home, someone comes along and goes, “No way this wiring will take 7 kW.” And so you go, “Oh, I can’t have a charger.” Eventually, I rang up my brother who’s an astrophysicist who just goes, “You don’t need 7 kW for most normal people.” To be honest, if you’ve got four to be 3.5 is okay, right? It’s enough for most practical purposes. But the people turn up and go, “No, no, no, it’s got to be 7 kW otherwise it’s not a proper car charger.” I was going to phone our ops director. Exactly. Yeah. Yeah. We have roughly a thousand people in that every day. Anyway, right. Thank you. Please do cuz great charges though. Anyway, right. See the um but the standard perfections that everyone’s held to, right? You know, no, not everyone can have solar panels. One of my favorites, you know, like it’s not always windy and it’s like, right, you know, we kind of work this out, right? And and but you flip it around and it’s like every turn of a wind turbine turbine means we use less gas. That’s great. It’s cheaper. It doesn’t need maintenance. It’s not trashing the planet. But when it’s not windy, until we have other solutions, gas as a backup is absolutely fine. And I, you know, for me, uh, another light that came on was I think I might actually, I might have learned this from you, Robert. Oh my god. You did an incredible video on the end to end emissions of the fossil fuel. Yes. Yes. How how much waste It’s not just what happens when you burn it in a car or in a boiler. No, it’s from the the point of uh production. Yeah. Right through to getting it here. the amount of uh like 40% of the world’s fuel is used shipping fuel. Shipping fuel. Yeah. Um so when when you see that and you look at the liquid natural gas industry and by the way we now got satellites that can spot leaking methane. Um uh you realize that it’s we is brutally inefficient to be shipping gas from uh Qatar, the US and Australia to here. Um so to the extent we’ve got to use gas, use the nearby one. Use the stuff nearby. It’s genuinely miles lower emissions and you can tax it and you can use that tax to reduce energy costs, invest in the future, do what Norway did, which is go electric, right? But I think our current policies really don’t serve us well in bringing people what we need, which is super cheap electricity. The biggest barrier to heat pumps is electricity is too expensive. The biggest barrier I mean, I think we’ve moved on on EVs now. Public charging EVs are are too expensive. home charging at the moment thanks to the government’s reduction on levies. I think it’s currently seven or eight times cheaper just to charge an EV at home. Never mind the fact that, you know, you never get through I’ve never needed new brake pads. Maybe I don’t drive hard enough. I don’t know. But there’s just no consumables in an EV. My I had a Tesla for three or four years and I think the total I spent on service was 120 quid, right? So all those costs I think you know people people are now becoming aware of it and just last week or this week Auto Trader has said the average cost of an electric vehicle in that they advertise is now for the first time ever lower than the average cost of a fossil fuel vehicle to buy. So I think that’s working well. But the big thing here is like just relentlessly focusing on how do we make doing the right thing cheap. And you mentioned the marginal price of electricity. But it’s not even just the marginal price. Uh I mean I’ve spent a long time banging on this. I’m worried about it being boring. Uh but so far this year year the UK spent about400 million pounds paying wind farms to turn off and paying gas to replace it instead of just having cheap electricity near wind farms. Um uh the the in energy in electricity we’ve got two markets. You’ve got the wholesale market. it now only accounts for maybe 35% of a typical bill because we’re spending so much on inefficient infrastructure and the plans mean that um even if the wholesale price goes to zero there’s every chance that by 2030 electricity bills will be higher than they are now. So it’s not only how you set the price which matters that’s the marginal cost but it’s actually the entire system design and management is is was designed around fossil fuels. Um and there’s a real risk that we end up making electricity expensive not just now but for the next 20 every decision we’re making that that’s locking in cost these are all 10 20 year costs. So if you if we were to hand you a magic wand and you can just wish, let’s cap it at three wishes to kind of resolve to some of these things, what would you do? Yeah. I mean, look, so I would reform the electricity market. I’ve talked about zonal pricing a lot. By the way, it doesn’t need to even affect consumer prices in terms of every region could be the same if you wanted. Um why? But why? I’m not saying I’m not agreeing with as a Welshman where Wales is a net exporter of uh of energy. I don’t see why the Welsh shouldn’t get cheaper power than No, ironically, right now Wales is an expensive area because the fixed cost of the system vary by region and uh because there’s a lower population density. There’s more sort of more kilometers of cable per person than for example in London. So London has very low fixed costs. Wales and Scotland have very high. So in Scotland and Wales, you currently pay more for your electricity than you do in London, even though you generate more than you use. Scotland generates three times more than it uses and