National Grid urges us to brace for a long cold winter of high energy prices. John Pettigrew turned Boris Johnson green last week. National Grid, an anchor sponsor of the Cop26 climate summit that gets underway in Glasgow today, marked the occasion by lighting up Downing Street with tinted LED bulbs on Thursday evening. Pettigrew, chief executive of the FTSE 100 utility giant, has been involved in a plan — to be announced by Johnson and Indian prime minister Narendra Modi at Cop — for a global network of solar-powered “green grids” linking 140 countries. More prosaically, the former state monopoly is also taking the opportunity to tell consumers that plugging in household appliances at different times could save thousands of tonnes of carbon a year. Using tumble dryers at specific “cleaner” times would save 164,250 tonnes, the equivalent of taking 78,214 cars off the road, National Grid reckons. Doing the same with washing machines would save 76,650 tonnes. The crisis has spurred ministers to revive interest in building new nuclear power plants after a decade of dithering. Business secretary Kwasi Kwarteng has talked about approving a mix of big and small new reactors. Last week he set out a bill to revamp the funding model, allowing developers to front-load costs onto consumers’ bills during the building phase. The so-called regulated asset base model, which is also used for National Grid, could help the government attract investors from the UK, America and elsewhere, and pave the way for China to be kicked off the proposed Sizewell C project in Suffolk, plus Bradwell in Essex. Pettigrew said it was not too late to build new nuclear plants. “A mix is going to be important … some baseload [nuclear power] generation at zero carbon to support offshore wind, onshore wind, solar, long-term storage or hydro.” But he said “the biggest challenge, if you just focus on the UK, is going to be connecting 40 gigawatts of offshore wind by 2030. That is a massive step up from where we are. In the past decade, we built 10 [GW]. And in the next nine years, we’ve got to build another 30. It feels like the UK has been jogging for the past 10 years, and now we have to sprint.”

Times 31st Oct 2021 read more »