Welcome to this week’s Energy Security and Net Zero Committee, where we are looking at the clean power 2030 mission. We have our first panel to understand the viability of the 2030 target, the technologies that will provide the most effective route to reaching 95% clean power by 2030 and what levers would speed up progress to 2030. We have three members of the first panel. I will ask you to introduce yourselves very briefly.

Hello. It is very nice to be here. My name is Marcelle McManus. I am a professor at the University of Bath.

It is nice to meet you all. My name is Stuart Dossett. I am a senior policy adviser at Green Alliance, which is an environmental think-tank and charity.

Good afternoon. I am Adam Berman. I am director of policy and advocacy at Energy UK, which is the industry body for the energy sector.

Thank you all. You are very welcome. I will start with the first set of questions. Is the Government’s target of 95% clean power generation within the next five years genuinely achievable?

It is definitely ambitious, but I feel that it is achievable. You can see that so far there has been a huge amount of energy and intensity from mission control and broader Government on this, but that is a level that is going to need to be maintained right through to 2030 and beyond. It is important to point out at the outset that achieving clean power in 2030 is not just about net zero. It is about energy security, the affordability of electricity for households and businesses, stimulating economic growth and unlocking a clean economy as other sectors decarbonise through the 2030s and beyond. There are certainly some very big challenges to overcome in achieving this plan. The first one I would highlight is that the renewables build rate that needs to be achieved is massive. The next two contracts for difference auction rounds need to procure up to 52 GW of wind and solar, of which 20 GW is offshore wind, because of the build time for those to be online by 2030. That would be 10 GW at least in each auction, which is double what was achieved in the last auction, which itself was a record-breaking amount. The second thing I would highlight is that we need to bring on to the system new forms of clean, flexible power and a massive increase in demand flexibility. That will include some first-of-kind new technologies, such as hydrogen for power, which ultimately will be the technologies that displace gas from the system. On the networks, the NESO analysis shows that there are 88 transmission projects that need to be completed for 2030 to be achieved. I think it said that 85 of those have delivery dates before 2030 and three need to be expedited. Keeping those on track while ensuring the appropriate level of environmental protection and community consultation is going to be a really big challenge. Ultimately, ensuring that the clean power plan does not increase the cost of electricity and reduces it wherever it can is of fundamental importance.

It is a mammoth task, but it is one that we have to achieve. To add to what Stuart said, one way in which we can achieve it, as well as providing more generation, is to look at demand management. We really need to look at both sides. We are not just looking at putting new renewable technologies into the system. We are really looking to see how we can actually reduce demand or change demand within industry, within industrial clusters and on the domestic scale. That will then enable us to balance the network a little bit better and reduce the rush to get more technologies on board between now and 2030.

To give a private sector perspective, industry stands firmly behind the ambition of the 2030 plan. In terms of a few missing pieces, to add to my colleague’s comments there, the first one is that the demand side is probably the biggest single piece of the puzzle that we have not yet cracked. As a result, you get these wide estimates of what is actually possible in terms of households and businesses turning up and down their energy usage depending on need. There is huge potential there that is largely untapped. It requires a lot of different policy levers to get there. To date, we have had focus mainly on the big infrastructure: big generation and big transmission. That is crucial, but so is the demand side. Whether we like it or not, there is going to be a lot of unabated gas still left in the system for quite a few years to come. The NESO modelling bears that out. We need to come up with a convincing pathway of how to phase out the unabated gas while maintaining investment in it so that you can keep it going—you can keep the personnel there and keep maintenance going—and then phasing in the low-carbon alternatives. At the moment, there is not a plausible gas pathway forward. The final thing is bills. Bills are left as this giant question mark underpinning the whole plan. From the perspective of industry, it is not good enough just that people come out roughly on par in 2030 in terms of bills as where they were in 2024 or 2025. We need a cheaper energy system. There are lots of ways to do that, but that really needs to be a core focus of the 2030 plan as well.

I would like one from each of you. What are your top recommendations for ensuring clean power 2030 is met?

Building on the demand reduction, we need to have localised and regionalised strategic plans to enable us to ensure that we are getting power to the right places at the right time so that we can electrify industry.

I will go with the renewables build-out. As I mentioned before, there is a huge unprecedented amount of renewables that need to be procured through the next contracts for difference auctions. There are some routes whereby private business can bring these on, through power purchase agreements for example, but ultimately it is the CfDs that are going to be bearing the backbone of this. Ensuring that those next two auctions procure the amount that we need is of fundamental importance.

To add on the CfDs very quickly, there are two auctions, yes. On fixed-bottom offshore wind, it is one auction. It is AR7. This is the final auction this year in which we can procure the amount of capacity needed. I would probably make a couple of points about grid and connection. First, there is lots of work going on in relation to grid, but adaptability in relation to the connections queue is going to be really important in making sure that, if market interests do not perfectly align with clean power 2030, we have some flexibility in that connections process. Secondly, the distribution network has, to date, been treated as a second-order priority to transmission. We really need to treat it as an absolute priority, which means holding DNOs to account on timelines. It means standardisation of fees, standardisation of connections process and more granular data. There is lots that can be done there.

That is very consistent with what we have heard elsewhere. To what extent is there tension between meeting clean power by 2030 and net zero by 2050?

This is a juicy question. If you take net zero with an economist lens, you will try to attack the cheapest emissions first. You go for the cheapest emission, then the next cheapest emission and the next cheapest one after that. Clean power 2030 does not particularly look at net zero in that way. It just looks at a particular sector and says, “Let’s get rid of lots of emissions from that sector”. Wisely, the Government have put the emissions reductions plan at roughly 95% to 96%, because those last 4% or 5% of emissions are incredibly expensive to abate. Frankly, it is a much better use of your time to look at harder-to-abate sectors such as road transport or buildings. Where it is really positive in terms of net zero is that electrification is the gateway to the decarbonisation of the whole economy. We are going to need lots and lots of clean electricity to power that. You cannot view either clean power 2030 or net zero in a vacuum. The renewables developers that I represent are not just looking at clean power 2030. They are asking, “What is my consistent demand for my product, for my electricity, going to be through the 2030s?” That means that they are looking at things such as the clean heat market mechanism. What is the demand going to be from heat pumps? They are looking at things such as the ZEV mandate and what the demand from EVs is going to be. Net zero is absolutely interlinked with clean power 2030, but it also means that, in order to get success from this programme, you need success from other programmes under the net zero umbrella.

I would echo everything that was just said and enforce the fact that many of the other sectors of the economy are going to start to electrify and decarbonise through the 2030s. Having a clean power system in place by 2030 that can then expand through the 2030s to meet that really significant increase in demand is going to make that job much easier. To build on the point around the interlinkage with the other plans, one in particular is the warm homes plan. Buried within the NESO advice was quite a telling stat that is really important here. If the Government achieve their 2028 target of 600,000 heat pump installations per year, in order to get the demand reduction from residential electricity that you need, you need to be installing insulation measures in houses at twice the rate that the warm homes plan is targeting, for example. This really highlights the crucial interdependence between the clean power plan and other areas of government priority.

Similarly, I would echo what has just been said. Also, I do not think that there is a huge tension between these things. We need to have this clean power by 2030, but, while we are doing that, we need to also think about what is coming next. We cannot forget the next steps, such as the wider circular economy. If we have clean power, we are not using fossil fuels. How do we defossilise the rest of the economy around us to get to that net zero target by 2050? That is really critical. It is a huge nascent industry and technology, which could put the UK at the forefront of innovation between now and 2050 or 2040.

Is £40 billion a year between 2025 and 2030 realistic to you in delivering the 2030 target?

I will start off from the industry side. There is no reason why £40 billion is not completely plausible, but it needs to be met with the same level of ambition from the incentive structures that are in place. The CfD will obviously be the primary one on the generation side and RIIO on the network side, etc. All I would say is that we have a lot to achieve in very short order. We do not really have time to try little pet project ideas. If you look at just AR7, for example, the latest CfD round is going to take place this year. There are a set of ideas on the table. One of them, for example, is that they lower the eligibility requirements and projects can bid into that process before they have got their DCO—their consent order. That runs the risk that you end up with projects that essentially are not shovel ready and probably do not deliver in time for 2030. Once you look at all of these incentive mechanisms, we have to recognise that you could reinvent the wheel—but if it ain’t broke, don’t fix it. If it works today—and we know that the CfD works—let us leave it as it is. Let us set it so that there is a competitive auction, we drive down prices and we procure as much as we need, but not playing around with the rules so that we put at risk the amount of capacity we need for 2030.

I will probably leave the detail of this to my more industry colleagues. From the academic perspective we like to see sufficient investment, but I will leave it to my colleagues to answer.

That figure of £40 billion shows exactly why the clean power plan is so central to the Government’s growth mission. That is a huge amount of capital investment. Large quantities of that are coming from the private sector and that has an opportunity to really stimulate regional economies up and down the country. It should very much be seen as an opportunity, not as a cost.

I am going to talk about the balance of technologies. What technologies would provide the most effective route to meeting the 2030 target?

We have talked a little bit about demand management and the way in which we can integrate renewables with demand management. We have seen a huge increase in wind and solar. We need to continue with that, but we need to look at how we increase the amount of storage. There are different ways in which we can do that. We can flex our demand and that is really important. That is becoming a bit of a barrier to net zero. We have the storage, but there is also that electrification to our industrial clusters and the big industries, so that we can take that demand more flexibly and stop curtailing when we have periods of high capacity. That is really important as we go forward. I would say that not just the balance of technologies but the balance of technologies and infrastructure is absolutely critical to this.

What about enabling systems around those technologies?