has among the highest prices in the UK. And that’s that’s that’s a grid cost effectively. It’s nothing to do with the actual cost of energy itself. Yeah. It’s just the infrastructure cost being divided by the number of people. Got it. Um and by the way, it’s crazy just to be really clear. Um and what we don’t have is the the wholesale cost balancing the other way, which is saying Scotland’s generating shed loads. So when it’s windy in Scotland, I mean it’s you literally turn off a turbine, a wind turbine, you however you p like at least let’s get the electricity and use it for something. So right now um I was speaking to one of the biggest data there’s all this talk about AI data centers. You mentioned it at the beginning speaking to one of the biggest builders of AI data centers in the world and um uh they said look we got to be within 100 kilometers of London. Um, and I said, um, well, uh, there for latency, by the way, it turns out data moves very, very quickly because when I said to him, if the electricity in Scotland was half price, he goes, we’re going to Scotland, right? Yes. And the thing is like at the moment, because we don’t have, we don’t give them that option, they either don’t build in the UK at all. So, Tik Tok have just built their biggest AI data center in the world, announced it in Norway because it’s got cheap electricity. Um uh it’s not like there’s a big population, right? They’re there for the cheap power. Scotland can have some of the cheapest power in Europe. Um and you could the point reb you pass on to pass the huge savings on to consumers. Savings will be six 8 billion a year, right? You could pass on to consumers by you could flatten the prices for consumers still have it variable for industry. There’s a ton of things you could do. It would just be good to reduce the waste. So number one would be market reform. That’s one example. There may be others. The second one I do is uh more onshore wind. Um, so we’re told often the myth is that we built loads of offshore wind in Scotland uh because it’s windy and it is um but uh because it cost a lot of money to build a grid um uh the cost per unit electricity delivered is something like one and a half to two and a half times more expensive if you build offshore wind in Scotland than if you build onshore wind in England where you’ve already got grid. Right. Um, so if you wanted a cheap electricity system, you wouldn’t just be building this. You not like you I always think of it like if if the wind farms weighed something, Britain would be tilted like you know Scotland will be going sinking. All right. Um uh and and I think we really have to understand that in in a renewable world or clean energy and electricity world distributed stuff is really important. And the third thing I’d do is use longdistance interconnectors. If I look at what’s happening in in place like China, uh they ship huge amounts of electricity, very very high voltage from one end of the country to the other, our equivalent is connecting us to other bits of Europe to uh Africa and it is happening. So if you look in Saudi Arabia, they’re currently building four interconnectors because they they know that one day fossil fuels numbered. Uh so Saudi Arabia’s currently got a plan to build 70 gawatts of solar power. By the way, the UK as a whole is a 50 gawatt system across all our power, right? and and so over the next five years Saudi is building one and a half times the UK just in solar and then interconnectors into four different regions of the of the world to be selling that cheap electricity. So I think something we really miss in the UK is we don’t have enough global perspective to see what’s happening and specifically really uh the Middle East uh China and then pockets of the world. Who knew that Nepal is one of the biggest adopters of electric vehicles Ethiopia right massive penetration electric vehicles. Um and of course we talk about China all the time classic for philosophical nonsense. They say, “Oh, it’s all coal plants.” You know, China’s currently building nearly 80% of all the 75% of all of the renewables are being built in the world right now being built in China. Um, you know, the US president said China builds wind farms and sells them to everyone else, but they use coal themselves. You know, that’s changing so fast it’s unbelievable. Uh, I guess I should also win that we’re not allowed to buy Chinese wind turbines here because they’re 30 or 40% cheaper than European ones. But anyway, we’ll talk about the point is we should be focusing relentlessly on cost. I want to pivot for this last section to electric vehicles because as we have painted very eloquently on this panel, the pursuit of doing less harm, the pursuit of the beautiful elegance of electric vehicles that can be fueled by anything um and just how efficient they are without wasting energy as well has become very very clear. But for whatever reason, and I think you can tell by how impassioned this this panel is, they’re still quite politicized. There’s still quite a divide in the perception of EVs even though we start to see the economics stack up. And I wonder in this last section if we can iron out a few things, a few bits that are missing from how electric vehicles are currently being marketed and what we can do to fix it. And I know that you Rory in particular will have some thoughts. I mean I mean there’s one fantastic bit of good news by the way which is by no means universal