Renewables are obviously going to form the bulk of the system and they are crucially important to get right. We have a very well‑worn mechanism. The contracts for difference are going to bring those on. On the demand flexibility, there is a whole range of things we can get into around smart meter roll-out and half-hourly market settlement to ensure that the appropriate structure is in place so that consumers and businesses are incentivised to use their energy flexibly. The third section is around the clean, flexible power component of this. So the Government are putting in place a long-duration energy storage cap and floor mechanism, which works similar to a CfD, for example, but the first projects expect delivery by the end of 2030, so the timelines are already very long. While we are talking about 2030 today, we need to keep in mind that the power system is going to continue evolving beyond 2030. It is going to be increasing massively. We need to bring those clean forms of flexible power, be it long-duration energy storage such as pumped hydro, compressed air energy storage or hydrogen, for example, on to the system as quickly as we can so that we can diversify our security of supply mechanisms. I will leave it there.

My next question was actually on storage, so thank you, Marcelle and Stuart, for picking that up. Adam, what is key to getting enough storage? Do you think there is enough focus in energy on the storage needed? We see a lot of focus on generation, distribution and transmission, but is there enough focus on the storage needed to make 2030?

There is a growing focus on it. In fairness, this Government have come in with some big ambitions there. We have seen, for example, consultations on things such as cap and floor mechanism for longer-duration storage. There are two ways of looking at storage. The first is the road to 2030 and then it is the road beyond 2030. I actually work backwards. Beyond 2030, there is very little thought as to what that is going to look like. When you have a high-pressure system over western Europe—so, frankly, there is no wind anywhere for a week or two—what are you going to do to fill the gap? You can use gas, but obviously we want to phase out unabated gas. There remains, for those longer-duration periods, a bit of an unanswered question, or at the very least pathways that are going to take quite a long time to eventuate from carbon capture and storage to hydrogen to power, etc. For up to 2030, we are starting to see the right technologies being invested in. There is an incredible pipeline of batteries. In fact, there may even be, at a certain point, too much investment in batteries. In the connections queue prioritisation process, you are seeing the discussion about some of the batteries being moved to the back of the queue because there are too many of them. That is really positive, but certainly the Government need to do more to think about how we can incentivise them. The lead times of some of these projects, particularly the longer-duration storage, are just as long as the lead times for any substantial renewables project. We have 12 or 18 months at this point to make that work.

Do you think industry feels confident that Government have got a grip on that?

We have heard lots of positive noises from the Government. The challenge with 2030 is that no single part of it can fail if you are going to reach that target. This is certainly a part that has had less discussion than others, but we have seen, for example, a low-carbon flexibility road map, which the Government have said they are going to come up with by the summer. The engagement process for that has started. All the signs are there that the Government are taking this seriously.

Stuart, what role do you think new nuclear, SMR, and carbon capture will have in achieving 2030 specifically?

I am not a deep expert in those two technologies specifically. From what I have seen, the likelihood of significant amounts of carbon capture and storage within the power sector or small modular reactors is limited by 2030. This, again, comes back to the point around how the system evolves beyond 2030 and how you optimise the system to achieve 2030 but ensure a system that is well geared towards the 2030s, when you are going to see a very large increase in electricity demand.

Given the quite substantial cost, do you think we have the right balance, in terms of where Government are focusing, between renewables and these more unproven technologies?

Nuclear is obviously a proven technology. We need to be looking at all sorts of options at the moment. It is really critical to the industry that I work with, which is investing in some of them and working with us in very early-stage TRL energy systems, that it sees a pathway to how this is going to be coming into the future. It is reluctant to invest in things if it does not. For the new renewables, the biorefineries and these types of technologies, we need to have some system to enable people to invest in that and take it beyond the early stage research. As Stuart said, we are at that cusp between what we can do now and what we need to invest in in the future to get to 2050. That is the tricky part where we really need to have some careful thinking. The industry that I work with is definitely of the opinion that consistency is key. It needs to have consistent policy and consistent frameworks for investment that go beyond the conventional financial modelling for financial timescales to make sure that it can invest, be safe and take that risk in some of the more novel things, which we are sure will get us beyond 2030.

On that point around risk and perhaps riskier or more or less unproven technologies, do Government need to be clear on discarding those in the short term in terms of what they focus on so that we achieve 2030? Should Government disincentivise the riskier or more unproven stuff to make sure that we hit our targets?

The problem with the riskier technologies is that the question is what you want from them. There is a big link to the industrial strategy here. Let us take a newer technology: floating offshore wind, for example. Floating offshore wind, to take the last CfD auction results, is about double the price of fixed-bottom offshore wind. It is the same wind that is turning the same turbine. You get no other services from it. It is just double the cost. You should hope that, in paying double the cost, you are able to bring that technology down the cost curve, but, probably more importantly, you are able to establish a nascent domestic industry within the UK and lead globally on that. At the moment, we have a bit of a left hand, right hand problem where we have, for example, floating offshore wind. We just had the largest floating offshore wind project globally procured through the last allocation round, but I have no real sense that we are exploiting the possibilities on either the manufacturing or the services side. I hope that some of that will come out of the industrial strategy, but at the moment that is a bit of a question mark.

Thank you very much. That is really helpful towards our supply chain industrial strategy inquiry, which we are about to start. I am very grateful for your evidence there, Adam.

Thanks to the panel for appearing today. What do you make of Ofgem’s proposals to reform connections to the grid?

The overarching proposal to align the connection process with the clean power mission is one that makes an awful lot of sense. Once you get under the bonnet of it, there are considerations that need to be made around ensuring that you do not disincentivise investment that may otherwise come forward from organisations, if they feel like all of a sudden they are going to have no opportunity to connect and are going to be pushed way down the queue into the 2030s and beyond. The other thing that comes to mind on this is that, given that the connection queue is going to be prioritised based on the target ranges within the clean power plan, and talking to the previous question, the ranges for clean, flexible power and long-duration energy storage were arguably lower than certainly I would have hoped for. I appreciate that this reflects the readiness of various technologies. It will be interesting to see the low‑carbon flexibility road map when it comes through. One thing we really need to avoid with the connections reform is disincentivising those new technologies from trying to get on to the grid even by 2030 and being more ambitious than the Government see for them.

To take one other aspect of it, we are years behind where we should be on connections. That is primarily because there has been systemic underinvestment because the regulator has denied industry the possibility of investing ahead of need. That has been the regulatory landscape for the last decade. One way to think about how we can solve that specific problem is ensuring that we can get the skills base and the supply chain needed for the expansion of the grid. Considering a mechanism such as the advanced procurement mechanism—so thinking about how we can secure funding and components years ahead of need—is going to be really interesting for lots of different parts of the network. That is something I would like to see Ofgem go further on to ensure that we are not in the same problem. The connections queue has recently been closed because it has got so big. The connections queue is not going to get any easier, frankly, over the next few years. Anything we can do to get ahead of need is going to pay dividends.

I would agree with all of that. We need to be pulling in a lot of the discussion around who gets involved with these connections and where everything lies. We need to discuss this with the communities around as well. If we are having extra power systems put on these, we need to be involving the communities that they are within.

Can I come in with a quick supplementary on that, Marcelle? Is there a case for derogations or giving priority connections to schemes that involve communities or are fronted by communities?

Yes, potentially. To get to net zero, we need to have this discussion. We need to have people on board. We will be seeing changes and we cannot not have these changes. We need to have people willing to be part of that.

Adam, what does the industry think about such incentives?

I do not really have a strong view on this except to say that we get lots and lots of different folks coming to us asking for prioritisation in the connections queue, whether you are a large housing estate, a new commercial estate, new renewables or an industrial site. It is largely a matter for Government to decide how they want to prioritise that.

What do you think Government should be doing?

The issue at the moment is around investment. A little bit of meddling at this point is, frankly, necessary because of the mess we have got ourselves into. I would probably caution us not to go further in prioritising certain parts of the economy over others because, at the end of the day, you still need people to come in and build the generation and the transmission infrastructure. You want a certain amount of clarity and certainty over that.

I am interested in that because there seems to be a consensus that the current rules have not worked for all kinds of things. Marcelle’s point about public consent and support is pretty crucial, as well as the investment. If we get the investment and everybody hates it, no one is going to like you, no one is going to like us, and everyone is going to end up going, “Why on earth do we have all of this stuff?” When you talk about meddling in the rules, I would be interested to know what kind of consensus we can perhaps recommend of what those rule changes might be that facilitate the adoption of renewable projects and reaching 2030, which is eye-wateringly close in this context of energy, which also make sure that have the public consent for it, because otherwise that is going to slow you down.

Yes, absolutely. The Government’s position here has been that community benefits is the way in which they will look at this problem, but that there will also be a public comms campaign to try to foster the same spirit as we had in the 1950s and 1960s when we built out the transmission infrastructure at scale post war. Beyond that, there are some ideas, although, at the end of the day, like any nationally significant infrastructure project, if it is in the national interest you get that clash between the national and the local. It is a real challenge to deal with that. I do not know whether a speeding up of connections for particular communities would necessarily facilitate that, but, at least as it currently stands, the Government are minded to view community benefits as the central way of dealing with that problem.

I am going to go back to Luke Murphy but there is a lot more in that set of questions. If you can come back to us in writing, that would be really helpful.

In order to address current delays in grid infrastructure, is there anything that the Government are not doing? We have Ofgem’s proposals to reform the connections. Is there anything that the Government are not doing that you would recommend that they should do in order to speed projects up?

I have been part of a large UK-based project called IDRIC, which is the Industrial Decarbonisation Research and Innovation Centre. We have been working with the industrial clusters on that. The key message coming back from several of these industrial clusters is that we are not getting the connections to companies and industry to electrify quickly enough and that has been a key barrier to decarbonisation. It is not just connecting to the power sources.

I would echo that. In the rush to get as much generation connected on to the grid as we can, we cannot forget about the end users of that electricity, so we need to ensure that the demand is also able to connect to the grid in a timely manner.

I would say, “Make a decision on REMA”. It is a massive albatross around the neck at the moment. No one knows which way the Government are going to go. That is for them to decide, but you have these huge programmes of work: 2030, strategic spatial energy plan and REMA. At the moment they are simply not joined up. Some clarity on that would be useful to making decisions.