in many many categories which is uh no one who well not quite very very few people who make the transition ever avert there there is a tiny minority I think it’s less than 10% isn’t it probably 5% less than that I mean the only real guide in human behavior I would argue is repeat purchase because it’s based on what you have experienced yourself do you do it again and that’s you know now there are lots and lots Funny enough, here on Oxford Street about 50 yards away, um I used a mobile phone in 1989 on the street and two people shouted abuse at me from passing cars. Okay, so this this isn’t new, by the way. I mean, most of you are too young in the room to remember the stage when people would say, I don’t I don’t want a mobile phone. Why would I want to make phone calls on the street? Which was a standard phrase. And so it’s not uncommon for new technologies to be met with disproportionate skepticism and hostility because we don’t like changing our behavior, you know, fundamentally. And if you’ve just bought a gasoline car a year ago and you’re effectively being told you were wrong, it’s hardly surprising that people react to that. It’s a kind of um cognitive dissonance if you like. You know, there’s there’s natural reactants to that kind of thing. Um, what is really interesting about human behavior, which is where I’m really optimistic, is just as in a digital camera, you have a default mode, you know, it’s shutter speed, priority, and it, you know, and after we’ve first fiddled around with our our new digital camera for a bit, we basically leave it on auto, don’t we? The human brains automatic behavioral things are basically habit and social copying. Do what I’ve done before and do what everybody else does. So when you come up with something that’s genuinely new, you’re asking someone to go against both of those defaults. You’re asking them to do something they haven’t done before and which not many people they know are currently doing. And that’s why you always get this sigmoid curve in the adoption of any new technology. It’s slow at first, then it reaches an inflection point and gets faster and faster. So one of the most interesting thoughts I worked with a company called Herdify who look for herd effects cont social contagion in buying behavior and Tom Ridges made a brilliant point. He said if I sold solar panels I’d rather sell to the despair of my finance director I’d rather sell five solar panels to five people who live on the same street than 12 solar panels to 12 people who live 20 miles apart. Because fundamentally the way in which human behavior goes is that we are massively comfortable doing things that other people are doing cuz we’re a herd species basically. You know, we’re comfortable doing things that lots of our friends do. I’ll be honest with you. I I people ask me why did you buy your first electric car? And I came up with a load of answers. Uh the real reason was my brother had bought an electric car first and therefore he he knew all the physics stuff. So I was comfortable enough to do it myself. Had my brother not bought an electric car, would I have bought an electric car five years ago? No, probably not. Didn’t know enough people. Simple as that. And actually, you know, the most important advertising medium is each other to a large extent. And so, one of the things you’ll see is that the whole thing will become easier and easier and easier and that sort of natural mobile phone reactance. I mean, literally, I was making a call. It was a thing like a brick. I didn’t ring anybody because it was too embarrassing in 1989, but someone had rung me. put the phone to my ear. Someone pulls down the back window of a London taxi. Wanker, there you go. Right. I It could have been unrelated to the phone, I suppose. Yeah. But but I mean, we shouldn’t be surprised by this. And also, the great thing but the great thing is that people now actually I’m going to be a little bit naughty here. The fact that it’s a bit of a pain in the ass transitioning to electric is actually a loyalty mechanism. It’s like the IKEA effect because I’ve invested all this time and effort becoming proficient in using six charging apps and you know knowing what a kilowatt hour is and I’ve wired up my house. Now I’m actually disproportionately inclined invested in it. Yeah. Okay. Invested in the thing and I’m reluctant to go back. It’s called the IKEA effect because once you’ve been to IKEA and you’ve driven to Cudden and you’ve gone and walked through a serpentine corridor, you’ve got to at least buy a set of tea lightss because otherwise you’d feel your whole journey was totally wasted. Okay, it’s sunk cost. So, one of the other things is that that electric car buyers once they’ve actually overcome the hump of adoption will become disproportionately loyal because actually it’s a bias but we’re happy to exploit it because of their sunk cost in terms of effort and mental investment. So you won’t see much reversion, which is the main thing. It’s like air fryers, basically. Once you have one, there’s no there’s no going back. Oh, I’ve finally transitioned to an air fryer. I resisted it. You saw the light. Well, see, why did you resist it? I’m intrigued. I I think you I you’re going to you’ll be like, “Oh, of course.” It takes up room on the side. It’s only a matter of time before it’s a Chinese EV with a built-in air fryer. Exactly. So, you don’t even need to stop for a snack. Don’t don’t bother with vehicle