Since you mention it, what is the panel’s view on what impact zonal pricing would have on investment and the clean energy 2030 target? I appreciate that any reforms would not come in until after 2030, but Ofgem, NESO and Citizens Advice—all quite independent organisations—are all leaning towards, recommending, or seeing the benefits of, zonal pricing. There are a lot of developers out there who say, “It will increase the cost of capital”. What is your view?

I can start off wading gently into this debate. I am slightly surprised that independent regulators are coming out opining about policies here, there and everywhere in the UK. Ofgem is an economic regulator; it is not a policy think-tank. There is a short-term problem, which is that, as you put it, Luke, the Government are not considering implementing any of this until after 2030, but, none the less, we have a lot of investment we need until 2030. In the very short term, the Government have said, “We will make a decision in time for AR7, the contracts for difference round this summer”. There is every chance that, if the Government make a decision in favour of quite substantial market change so close to an auction round, that auction round could well not go the way the Government wanted. The CfD process is a bit of a last-minute process anyway. If you are a developer putting in your bids, you get the auction parameters at the last minute, spend about a month doing your due diligence and then eventually put in your bid. In essence, the Government are saying, “We are going to radically transform the market and we will give you a month to figure out whether a 25-year asset is doable and at what price”. That is a slight issue. Beyond that, it has always been for the Government to prove the case for locational pricing if that is what they want to do. The challenge has been how you maintain investment in the very short and medium term with some of the challenges that are going to eventuate from locational pricing. The REMA programme has gone on endlessly now—two and a half years—still with not enough information about really crucial elements such as grandfathering. How are you going to grandfather presumably significant portions of renewables and non-renewables clean capacity into a locational marginal pricing world? There is still not a single detailed policy paper from the Government as to how this would work. It is very hard for me to sit here and say, “This is a great idea” or “This is a dreadful idea” without all the evidence.

I will echo and build on that. Ultimately, we are undertaking a herculean—as Fintan Slye keeps calling it—task to decarbonise the power sector by 2030. As we talked about, the £40 billion of investment per year primarily comes from the private industry. Anything that puts that in doubt is not a welcome distraction at this point in time.

I would agree with that.

We have gone a bit over my time and I have taken time from the next questioner, but luckily that happens to be me, so on to planning. It takes four years to determine applications for development consent but we know that most projects needed for 2030 have to begin construction in the next six to 24 months. What are your proposals for how the UK Government should overhaul the planning system to get the renewable infrastructure we need—wind turbines, solar farms, pylons and other energy infrastructure—up and running within the next five years?

I am not a planning expert but people are critical to this, to come back to that people part. We need to turn any social inequality into social equity. We have a huge challenge but a huge opportunity here to do this in a co-created way to make sure that it happens.

They are taking some sensible steps. The update to the national planning policy framework to align the generation project scale with the level of authority for signing that off was a sensible step. Grid connections prioritisation is key to this. I keep coming back to the clean flexibility and the long-duration energy storage. There are slightly lower target ranges than I would have liked to see within the clean power plan. The more flexibility and storage you have on the system, the less big that overall system needs to be. Again, I worry that, with such a massive push to build the renewables, which is absolutely the right thing to do and is going to be the backbone of the system, that requires us to have this big focus on the infrastructure and therefore we need to adjust the planning for it. There are other alternatives to get around that as well and this clean flexibility piece is one of those key ways in which you can end up actually building a little bit less out to 2030 and hopefully a lot less beyond.

Those were great points. I have just one thing to add. The very unsexy proposal around resourcing is a perennial problem at a regulator and national agency level, but also at a local authority level. They have a lot of planning decisions. One thing that could help to drive that is an obligation, particularly for environmental regulators, to make decisions on permitting within six months. That would probably have to be married with an expansion in resource—some money—to help them actually find the resource capacity. Without that, you will just be displacing resource from one area to another, which I do not think is helpful to the country’s interests, even if it is helpful for the energy transition.

Marcelle, you rightly mentioned the need to involve communities. The clean power plan also talks about proposals for strengthening nature protection, but many of these projects need to secure permission within the next two years. Can we do all of that? Can we get the planning necessary within two years for all the projects we need to meet 2030, implement the nature protections and do the sufficient consultation with local people in order to bring them along and build the support? Can that actually be done in that timeframe?

Can I add something else that we also need to think about to your long list of things we already need to think about? The critical reason for doing this is decarbonisation. When we emit carbon and greenhouse gases into the atmosphere matters. In the next five to 10 years, we are, critically, trying not to emit more greenhouse gases into the atmosphere, so we do not want to be permitting new developments that have a huge amount of embodied carbon in them at that point. That touches back to some of the nuclear and the large, big, concrete-based infrastructure that could potentially be problematic from a carbon perspective immediately. From a planning perspective that also needs to happen. Again, I am not a planning expert, but I think we could do it. If we put our mind to it, anything is possible, and we need to do it. We do not have any other option. We need to be doing this and doing it quickly.

You mentioned nature there and this is a really important point. You set out, quite rightly, that the timelines for all this going through the planning system are incredibly tight. The clean power plan is very clear that it wants to act in a nature-positive way, but yet, in the same sentence almost, the conversations around how you ensure appropriate protections for nature within that that are going to be happening between Government, civil society and industry are only just beginning to happen now. There is a lot that is going to go through before the Government have actually had that conversation around how to ensure the appropriate level of nature protection.

With regards to reforming judicial review, do you have any recommended options to reduce the delays that arise from legal challenges to nationally significant infrastructure projects?

I do not have any with me, but I would be happy to get back to you in writing on that one, Luke.

That would be great. Thanks.

You have already talked a lot about demand management, so we can probably assume that you all think that it should form a larger part of the policy mix under this Government than under the last one. NESO’s report to Government said that levels of demand flexibility could increase four to five times by 2030. Do you think that that is realistic? If so, what kinds of schemes would you recommend to incentivise that?

On some areas of 2030, we are roughly on track, so let us say renewables. Yes, there is a lot to do, but we are roughly on track and, if we keep on procuring and increasing year on year, we will get there. On the demand side, we are not on track and there are some really big mechanisms that are needed to be able to deliver on that. In order to do any demand management at your home, you will need a smart meter. Only two-thirds of households have smart meters. It is a very basic thing. We need to finish off the smart meter roll-out as quickly as we can. Second is market half-hourly settlement. This is a slightly technical mechanism to make dynamic tariffs work. Most tariffs that you will look at, if you have a driveway and charge your EV, say, or you have a heat pump, are loss leaders at the moment. They do not work financially for suppliers. You need market half-hourly settlement for them to work. NESO says that, according to its modelling, from 2028 it presumes that everyone will be on dynamic tariffs as standard. We are simply not on that pathway at the moment. The potential is huge. We have had this scheme called the demand flexibility service, which came about at the height of the energy crisis to try to help from an energy security of supply perspective. You have had millions of households sign up to shifting their demand patterns to meet supply. It has been really successful until this year, when NESO decided that it would not produce an availability payment, which is, in essence, a payment to ensure that that would be possible and households would be reasonably compensated for their time. It is really frustrating that we have missed a winter here, but this is a bit of a template for me of how the energy system is going to look in the latter part of the 2020s. It has an amazing potential, but there are so many moving pieces that are needed to get there. At the moment, as I say, we see lots of great intention and work on the big infrastructure, but, on this more digitalisation agenda, I see less evidence that the Government have put us on the right track for that.

How confident are you that the smart metering will be in place by 2028?

With the current regulatory framework, I am not confident. It is not set up to achieve that. Suppliers are seeing that we have now reached saturation of households that are willing. It is becoming more and more expensive and difficult to find the next household and the household after that who want their smart meter. We need to start talking about other alternatives to incentivise those households. Things such as the demand flexibility service have been a great mechanism to get people talking about this potential, but I am not sure that they have gone far enough. The Government have been a little slow on that over the last few months. We would like to see some progress.

In what sense? In the rewards they offer or in the ambition?

There is no reward on offer for taking up a smart meter. It is still entirely voluntary and remains entirely voluntary, but households will be able to track their energy usage. As time goes on, they will be able to take part in these tariffs and low-carbon products and schemes. It is increasingly hard, based on where we are. We have covered about two thirds of households in the UK with smart meters. It is increasingly hard to persuade households of the merits of smart meters. At a certain point, we probably have to recognise that there is effectively a cost now to the households that do not have smart meters. They are bringing about a cost on everyone else in the system because the system is more inefficient as a result of it. We would like to see a change in that regulatory agenda, where hopefully suppliers and Government can come together to think about what is a better solution to that problem. Some of these options are more politically difficult; some of them are less politically difficult. Already you are seeing that the cheapest tariffs offered by suppliers tend to be smart tariffs. That is not all the suppliers, but most of them. We need to make it all the suppliers. We need to make sure that this is absolutely the cheapest, easiest option for people. At the moment, that is not the case.

I would agree with that. We need to ask people why they are not putting the smart meters into their house. Again, it is down to that people aspect of it. I have some brilliant colleagues who I am sure would love to help out and share the evidence they have with this. Also, in terms of demand management, it is not just about smart meters and the digital infrastructure. It is about not using stuff as well, so it is about investment into insulation and, as we go forward, into electrifying heating, etc. These kinds of things where we are just using less energy are really important. Going back to that connection to the demand, electrifying industries so that they can help with that demand management is critical too. It comes from the industrial side and the domestic side too.

Are there any examples internationally where demand has successfully been manipulated to reduce energy consumption and therefore bills of consumers?

The Danes have done quite a good job in how they have connected communities and helped communities understand when energy is available and when it is not. There are lots of little examples around the world as well, but the Danish have done a good job.

Taking advantage at the moment involves the consumers manually deciding that they need to take advantage. Do you see further scope for automating this as you digitalise? You can automate things and therefore people will not have to think about it. At the moment, they have to do quite a lot of thinking.

Yes, absolutely. Ironically, the use of AI can help across the piece. It takes a lot of energy, so we would be a bit wary about aspects of that. When it is integrated with some modelling and planning tools, it can expedite decisions across large problems. That can be very useful. On a smaller scale, the digital “turn your fridge off for half an hour when the prices are high and the carbon intensity is high” tool is quite useful. We do not all need our fridges and things like that on 100% of the time, so that kind of interaction is very useful.

I am glad you mentioned AI. Do other people have comments on it? For consumers, but more widely across the energy system, to what extent do you think it has a role in reducing energy usage and cutting bills? To pick up what you said, Marcelle, how big is the concern that it is going to use so much energy that it is a complete waste of time?

AI is a double-edged sword. The energy consumption is quite vast, but we are beginning to see some potential for it being able to optimise demand management in particular quite well. It could be of a net benefit overall, but only if used appropriately and not, in my case, for ChatGPT answering my students’ questions, for example.

I was listening to somebody saying that the energy used to create ChatGPT is equivalent to the energy of one medium-sized country for a day.

It is almost like you could use humans.

We do not want to incentivise that kind of use, but using it smartly in judicious systems is not a bad idea.

Linking it back to some of the questions that Luke was asking earlier, there is potential for use of AI in modelling the future energy system and, in particular, transmission pathways, where you can optimise for multiple constraints within that very quickly, whereas the current process requires very manual intervention to design different routes.

On the use of AI, and going to Claire’s question as well, there is already some use of AI within the energy sector day to day. There is that question of how you make it easy for consumers. If you bought a heat pump recently, you can absolutely go on a really manual tariff if you really want to figure out exactly what your energy usage is. Most people do not. They will go on a smart tariff from an energy supplier that offers them something that is driven by AI in practice. It looks at your demand patterns and thousands and thousands of other demand patterns to figure out the best deal for you and for other consumers. It is already there, but there is scope for more. The more electrified the economy gets and the more low-carbon tech there is in households, the easier it will be to benefit from it.

We talked a lot about consumers and demand management. Do you think that there is enough being done with industry, particularly heavy industry, in managing demand from those on networks?

That comes back to a lot of the stuff that I was saying. Industry demand management is absolutely critical. There are huge opportunities there. The industrial clusters and industry are producing a significant amount of the emissions and many of them are really keen to make significant progress and are already on the way. Those connections are really important, but investing in those areas is critical to 2050 as well as 2030

There is obviously decarbonising industry, but there is still the demand management of the decarbonised energy. Is there enough focus on that from Government and industry in driving down and managing demand better from industry, particularly heavy industry?

No, not currently. There are some mechanisms that exist that incentivise industry to change its demand patterns. It tends to be complicated by the fact that, once an industrial unit is built, it is built to operate in a particular way. We would love to see some shift there from the Government. Through the industrial energy transformation fund, we have seen some of the possibilities of this, but, if I am being honest, we are actually at a much earlier stage with demand management for industrial customers than we are for domestic customers.

How confident do you think we can be about the projected increase in demand for energy from major changes such as the use of datacentres and AI? There are some assumptions built into models about the amount of demand that will come into the system, but how confident can we be in the current projections that are there even to 2030?

Demand has actually decreased in recent years, primarily driven by energy efficiency. The expectation is that demand will roughly double in the road to 2050. If we really went down the datacentre route in force, that might well increase a little bit. Industry is more concerned about the supply side than the demand side just at the moment. That may shift. Electrification is happening, but it is happening in part a little more slowly than we might like. Yes, you have the move to electric vehicles, but the move to clean heat is going very slowly. The move to industrial electrification is moving very slowly, in part driven by long connection dates. If you need a decarbonisation pathway for your industry, you are looking at hydrogen and carbon capture and storage, and then you see a connections date in 15 years and think, “I will find something else”. On the demand side, we are slightly less concerned in the short term, but, as we move into the 2030s and 2040s, that may be more of an issue.

Here is an opportunity to get private industry bringing on private renewables as well, for example. Not all new generation needs to go through the contracts for difference or other Government mechanisms. Where you have these new large energy users, they are absolutely ripe for bringing through, through power purchase agreements, for example, new additional renewables on to the system and storage as well.

This is a really fertile area that the Government have not explored at all. I understand why they have focused on the contracts for difference, but this subsidy-free route—the corporate power purchase agreement—is one that so many companies cannot take advantage of, often because of things such as creditworthiness. If you are a big cement plant, you cannot take advantage of it, because, unfortunately, members that I represent do not know whether you are going to be there in 15 years’ time when that contract ends. There are lots of ways in which we can help to do that, possibly with a bit of help from friends at the Treasury. I am happy to provide a bit of information to the Committee on that in more detail.

It is a mixed bag. You have people who are absolutely 100% behind it and people who are a little bit more uncertain. This is an area where my colleagues at the University of Bath are doing a lot of research and I am sure would be happy to provide you some further information.

Narrowly within the power sector here, certainly no one wants their 2022 energy bill again. There is a clear understanding that came out of that period that building large quantities of renewables and decarbonising the electricity system is a mechanism for securing and assuring us against that kind of price spike happening again. Certainly on that perception, the clean power mission has cut through. It is absolutely crucial within this—and I am sorry to be the person who brings this up—that the affordability of that electricity is, ultimately, what is going to drive public perception of this. There is a value-for-money assessment test within all decisions that are taken in the clean power plan. I would be interested potentially if, in the following session, some more information on how that assessment works in practice came out. Absolutely every single decision that needs to be taken needs to be taken in the context of certainly not increasing costs but, wherever possible, decreasing costs. Ultimately, the energy bill that voters have at the end of this Parliament is going to be every bit as important as what the public perception of it is today.

That is such a great point. Even more importantly, we have just come out of an energy crisis where we spent £100 billion supporting homes’ and businesses’ bills. We have been very quick as a country to forget about that. We do not have another £100 billion to spend on another energy crisis. While polling systemically suggests that public acceptance for clean energy projects has improved remarkably over the last generation, we have a lot more to do. Stuart is right that the clearest evidence case for that is around bills and that people can have a cheaper and warmer home. If you look at the NESO modelling, with some pretty optimistic assumptions about both carbon price and gas prices, the conclusion of NESO is that this plan will leave people no poorer than they were in 2025 in terms of energy bills. It does not say that energy bills will be substantially lower. That is absolutely not what the plan says, although it says that how energy bills are decided is a matter of policy. I think that there is some constructive ambiguity there. Energy bills are too high and that is partially because we fund loads of energy infrastructure through energy bills, rather than funding it through general taxation. I do not think that anyone is pretending that, at a time of fiscal constraint, we are necessarily going to be able to move all of those costs wholesale on to the taxpayer. Probably the single most important thing we could do, apart from the demand-side response and consumer flex bit, which will be really important to bringing down bills, is rebalancing policy costs. It is figuring out whether we can take some of the policy costs from electricity, where electricity is essentially penalised. It is disproportionately expensive in the UK. Gas is, in effect, subsidised in the UK as a result. We shift some of those costs over while ensuring that there is money available for those that are hit badly by that, and there will be some. There will be some losers in that and we need to make sure that there is targeted support available for when we do that rebalancing to ensure that no one on average loses out.

There are huge opportunities around the industrial clusters to have skills training, to pivot the skills that are already there to green technologies and green refineries, and to look at how we can use those skills, those people and that infrastructure already. That is where the investment is required, building on the work that has already been done within the industrial clusters to make sure that we do not see the same kinds of things happening again. The people who are working in these areas are hugely skilled already. It is a question of making sure that the investment for the next refinery or biorefinery, or the next type of technology, can be co-located in these areas where we already have skilled workers.

As I said, there are huge opportunities. We learn from where it has worked well in order to make sure that we are not losing jobs. There is huge investment—not huge investment, sorry. I know that that is definitely not on the cards; there is huge investment in skills, not financially. We do not need to have a huge financial investment to see a pivot in the ability and the level of understanding of what could come next in these areas. That is what is really needed to push that.

Within the clean power plan, you see that there is an understanding of the need for a strong skills and workforce base in order to deliver it. You are starting to see bits in other areas. For example, there were the announcements recently on the skills passport in the North sea. I know that colleagues have views on how those could be improved, which I would be very happy to provide in writing later. What needs to happen, though, is that, as you say, those other industrial sectors around the country need to be getting that kind of attention and focus as well to give people who are working in there support and confidence that the Government see them and are thinking about them, and that they will be taken with us all as a country as we go through this transition.

That is where I would say that we need to be co‑developing these plans. We cannot go in and say, “This is what we should be doing”. We need to go in and say, “This is the problem. How do we co-create the solution?” I am very much of the opinion that we cannot say, “This is the technology”. I am an engineer. I work in technology. I have worked in technology for many, many years. Time and time again, I have come to the point where I think, “It is not the technology that is the stumbling block”. It is how we get the technology used appropriately or whether people want this technology. It is really down to that communication and that is why I keep saying that we need to engage the community and get this on board.

The annoying word always to use is “clarity”, but it is very hard if you are a young person training. Let us say that you are currently a plumber and you want to be a heat pump installer. You do your training. The training is incumbent on you actually doing your first heat pump job. You have no idea when it is going to happen. It could be in one month. It could be in two years’ time and you have to do retraining again. At the same time, the Government are providing no certainty as to exactly what the pathway forward is. Across so many areas across the net zero economy, having a clear trajectory is going to be really crucial to providing skilled workers, or those who would like to become skilled workers, the ability to know that, in 10, 15 or 20 years’ time, there will be this much demand for their skills. In terms of language, it is clear to me because the polling has manifestly changed over the last generation around clean energy infrastructure. Also, when you look at things such as the Climate Assembly, which some people might have been involved with, which sadly died a bit of a death because of covid, people came together and grappled with really complex issues. They understood the trade-offs and sacrifices, and came up with, frankly, a very progressive plan for any Government to push that forward. People are not idiots. When you present them with this information, they know exactly what has to be done. Absolutely, there are cases where people feel like the transition is being done to them rather than something that they are part of. That is a problem for politics, civil society and industry to try to get better at using inclusive language that makes people feel like they are part of that journey.