to loads, just vehicle to air fryer. Absolutely. But this is, by the way, bizarre because the world is being I worked a bit with John Roberts at AO and I think female territorial ownership of kitchen surfaces is holding back the consumer electronics industry. Okay, seriously, you go, where would you put it? Right? And you go, well, maybe on those six acres over there. The interesting for me was when I got a heat pump, the last thing left that I had that was non was gas was the hob and an induction hob was the greatest life changer. I actually phoned my mom while I was cooking. I’m going interesting. And she said, “I’ve got one, too.” And we were swapping notes on like how easy. But honestly, I think the induction hob is is is actually one of the greatest benefits of electrification. All right. It’s extraordinarily efficient, of course. And it’s so easy to clean and you you can’t even burn yourself if you try. It’s genuinely brilliant. Well, I want to Well, also apart from the controls which a heat pump problem though just induction hob with knobs any of these knobs would be quite good. It’s a German interface. I’m not saying they’re about German design but but I mean the heat pump thing is is interesting because um I’m absolutely convinced that there’s a wonderful reframing here which is you allow people to access their pensions to create effectively an energy pension. Okay. Right now, if you think about it, one of the dar things they do with solar panels is they say it pays back in 9 years. Okay, that’s typically what they say, the payback time. And it’s always the question that we get on our videos. The point is I’m getting an 11% return, which is a lot better than I’m getting from a bank. Okay, so actually taking some money out of your pension and punting it into a heat pump or a solar panel. I’m literally opening my app now. Not my app, my phone. because yesterday one of the guys in charge of um helping customers finance heat pumps, solar panels and EV chargers sent me a chart and then actually let’s have a quick 7% of our customers who install solar panels say they pay for it from their pension and 3% their heat pumps and they’re just doing that with organically without any gosh. So in you bang on to a point and actually then people if you got people to reframe it as I’m buying a source of income which you are you know you’re effectively protecting your retirement uh by investing this. You mentioned the spectator earlier and the interesting thing is like look again I have to work with all median all politicians. I genuinely and by the way surprises happen all the time. There’s always surprises. One of the surprises is the Telegraph, which look, our team always get really upset about the way they cover heat pumps and um and and to a degree electric vehicles and the spectators in the same world. But the interesting bit is they love solar panels on roofs because they’ve got so many customers who readers who are uh living on a fixed income on a pension for whom exactly what you say applies. And I think the interesting bit for me is I think the EV may be the next thing because if as a if as a a sort of retired solicitor reading the telegraph you you’re now proudly the owner of of solar panels the ability to fill a car cheap like the price going forward is fixed as well is really powerful. Um but I think you do get these surprises when you look at what the behavioral drivers are for different people. There’s no correlation between EV ownership and and concern for the environment apparently. In fact, it’s slightly reverse. It’s slightly reverse. Yeah. Um, you asked that question about when you do marketing EVs, right? There I think there were there were two very quick thoughts for me. Uh, the first one is uh I got our we’ve got a business in Texas and we we got them to do uh massive billboards promoting EVs as freedom cars, right? Cuz I think the whole prepper world, right? like the most the most kind of I don’t know I’m assuming largely going to be quite rightwing quite you know um anti-liberal um for them solar panels like get their get their whatever they call sort of their their bed their back garden in America fill it with solar panels get a cyber truck it’s got vehicle to grid basically right you go off grid selfreian you’re self-reliant you prep like it goes with your cans of beans right so I think that there’s a genuinely there’s really interesting case for people who distrust authority, distrust uh the man, distrust governments. Uh they should all be fully solar and fully EV. All right. Um and uh so anyway, we we’ve been genuinely playfully trying this idea because I think it’s got legs. Well, we’ve very interestingly, we’ve got Mike Murphy coming back on the podcast in a couple of weeks time. If you’re not familiar with Mike Murphy, he runs a campaign which is Republicans for EVs. And it’s so fascinating how not just with EVs, but I think clean energy as well, the opposite ends of the political spectrum are definitely coming full circle. Robert, I feel like we can do a little we can do a little live show plug because Okay. The success of our drive um vehicle test vehicle test drives, electric vehicle test drives has been pretty profound. Phenomenal. I think we’ve passed 145,000 test drives that we’ve facilitated around I can say around the world. But that is amaz because I had no idea because I’m usually at the other end of whatever we’re doing. So there’s some stuff the test drives