That is a very good place to finish. It sets us up nicely for questions to Chris Stark. Can I thank you very much for your evidence, Marcelle McManus, Stuart Dossett and Adam Berman? Thank you also for your very kind offers to write to us with lots of additional information and all the things that you want to add.   Witnesses: Chris Stark and Ben Golding.

Welcome to panel two of our session on how to get to clean power 2030. We welcome Chris Stark, the head of mission control. I think that there is another title for it now, which Chris is going to describe to us as well. I have mission control for clean power 2030 down here as the full description. We also welcome Ben Golding, the director of clean power. I do not know whether you want to say a few words each about your backgrounds to get us started.

This is just a brief introduction from me to say thank you for the invitation to come along and speak to you about what we are doing. That term, “mission control”, has a meaning and I hope that we will be able to tell you a bit more about what we have been doing in a new bit of the Department, looking at clean power by 2030. As a very brief introduction, we are, I think, now seven months in. We have done a lot in the early months of this Government to try to establish a plan for one of the key commitments of the Government to achieve clean power by 2030. That began with a really excellent piece of analysis that we received from NESO, shaping what needed to be done by 2030, and we followed that up with an action plan that contains the basic policy framework that we think is needed to deliver that. It is worth saying that I do not feel I have wasted a single day since doing this job. We have tried to move as quickly as we can to get towards where we need to be to allow us, at the start of this year, to move beyond looking at policies, although I am sure we will continue to do that, into the key challenge before us, which is to actually get this thing delivered. That is about delivering the grid, generation and storage projects that we need on the system by 2030. It is right at the edge of what we think is possible and we are very acutely aware of that in every day that we do this work. The more we look at it, the more it comes into view, actually. That is the exciting thing, because the main reason to want to do this by 2030 and to move so quickly on this is that we are trying to pull through a set of pieces of infrastructure and technologies that we know we will need into the 2030s, as we face into the next big challenge for this country, which will be the potentially explosive growth in electrical demand that we are expecting after 2030. In a sense, this is base camp for that challenge and we are trying to move as quickly as we can to get into the right spot to be ready for that next big challenge for the country over the 2030s. It is very exciting to do it.

We are something of a double act, in that I am the director of the unit supporting Chris, so I will not repeat any of that but just add and emphasise two things. First, there is that point that 2030 is, in infrastructure terms, very soon and immediate, so we are moving fast. The massive advantage of that is that we can get right down to the detail of understanding which projects, which grid infrastructure, exactly what needs to be done for that, tracking it and helping to drive that through. The immediacy, in some ways, helps to make it concrete. The other thing is to expand on Chris’s point that this does not exist in a vacuum. We are very acutely aware that our approach needs to face into the second limb of the Government’s clean energy superpower mission, which is net zero. We see ourselves as building a bit of a foundation for that, simply because most of the other sectors of the economy will need to electrify. That increases demand enormously over time. We do this as a foundation for everything else that needs to be done.

Chris Stark, you left your previous job as chief executive of the Carbon Trust after just three months. What was so appealing about this new role? You have defined your responsibilities. I do not know whether you have anything to add to your responsibilities and what the unit does in addition to what you just said.

I am very happy to answer that question. Let me first of all say to my colleagues at the Carbon Trust, who I met this morning because I spoke at one of their events, that I absolutely loved working at the Carbon Trust. I spent a long time thinking about where I wanted to go after leading the Climate Change Committee for over six years and the Carbon Trust was a carefully selected place to go. I had a brilliant set of colleagues there, and they are still speaking to me and inviting me along to events. Put simply, the reason I took this job is that I have spent now close to 15 years advising from the edge, I suppose, of Government, or UK Government at least, on what I felt needed to be done to address the climate targets and energy priorities that the country has. I have been frustrated over those years that some of the things that we could have moved more quickly on were not implemented. When you are offered the opportunity to come into Government—and I am a civil servant—as a civil servant and lead something that is focused on delivering against those objectives, some of which I helped to set, I feel that you have to say yes to that. It is a great privilege to do this job and to have this very special team around me now very focused on clean power.

What did you learn from your time heading up the Climate Change Committee, which you said you did for six years, that you have been able to bring to the new role?

The reason I do it is partly that we had done quite a lot of analysis on the needs for the energy system and the power system—I will make these distinctions—while we were in the Climate Change Committee. I had a brilliant time leading the Climate Change Committee over a very important period when the country was interested and keen to see more ambition on climate. That led to us, in 2019, doing an enormous piece of analysis on the need for a net zero target, which we advised should be done by 2050. The Government of the day took that up and put that into law. Then we moved into an even more interesting piece of work to show in some detail the pathways to achieving that. It is that that leads me to the role I do now. In 2020, we built five separate pathways for net zero across the whole economy, all of them designed to illustrate different approaches to achieving net zero overall, so quite different scenarios. We are about to receive from the Climate Change Committee the next appraisal of the path to net zero in the form of the appraisal of the seventh carbon budget pathway. In the sixth carbon budget pathway, we were looking at options deliberately to try to throw them open. When you have five different mutually consistent pathways, you are able to then look across them and see, “Are there any common features to that?” Any commonality between five different scenarios is something that should stand out as a priority for the Government to implement. One of those things is clean power. In each of those five pathways, you could see that there was a point in the 2030s when the power system was almost fully clean. The reason we felt it was important for the Climate Change Committee to say that that could be called a clean power system is that we felt it was important not to be overly purist about the definition of clean power. You could still have gas on the power system, as long as we were using it at a much reduced rate, and call that a clean power system, and accelerate the stuff that we would build on top of that to augment that gas-based power system more quickly. We advised that 2035 was the date that the country should aim for for clean power. Boris Johnson’s Government was happy to accept that advice. That was an extremely stretching target. Ed Miliband, then in opposition, picked up that analysis and asked why that could not be done more quickly. There is not a physical barrier to doing it more quickly. The question is whether we are willing to fundamentally shift some of the policies that determine the pace of deployment and work hard as a partnership with industry to get these projects delivered. That is the basis of the mission: that it is possible for us to move even more quickly on that clean power target. Although that is a relatively narrow goal in terms of climate—cleaning up the power system five years earlier delivers some emissions savings, but it is not, in and of itself, an enormous emissions saving—to achieve clean power by 2030 you must do very broad things, notably reforms to the planning regime, to the consenting regime and to policy. These are things that will have wider benefits beyond the power system itself. The more quickly we are able to decarbonise power supply, the simpler the story will be when we come to the bigger challenge of electrifying the end uses that we have for fossil fuels today in transport, in heat and cooling, and in industry. It makes sense to go quickly on this and to try hard for an earlier date.

My colleagues on the Committee are going to have some detailed questions on what you have just been saying in the next hour. Before they do, how will you define success on the delivery plan for clean power? Is there a metric that you will point to in 2030?

I might bring in Ben in just a second on that, but, yes, there is. I do not think that there is a single metric. Already we have defined two headline metrics. The first of those is the percentage of clean in any one year. We are advised by NESO—the National Energy System Operator—that it is possible to get to less than 5% gas or more than 95% clean in 2030. That is the first headline. We are aiming for that as the headline metric. The second is that we can produce from clean sources alone more power than is demanded in that year by consumers in Britain, which is a nice metric because it implies, therefore, that we are, with that exported power, decarbonising those countries that we are connected to on the continent. It is an expression of a wider goal here to assist in reducing emissions across the world. There is probably a third, which we have not made too much of yet.

Do you have a number there for the export side of this?

I do not have it in front of me. I am not sure that we have defined it, only to say that it is more than 100. It is that goal of producing more than we require that is the centre. The last of them is straightforwardly grams of CO2 per kWh, which is an existing metric, and keeping that as low as possible and certainly well below 50 grams.

If the number of organisations was a reflection of the priorities of this Government, perhaps we would see that this is a big deal for this new Administration. We have NESO, Ofgem, the Climate Change Committee, Great British Energy, the national wealth fund, the mission board and the mission control for clean power. As a lifelong civil servant, I am sure you will be able to tell us how they all fit together.

I can tell you how they fit together, but let me first acknowledge that that is indeed a complicated landscape. I would quite like to knock off from the list one of those organisations, because we are not an organisation. We represent the Government in this and are not claiming to be a separate organisation from my colleagues back in the Department. We have a slightly different role from some of my other colleagues in the Department. We are tasked with looking solely at clean power and looking across all Government institutions. I can explain how those things fit together, but it is important that we acknowledge that we are going to have to do a job to explain how this fits together in a better and clearer way. It starts with the energy regulator. We have an energy regulator in Ofgem, which looks across all the regulated institutions. That includes NESO. NESO is now a public body tasked with operating the energy system, but also providing strategic advice and analysis to Government, which it has done on this issue. We are the policymakers here in Government that will set the policies and direction that allows that environment to work. The Climate Change Committee, in this discussion at least, is ancillary and an independent adviser on the achievement of our climate goals. It has traditionally been an institution that has done energy analysis. I think that, in the future, we will look more to NESO to do some of that energy system analysis. It is now tasked with that role as an independent body in the public sector. We still value the independent view of the Climate Change Committee, because it is tasked very particularly with looking out to 2050. That kind of perspective is still extremely helpful as you think about the energy system. There are other institutions here. You mentioned GB Energy. That is a new entrant in the energy market itself. It is publicly owned, but it will be operating and will be part of the plan for clean power, but as a member of the energy sector itself. It is important to make that distinction because it will be operating and making decisions under its own steam, some of which I very much hope will assist us in achieving clean power.

What about the national wealth fund?

The national wealth fund has interests in all sorts of sectors, including the energy sector. Thank you. I had forgotten that one on the list. The national wealth fund already is a key investor in some of the enabling technologies and industries for clean power by 2030. It has made investments, for example, in cable manufacturing recently and there are several other aspects of the energy system itself. It is very helpful to have the national wealth fund doing that job. It allows us to bridge the gap to some of the key industries and technologies that we know we will need in 2030 earlier than we might otherwise if we were looking only to the private markets.

Can you explain how the responsibilities of the mission board will differ from you at mission control and from DESNZ? Those are the three key bits.