are down there. I don’t see it. But that is an incredible number of people have been in electric very often for the first time and can test things backtoback speak to the experts make those sideby-side comparisons to different models. Um and we’ve done them. We can we can never say it without going into voiceover mode but in Harriut, Twickenham, Chelenham, Netherlands, Vancouver and our shows down under in Sydney. Anyway, um but also Robert I just coming back to the point around actually it’s about your the people that you know who have EBS and I think there’s two things here actually all of you now need to move to the same street but secondly your wife’s book club. Okay, they have all adopted electric vehicles as a contract. No, no, not all of them. No, because some of them don’t drive out. But no, so there’s eight. So it’s very briefly there’s eight women in my my wife in the same book group including her. Uh and uh just a completely cross-section of of very amazing women. And I never heard any of this until every year or two years some of the husbands who are still hanging on are allowed to have dinner. We all have we all meet up, you know. And one of them women said to me, you know, you know, we love our Tesla. They got a Tesla few years ago. And she said, we couldn’t believe it. And every time we saw Judy, she would she we was that one of Robert’s special cars. And she say, “I’m not here to talk about cars. You just plug it in like a phone. I don’t want to talk about it. Shit.” Four of those women have now got electric cars. So that when I went of the hours I’ve spent going, maybe you should consider it. And I mean, think about the environment and what it says about you and all you need to say is it’s just like a phone. Shut up. You know, there’s more too which is that uh obviously current electric cars look very much like conventional cars because you have to manage people across that transition. But the real I mean the real excitement might be in micromobility of all sorts of kinds because you can miniaturaturize an electric motor in and and also you can have self-driving and autonomous vehicles and the Heathro pod and everything else. uh with a with electricity in a way you can’t do with an internal combustion engine. So I mean I’m quite pleased to see Renault deciding basically to have fun with the whole thing because you will eventually be able to be much more experimental with the vehicle you buy much more eccentric actually. It’s almost like the Swatch rescuing the Swiss watch industry. I think it will go highly eccentric and there’ll be a kind of Cambrian explosion in terms of different kinds of of of mobility. And there is that place on Kensington High Street in the Micrololino place. I’m not allowed to go to Kensington High Street drunk because my wife’s convinced I just wander in and buy one on impart. Um but but actually I mean the one of the most exciting things I mean we should mention scooters and bikes. We we haven’t mentioned them. I mean in large parts of the UK uh the dirty secret of a bicycle is that going uphill it’s not much faster than walking a conventional manual bike. Okay. Now in if you live in Bath or any of those places which are just deeply hilly okay the electric bike is a complete game changer suddenly because it’s not really a very effective mode of transportation in anywhere you know any anywhere remotely mountainous and now suddenly everything changes. It’s very very interesting and so the very small modes of transport are just as exciting. I think I think an incredible thing when you visit China now and I think uh by the way the government in January did a a visit with the prime minister of China and I thought one outcome we should have done that is we should have agreed that we’ll do like 10,000 students or school kids going both ways on on research visits because you learn so much. But one one thing that um you experience now is on the streets of Beijing and Shenzen and and Shanghai, all of the two wheel vehicles are now electric. Yeah, they all are, aren’t they? They all are. Um so there are, you know, the streets are still thick with them in places with two wheel vehicles and and yet you’ll hear more noise in London from mopeds and delivery vehicle and stuff like that uh and in any UK town or city than you do in China because they’re silent. And it is an absolute pleasure. Um the the the change in road noise. Um of course by the way all the buses are electric pretty much all the taxis pretty much. 25% of the HGVs sold in China so far this year. Incredible. 25% of trucks. That’s the pace of change there. um on on electric specifically electrification of transport and I think we we need to take a global view because we have these little arguments in Britain and you forget other people are doing it and we can just see how it works and learn from them. Um, one thing I just wanted to say because I I mean it’s very relevant to all the things we’ve been saying but and I it’s a piece of news so I I don’t know how well researched it is but effectively the the the report I think was in electric originally and and then it got picked up a lot is that the total number of electric vehicles in the world which is now well over 100 million which includes two wheels very importantly because they all used to use they all used to use petrol and they don’t two stroke yeah really bad but but it but what it’s done is displace replace the equivalent of 70% of Iran’s fossil fuel output in total in the world. So, so there’s the world now consumes that that much less and and I think this is what we’re harking back to what you said that has there’s some alarm bells ringing in some boardrooms of some fossil fuel companies because they’ve actually witnessed for the first time not a not a a pandemic or a war or anything else. It’s people are using less of their product and they’re going to get nasty. Yeah, when they’re think they are getting mastic. I think when you talked earlier um about the sort of hysteresus curve, you know, the adoption curve um it gets steeper and and it’s I think a lot of time uh Silicon Valley kind of taught us about it’s not where you are today. It’s not even the rate of change, it’s the rate of change of the rate of change. Yes. And the acceleration in the um electrification, you know, in in many countries really is causing those problems. If you look at Latin America now, if you look at um uh Southeast Asia, huge explosion in electric vehicles. Um and the other report that just come out is about LG ex the the long-term decisions of China and Asian countries that had said we’re going to be using LG a lot because it’s cleaner than coal. And they’ve gone, “Oh we’re not going to use that. It’s not going to come here. So let’s let’s reinvest in renewables to a hugely greater degree, which is which is, you know, makes economic sense.” Well, I also just, you know, reminds me that you did a podcast this week with the wonderful Yan Razel who, um, many of you may be familiar with. That is coming out on Monday. And for anyone listening to this podcast, it is already out. And the fact is is that, you know, if we have a world which is about 70 70% electrified, then we have the overall energy requirement. I think that’s something that’s become abundantly clear. One really quick thing on this, you’ll hear this a lot now. What happens is each time each defense layer of the arguments placed by the sort of fossil fuel lobby as as each layer gets demolished they come up with new ones. Right now you will see a lot of people saying well only 20% of our electric energy use is electricity maybe 25%. Right? First of all in China it’s north of 30% is happening but the interesting bit is that as you electrify you just reduce your total energy use. So um uh every percentage point the electricity increases it takes down the fossil fuel percentage point uh percentage by maybe two or three points uh i.e. uh if you don’t look at the amount of energy consumed but the look at the amount of work being done by the energy then you would see electricity as a much higher proportion of the work the work of movement or the work of lighting obviously if you if you take lighting okay how much I mean the whole oil industry started with lighting didn’t it okay now if you take so there’s a brilliant podcast Saul Griffith’s Australian guy if you come across him on cleaning up podcast he’s terrible his basic point is electrify everything and by the way. One thing I will have a dig at government for is around with symbolic actions which just irritate people for no real benefit. So the classic example of that is making vacuum cleaners a bit rubbish. Okay, I I I just bought one of these coffee machines and witch said it’s terrible for energy consumption. I’m going it’s on for like 3 minutes a day. Okay, a vacuum cleaner if it’s an industrial vacuum cleaner being used all the time there is a significant benefit to you know increasing energy efficiency or whatever but those things which simply irritated people by you know by effectively you know but by just imposing I don’t really understand the eco setting on my dishwasher because it basically says you know um uh it says it’s going to take 5 hours to wash your dishes and it’ll use a bit less water and I go I live in the UK and it’s December for god’s sake right and I I think there’s an awful lot of just as there’s greenwashing, which is bogus green activities which don’t really mean a damn thing. What I used to call planting a flower bed on the Death Star, you know, you know, you’re a huge oil company, but you do this one cute little thing and talk about it all the time. There’s also the opposite, which is symbolic. It’s like when you read press releases about how much, you know, carbon emissions come from your email, not not deleting emails. Yes, that’s right. It’s utter horseshit, right? Yeah, like you know the things that use like energy are the things that move big weights, vehicles and heat. Yeah, pretty much everything else is irrelevant. Yeah. Well, I am super aware that we are desperately running out of time that some of you need to catch trains that there are probably questions which I’m afraid we don’t have time for. However, you can approach these guys as we sort of turn the cameras off and and enjoy a couple of drinks. Um, so honestly, I can’t believe how much time has flown. Thank you so much for joining us for this discussion. Thank you so much to everyone here in the audience. Um and for those who are listening on Spotify or Apple podcast or whatever. Um thank you for listening. So what do we say at the end of these? Please like and subscribe. Oh yes. And and tell your friends about it and it’s particularly your annoying uncle or aunt. Yes. Who and Daily Telegraph journalists in general. The odd Daily Telegraph journalist. It’s worth doing it just for the laughs. Uh and and if you have been, thank you for watching.