I am very happy to take that on. The mission board is effectively a Cabinet sub-committee. It is a ministerial-led board, which is led by the Secretary of State, with other senior Government Ministers alongside. The mission board, if you like, oversees the entirety of the clean energy superpower mission. We are one of the two limbs, alongside accelerating to net zero. They look across all of that. We report into the Secretary of State, who has oversight of the whole mission. The most important thing is to come back to the point Chris made. This is a team in the Department reporting to the Secretary of State, like any other.

You said that it was basically a Cabinet sub-committee. The Secretary of State very much distinguished it as different from a Cabinet sub-committee, because Cabinet sub-committees only meet when things are going wrong, which I thought was quite an interesting insight from his experience in Government. I would be interested to know how therefore we could distinguish this from Cabinet sub-committees, or not.

It definitely does not only meet when things are going wrong. It meets on a regular basis and will oversee the mission and have reporting on progress against it.

Will the Department be publishing the minutes of the mission board and, if so, when?

No. My understanding is that it is normal practice not to publish minutes of those types of committees.

You are only responsible for one of the five missions, but one of them is also the growth mission. How does your mission integrate with the growth one? We have already had some conversations about that in the national conversation most recently.

We have had some national conversations about it. They are very closely aligned in the way that they work together. The position of the Government is absolutely that growth and progress towards net zero and clean power are pulling in the same direction. It is fair to say that that will not always be the case on all things, but overall this is a strong foundation for growth. The two missions at official level and, indeed, at mission board level have been working hand in glove and working together on analysis.

I have one final question in relation to all of this large ecosystem. The language is that, loosely, the national wealth fund and Great British Energy are filling gaps in the market. What do you see as your role in making sure that they are not crowding out private investment? Do you see that as any part of your role?

That is probably more a role for those two organisations. The people involved in those are quite accomplished in managing to avoid crowding out private investment. A lot of that will come from how they make their investments. I spoke at a conference recently alongside one of the senior officials of the national wealth fund. One thing he said there, which was striking, is that, at each of these conferences he goes to, he asks whether anybody there would like to buy out any of his positions. He has never had anyone take up that offer yet.

Okay, that is fine. Also, as Chris pointed out, quite a lot of this is about the policy landscape within which commercial operations will be working. Therefore, what you are doing will have an impact on what the gaps are in the market, because you create them or otherwise by the policy framework. What do you see as your role in creating that framework, which means that the national wealth fund and GB Energy are not doing things that other people could do?

Let me have a go at that. I will say again that what we are trying to do is extremely stretching. We are trying to do something extremely difficult here. The only way we can see to do this and unblock the previous delays that we have seen in deploying infrastructure at the scale that is required is to be more deterministic of what we are trying to achieve. We start from the basis that we have a plan for 2030. That is what we have done. We have worked quickly to establish what could be done by 2030, with advice from a different organisation, NESO, which is literally tasked with providing that kind of advice. It was the first report it has ever produced. We then put a plan around that, and the importance of that is difficult to overstate. It gives a huge amount of certainty about what we are trying to achieve now in the short term in our electricity system. You are right: there is more policy to be done. In a sense, we are giving a signal to the market that this is what that policy will deliver. Trying to develop those policies as quickly as possible is what we wanted to get done quickly to allow us to move into what you could think of as delivery mode. I am sure that there will be more policy to follow, but we have started off as quickly as possible by determining the outcomes of that policy from the start in a much clearer way than was done in previous Governments.

You may be familiar with the words of Adam Bell, the former head of energy strategy at BEIS. He says that mission control “has very little ability to direct the policy work of the Department…This is not mission-led Government, but the creation of a new advisory body”. If he is right, how will you influence the delivery of policy?

I do not think that he is right. I am very happy to say that directly to Adam next time I see him. We have a huge amount of influence. That is probably most obvious from what we were able to produce quickly before the tail end of last year. That said, where Adam and I may agree is that we are not claiming ownership of the policies within the action plan. We are here to steer policies that are, quite rightly, owned and developed in a Department that is very highly functioning at the moment. Our job is to steer those teams that own those policies to deliver what is necessary for 2030 and, I suppose, to define the outcomes that we are looking for them to achieve. We have very successfully done that. It is not some sort of power play within the Department. This is a very useful new facility that the Department has, working directly with the Secretary of State.

I think that he suggested that the Secretary of State has the option of instructing the permanent secretary that they are subordinate to Chris Stark. Where does that sit?

I am very happy to put on the record that that is not my desire. I work very well with the existing permanent secretary and I do not think that it is necessary for us to do that. In establishing a team now focused on clean power, we have given a bit of headspace to the Department to think solely about that and to build a strategy around it. That is very difficult when you are in day-to-day working on your policy in your own policy area. We very quickly have managed to set that up. I think at least, and Ben may wish to confirm it or otherwise, that the Department has responded incredibly well to that. It is not a big team that we have established, by design. At the moment, we are somewhere between 40 and 50 people. The team skillset has also changed over time as we have moved from policy setting and policy guiding into the delivery mode that I talked about. That is there to add to what is in the Department already and to give a new facility for the Department to work even more effectively.

To confirm it, that is absolutely right. I cannot emphasise enough the importance of us being part of the Department, rather than separate to it. We are not advising or influencing officials. We are the officials and we are absolutely part of that wider team and able to draw on the full expertise of the Government Department.

Adam Bell has misunderstood.

I would not wish to speak for Adam, but Adam has a very particular view on how this could be done. I think I am right in saying that it is very much a command and control model. I challenge the notion that that is the only way to do this. We are establishing that the command comes from the strategic intent to do what we need to do by 2030. If everyone lines up behind that, we have a whole Department working on this, rather than a single team.

Yes, which is the essence of the mission.

It goes right to the top and—I can say confidently—to the Prime Minister, because the Prime Minister himself spends a lot of time talking about this. We have had the privilege of spending a lot of time with the Prime Minister to talk about clean power by 2030. In that sense, it is all subordinate to him.

Thank you for clearing that up.

I am very interested how it all works among yourselves. I have a set of questions in front of me, but I am also trying to integrate that into what I have heard. What direct powers do you have to directly report to the Secretary of State? We are hearing that there are no minutes, so it is more of a conversation. How shall we imagine that?

We do not have any direct powers. What we have, as part of a Department that makes policy, are those powers. We have, in a sense, the additional power, if you want to put it that way, of the ear of the Secretary of State and the Prime Minister. That is the power set that we have before us: that there is a Government committed to achieving clean power and a willingness to put the policies in place to do so. That partnership extends into the private sector as well. There is an additional arm to this, which is our willingness to work with the people who actually deliver these projects, who, in almost all cases, are actually private developers. The power comes from the clarity of the intent that we are setting out in the plan that we published last year.

Then you need to intersect with Treasury, Cabinet Office and No. 10. How is the co-ordination happening?

We have a role that is deliberately looking beyond the Department alone. In particular, as we framed up the action plan last year, we thought deeply about planning powers and worked very well indeed with MHCLG colleagues. You will see some of those planning proposals coming through in a new Bill that is coming before Parliament in the next few weeks. That is the testament to this thing working. We have also worked very closely with my colleagues in Treasury in the preparation of both the analysis and the action plans that we published. With Defra colleagues, consenting issues here are very large and loom large in the story of how we achieve clean power. There are others. You could go further than that. You could go into the Home Office even and talk about things such as work permits, and into the Department for Education for the skills discussion. There are all sorts of issues here. The role here is to look beyond the departmental boundaries as much as it is to co-ordinate what is happening within the Department.

You set the general guidance and policy, but you do not manage bids directly for planning and spending.

We do not, no. In a similar way to the Secretary of State for Transport, some planning proposals come through the Department and the Secretary of State rules on those in a quasi-judicial capacity. The way the Department is organised is that we have quite strict separation between the people who are doing the policy work and the people who are advising on those formal planning decisions. A lot of planning applications never come into the Department at all. They go through other routes. There is a careful separation there to make sure that we maintain propriety in this.

Within DESNZ itself, where does the authority lie between you and the directors general for energy, markets and supply, Jonathan Mills, and for net zero, Lee McDonough?

Jonathan is the senior responsible officer, as it is called, for the mission as a whole. He has been tasked with overseeing the clean energy superpower mission. He supports the mission board and the Secretary of State in doing that. We sit slightly separately and report directly into the centre of the Department to the Secretary of State, but we work as part of that wider structure with the directors general and others in the Department. It comes back to that. We are not separate. We are part of the Department and our authority, like Jonathan’s, derives entirely from the Secretary of State.

I want to go back to what you were saying about the intersection with the Treasury, Cabinet Office and No. 10. Legend has it that no one from outside of those Departments has ever managed to influence them in anything other than a minor way. Why do you think you will succeed?

If I may, I feel that setting up the question as though it is a competition between us is not quite the right framing of that. The Government have a mission to do clean power by 2030. Let us pick on the Treasury; it is the one that is often cited as being the biggest issue. It is as much the Treasury’s mission as it is mine. That said, understandably, the Treasury has a host of priorities at the moment. To be honest with you, we have not had these problems because we have been able to move so quickly and bring such immediate clarity to what we are trying to do. It helps with the Treasury that what we are doing here also can be done in advance of a spending review more easily, perhaps, than a brand new big spending programme. The join with the Treasury is often around the growth objective. There are not many better things to do than trying to get £40 billion a year of new capital investment into the economy for a very sensible thing that we know we will need beyond 2030. We have actually enjoyed huge support from the Treasury and likewise other bits of Government too. I think that it comes from understanding that it is not just the DESNZ priority. It is the Prime Minister’s priority. The fact that we were straight out of the blocks to try to define it as clearly and as simply as we have means that everyone understands what we need to do now.

Thanks for appearing before the Committee. A key part of the clean power 2030 action plan is around maximising domestic opportunities for clean energy supply chains. I have heard from some industry sources that they do not necessarily feel as if the clean energy action plan and the industrial strategy are sufficiently joined up. There are some concerns about the GIGA funding that was previously allocated under the previous Government. How are you ensuring that the UK benefits from that additional economic value that can be created? We heard Adam Berman from Energy UK in the first session talk about the potential opportunities around floating offshore here in particular. Are you sufficiently focused on that economic value creation? Are you having sufficient engagement with the Treasury and the Department for Business and Trade on that point? Are you confident, as the industry is slightly concerned at the moment, about whether we will be able to extract enough investment from the Treasury in the spending review to deliver on the aim in the action plan but also the industrial strategy?

There is lots in that, but the general issue of supply chain, and seeing benefit to the supply chain and the workforce from all this, is one of the top priorities now. I am absolutely sure that we have more to do on this. To be very clear, this is going to be the job of the next 12 months for us. We need to be clearer about the way in which the supply chain supports the plan that we have set out. We wanted to spend the first six months developing the framework for this and then the broad policy framework that would support that and put that in an action plan that we could publish before the Christmas break, which we did. That allows us to switch into a different mode of understanding, almost down to project, what is required to achieve that by 2030. We are in the midst of that project-by-project analysis right now. It is probably most advanced for the network projects. We know that there are 80-plus network projects across the country that are necessary for 2030. It helps that there are only three transmission owners doing the programme and that allows us to look really deeply into some of those supply chain issues. We need to broaden that into the broader set of things that are going on alongside that, including the energy storage projects and the generation projects that we will be building alongside that network. We are less advanced in understanding the supply chain constraints there. We already have in the Department quite a lot of knowledge about the extent of the supply chain for offshore wind and some of the onshore technologies too. We want to bring that together. The goal of that is to try to understand, in the first instance, where we see bottlenecks. That is true of the supply chain. It is also true of the workforce. The workforce challenge here is huge. There are hundreds of thousands of jobs across the country. We want, first, to understand how you get around that bottleneck and, secondly, to open up the question of extracting as much value as we can from doing that. We want to establish the industries that we know we are going to continue to need into the 2030s and 2040s, because the story of building out the clean power system does not end in 2030. The importance of us putting our arms around an actual plan for 2030 is that the developers and the supply chain see that and understand that we are serious about it. We are going to develop a much deeper sense of where we are facing a supply chain constraint. I am sure that we will uncover some of that. There was a very good piece yesterday in the FT, for example, on some of the electronic components that are required in those network projects. That is something that we can develop a better understanding of because we have a whole plan for the country. You can then, of course, build a better case in the industrial strategy, potentially with investment from the likes of the national wealth fund, to establish that manufacturing in the UK, to have a sensible import strategy, or to invite foreign manufacturers to come and produce some of that stuff here. That is the industrial strategy that will sit alongside this. We will tie that together when the industrial strategy is published.

If it is all right, Chair, I am going to eat into my time slightly to ask a couple of follow-up questions. I am really interested in the controls environment you are setting up. Apologies, I missed the start of the session. I was in a DL. You have a role for assurance. How mature would you say the controls environment is within mission control at the moment?

I will have an initial go at that and then turn to Ben. We have a rudimentary dashboard, as we call it, at the moment, which is basically a repository of data about some of those key projects that I talked about alongside some of the headline energy system metrics that I talked about. We are trying to get to, as quickly as we can and in the first quarter of this year, a core list of potential projects that we know will matter for 2030. We have not talked yet about one of the other big reforms happening alongside this, which is the reform to the connection queue, which NESO is leading at the moment. It is doing radical surgery to the way in which that connection queue is managed over the next six months. We will combine with that. At the end of that period, we should have a really strong sense of which projects are likely to be on the system by 2030. We are then looking to develop the schedule of works in each of those projects, so that we can understand when they must be delivered and when they have been promised. A lot of those network projects are by regulated asset owners, so we have quite a lot of potential to drive the delivery of that once we can understand it at that level.

We have the huge advantage that we are doing this in an incredibly data-rich environment. There is a lot of information held by existing teams in the Department, National Energy System Operator, Ofgem and others, such as the Low Carbon Contracts Company, on the breadth of the projects happening across the country. We have a huge amount to draw on. There is a lot known about these projects and we can be really specific about them and the stage they are at. The task for us now is to draw all of it together into one place in that dashboard and not just have a map of what all these projects are but be able to draw inferences and insights across them about where there are common challenges and barriers that we have not yet addressed and still need to work on. I would see it as a maturing thing for us as a unit. We are still quite new. We have set out the pathway, but there is still work to do on exactly how we do that tracking, insight and intervention.

You will recognise that, in a controls environment, it is not just about the data. Governance, reporting and culture are really critical. Are you going to seek any independent assurance of your controls environment, such as P3M3 or similar?

I think that we will have to. To be very honest with you, we have focused on developing policies in the first part of our job and we are now in the middle of rolling into the delivery task. The control environment for that, as you put it, is exactly what we are discussing in the Department right now. I am sure that the assurance process above us will want to do some independent appraisal of that. We will also want to bring in some expertise to allow us to do that. It is a very different skillset from the one that we have had in the first six months.

Talking about bringing in expertise, how is mission control engaging with the industry?

It is engaging pretty well so far. We have been able to do so under the guise of the action plan that we have produced. First, there has been a process of engagement led by NESO to develop the scenarios that we have adopted in the action plan. Secondly, we already had a number of industry groups that were up and running, some of which we reframed when the new Government came into power, which we have used for the clean power engagement. In addition to that, I can tell you that I have done a genuinely staggering number of external events to try to make sure that everyone understands what we are trying to do here. We now move into a new phase of work, where we will want to have a deeper relationship with certain developers along that project list that I talked about. The next stage for us is to develop the closer relationships with key developers.

You have eight commissioners. Are they advisers or are they on the ground doing that engagement?

We did not talk about the clean power commission, but I am very happy to do so now. The idea here is that we have an advisory commission that sits above the challenge that assists us. I chair that group and it has eight genuinely excellent experts in various aspects of the challenge before us. They include the likes of Nick Winser, whose review is the basis of the network upgrades that I referred to earlier, but we have a host of other people represented around the table. That group has been incredibly generous with its time. We are not meeting on the odd occasion every couple of months and looking at papers. We are doing full-day sessions and, in the run-up to the publication of the action plan, sometimes twice a week and going deep into the issues. This is definitely a new part of the armoury that we have. We can bring into a relatively private space the key people on any one issue and try as best as we can to resolve it in that room so that we do not waste time with some of the processes that Government, sadly, is afflicted with that cause the delays.

Do you think you have the right balance of advisers and doers in the function that you have?

That is a very good question and a good challenge as well. I feel that we do at the moment, but, as we get deeper into the delivery challenges, there is probably a need for some deeper commercial expertise. Although almost everyone on that group has delivered projects at scale commercially, the discipline of doing so and the understanding of the key aspects that drive project delays are things that we want to bring in. I do not know whether we will bring that into the commission itself or into the team, but that is something we have already identified.

In terms of engaging with devolved Governments, how are you doing that, in particular with Scotland, because it is quite a different consenting regime?

We have been engaging very closely with the devolved Governments. In the run-up to the action plan, we have had very regular—weekly or multiple times a week—meetings with the Scottish and Welsh Governments in particular, because this is a GB target. We will continue to do that. In those regular meetings with the commissioners, we will have some where we meet in a slightly broader group and invite representatives of devolved Governments, but also of Ofgem, the National Energy System Operator and others who make a really key contribution to making sure this all comes together as a single system.

Looking at England in particular, we have some established strategic authorities. We have an announcement today of some newly formed ones, which of course will go through that formation. Then we have existing councils and others that are left in the current formation. Do you think that period of change is going to help or hinder the role that you have in the delivery of clean power 2030?

We have not done much engagement in England within any authority at local level. That is partly by design, because we felt that at the moment we are able to do a lot at the national policy level. The engagement we have done has been particularly with the Scottish Government and Welsh Government, and, within that, definitely with the Scottish Government and the very separate consenting and planning regime up there. Once we have the project list that I referred to earlier, it is a little easier for us to develop some of the strategic relationships that we will need at local authority level. That is partly because many of those projects that I referred to are not yet through the planning system and might well be in the town and country planning system. You can imagine us, in the future, giving some assistance to those key local authorities that are in the frame for some of those projects. That is part of the mission thinking. We might need to move resource around the system to help with some of that in the future.

Ben, Chris, thanks for coming in. Thanks for your stamina in answering all our questions. Chris, you were on the Climate Change Committee and recommended a net zero target of 2035. You said just now that that was an extremely stretching target. Now it is a 2030 target. You are among friends here. Do you honestly believe we can reach 2030?

I do, but I also think that it is, by design, an optimistic take on that. It is really important that the idea of doing this as a mission is different to the classic ground-up delivery appraisal that you might do. We are definitely stretching for something that is at the edge of what is possible in the knowledge that it is going to be very useful for us to achieve it. We are pulling through a lot of stuff that we are going to need after 2030. We are also safe in the knowledge that we are not going to strand assets on the way as we try to do it. It is a really well-defined mission in that sense. I freely admit that I came into it thinking that this would be super difficult. This is extraordinarily difficult. From all the analysis that I had done at the Climate Change Committee, looking at 2035, you could see that. It has been reassuringly surprising how ready we are, particularly on those network projects. That is the core of it. If you can build the network we require for 2030, the challenge of connecting what we need to it quickly is quite alluring, actually. We have a lot of those tools at our disposal to drive the progress that we need. Yes, I think that we can achieve it. I would not do this job if I did not. The optimism you require to believe it has definitely lessened. I am more and more confident about our ability to bring these key projects home. There will, however, be, I am sure, things that we have not yet thought of and obstacles in the way that we have not yet stumbled across.

You said that it would require a fundamental shift from industry and Government, and from consumers as well, I expect. Have you made any kind of assessment of what that fast tracking will require or cost us in terms of having to speed things up and perhaps in terms of lost opportunity? That industrial strategy, that domestic supply chain and all these jobs may not arrive in time for that 2030 target. We could be buying 2030 off the shelf, rather than building it here.

I agree. Let me say this: I do not think that that is what we are here to do. We want to try to build 2030, of course, but we want to do so in a way that benefits the country in the form of the consumer and the industries that we build alongside it. That is the point of this. We need to be ready for the phase after that, with a stronger domestic story on how we are going to supply it. I do not see it as a missed opportunity to do all this. In fact, it is quite the opposite. We have a set of largely domestic developers across the value chain and energy sector, and in your bit of the country, even. You have really important private sector developers that want to support what we are doing here. Most of their supply chain and value is already in this country, so are pulling that through even more quickly. You hear from people in that sector that, in general—and maybe they are just saying nice things to me—this is exactly what they want to see: that level of clarity and the fact that we have been able to broker a much stronger relationship with the Scottish Government. A lot of these projects are wind projects in Scotland. It is a much better environment to be doing what they do in the private sector in that sector now.

If we win this prize and get to 2030, where would that put us in the euros and the international league table of decarbonisation?

It would put us right at the top. We already have an incredibly good story on decarbonising the power sector here in Britain thanks to our efforts to close coal. We have a golden opportunity and not every country has this. We have a golden period ahead of us where we can continue to rely on the gas fleet that we have in this country to supply flexible electricity that allows us to accommodate particularly wind, but also solar, at a scale that is going to be incredibly good for those who care about decarbonising power. We can then face into the challenge of what we do with that gas fleet afterwards. Those conditions are fairly unique to Britain, but they allow us to move very quickly on this. Part of what we are trying to do here is to show the value that comes from that to those countries that are slower on this trajectory.

Coming back to that point about the industrial opportunity of this, there is something quite powerful about getting there first and being able to say that we have a clean power system. There are lots of businesses out there that are investing in lots of things in order to be able to say, “We are using clean power”. Often that can be buying very expensive generation to have for themselves. We are able to say, “It is coming out of the grid, so invest here and you have clean power immediately”.

Having accused you of being perhaps over-ambitious, can I turn to solar energy? Solar Energy UK has pressed for 60 GW of solar. The Secretary of State, when he was in front of us, said that that was a floor, but you have set targets of 45 GW to 47 GW. Why?

There are two things to say on this. First, this is the kind of system that the energy system operator says it can operate. I definitely care about having a clean power system, but I also care about having an operable system, so we have followed the advice of NESO on this. Secondly, those numbers that we published are for transmission-connected solar, largely. There is more scope, and potentially much larger scope, to do what we call distributed connections at a more local level. The Secretary of State is right. I would, of course, say that, but the Secretary of State is spot on in describing it as a floor. It is a very ambitious floor, but there is scope to add more solar to that.

Why have you not uplifted your deployment targets for renewables?

We have uplifted our targets to an extraordinary degree, but not quite to the numbers that Solar Energy UK might like to see. The opportunity for solar in particular is to go beyond those targets in a way that is more difficult to do on something like wind.

Would it help competition in the industry if you did?

I would not quite characterise the ranges that we set out in the plan as targets. The way NESO framed its advice is that these are, to some extent, limited by what you can physically connect to the grid in that time. It has prioritised between technology in terms of what is deliverable, what is feasible and what there is space for. I do not think that we see them as targets to be met and not exceeded. We see them as a guide to what needs to be done in order to deliver 2030 within the boundaries of an operable energy system. It is worth saying that, on solar in particular, because of that distribution‑level connection, I am not sure that we are that far apart, actually. We hit 47 GW. There is probably another 9 GW or 10 GW of credible solar that could be connected at that distribution level, so you get to quite a similar figure.

I understand that some developers are concerned that you have not really engaged with the industry on what they see as caps. You call them targets. Can you explain why you have done what you have done and why there is a concern from some developers that they have felt that the modelling of NESO is not being done very correctly and it is an outdated model?

NESO did a lot of very structured engagement across the country as it developed the advice to us. We took the analysis from NESO and developed a policy with NESO about how we collectively would approach connection reform, which we felt to be very necessary. To make the point, the connection queue contains within it something north of 700 GW of projects, mostly generation and storage projects. It is debatable whether we will ever need that much. We had to do something with the queue to make sure that those projects that were most ready to be developed, closest to financial close and able to be brought into operation most quickly could be connected. I realise that that is a difficult process. It is inevitable, with numbers as big as that, that there will be losers from that process. No one will lose their grid connection. Some of them will be pushed back in time. Some of them will be brought forward in time. We took the decision that that was necessary and essential to making progress on this. One other reason for doing that is that, by rationalising the connection queue in that way to deliver the national targets that we have set, it also frees us up to do new demand connections for new housing developments, prisons and schools. Those are also stuck in a queue at the moment, so it is very important for the growth of the economy that we unblock the connection queue. I am, of course, disappointed that some developers feel that they have not been as consulted as they would like to be. It is not for want of trying on our side, so my door is open, definitely, if they would like to discuss that.

I also hear some criticism of the definition of what is needed. That has not been very clear and transparent and should possibly also be defined a little more clearly to those who want to become developers or are developers.

Yes, and it is a strategic need. There are obviously winners and losers in defining anything like that. The fact that we are being so deterministic about that and having a plan that contains such specifics about what we are trying to do by technology is what drives that strategic need. We have created these ranges. Rather than single-number targets for each region of the country, we have a range. That is what allows us to keep the flexibility in the system. To use a term that I occasionally use, we will curate the grid queue, with NESO support, to deliver those ranges. Necessarily, I do not know exactly at this stage which projects will come on at what date. It is really important to say that we will offer connections out to 2035, quite deliberately, to build in some flexibility beyond 2030 and give developers some certainty about that.

What is your view on the desirability of private wire connections?

Private wire connections have a really important role, but I do not love them. The more that we are able to have a healthy, flexible, liquid market for a range of technologies that we know we are going to need for clean power by 2030 and beyond, the better. Private wire projects do not usually deliver that. There is an ability to do private wires as part of this, but I would prefer to aim high and have these projects, wherever they may be, grid connected.

You used the term “stranded assets” a few minutes ago. I am interested in your sense of the sensitivity around oil and gas, the workers, the communities, the investors and their role in the transition as well, and the impact that having sensitivity has on your ability to deliver clean power 2030.

We have a huge workforce in oil and gas, which is something we thought a lot about in the Climate Change Committee. In fact, we published some of the most interesting work—I think I can say now—on how that just transition could play out, particularly for that sector. What we have in this sector complements what needs to happen elsewhere. I will mention a point that I made earlier: we are in a fairly unique moment in history when the task is to augment what we already have. We have closed coal. That has been a very successful transition and we brought the workforce along with us on that transition. We expect gas to be on the system well into the 2030s.

I think that people who suffered as the mines closed many years ago might disagree with you, Chris.

I should clarify that I meant the workforce in the power stations. Although I say that, even that has not been a simple process. It was very important and great to see that there was a celebration when we closed the final coal-powered plant in Nottinghamshire last year. That is testament to that being a well-managed transition. Well-managed transitions are still difficult. The gas transition that we face in the power sector is one that is probably 10 to 15 years away. We are in the midst now of a really unique moment that we must capitalise on, where we can build on what we have and move those jobs across to the cleaner technologies now, while maintaining that gas fleet, so that we are able to face into the next of those transitions and close off gas at some point in the future.

The problem is not in generating power. It is in producing it. It is in offshore jobs in the North sea.

I am speaking specifically about the power sector here. I accept that entirely, but looking beyond the power sector is beyond this mission. We are not looking at oil and gas supply, except that we are reducing our exposure to some of the globally-traded gas that we will have in the power system itself.

That inevitably has massive consequences for jobs in Scotland and the North sea.

There is an obvious link with the oil and gas industry more widely.

It is partly why I made the point that I did that, in the power sector, the task is to grow the workforce so we are ready for that transition away from gas in the power sector. The wider issues of what we do in oil and gas go beyond my clean power mission. I am very happy to talk about work that we have done before at the Climate Change Committee, but there are other officials and Ministers who will handle those issues.

Problems in planning, storage and infrastructure are all delaying decarbonising the grid. We heard a lot about that from the previous panel. What levers will mission control use to speed up the delivery of essential energy infrastructure?

We have almost too many levers. The challenge for us is that we have a set of projects that are, in some shape or form, in the planning system already. Most of the projects for 2030 are already in the planning system. We basically need that planning system, as it is, to work better. That is the core challenge. The first step here is that the planning system itself will need to be resourced to do so. We can help with that by giving priority to those projects that we know we need for 2030. That ability first to model what we need for 2030 and then to turn that into reformed connection agreements gives us a really important sense of priority, which we can offer back into the planning system, about which projects we need to see quickly through planning. That does not mean that we are running roughshod over the planning process itself; it just means that we should be able to provide the resource to make sure that those projects get the attention they deserve and need. On the wider planning issues, there will be some reforms in the planning and infrastructure Bill that you will see in the next few weeks, which have been framed up not solely around the 2030 goal. Because we have been able to bring the clarity that we have about what is needed for 2030, we are confident about how those reforms will support what is playing out. It is difficult to talk about them now because we have not yet seen the clauses published, but I am very excited about the extra facilities that we will get in that Bill, should it become law. We have talked about Scotland on a few occasions. One of the other things that we are able to do is to offer Scotland some shifts in their own planning and consenting regime with primary legislation here, which helps immensely with some of the consenting challenges that we have in Scotland.

It is maybe worth setting out, as well as what is coming, some of what we can talk about, which is what has been announced already. Chris talked about the importance of getting the right resourcing into the planning system. We have already announced £46 million of investment to do exactly that: to build up the resource across the system and across the statutory consultees. We have announced that we will be increasing resourcing in our own internal unit that handles the planning applications for which the Secretary of State has a role. We also announced a number of things in the clean power action plan directly, such as bringing more onshore wind and other projects into the nationally significant infrastructure system, where appropriate, or the reform of the national documents that guide that planning process. Of course, there were the recent announcements around the judicial review process and seeking to make that work more effectively so that things move through in the right way while protecting access to justice. There is movement on this already as well as what is to come.

On that point about resources, since 2010 the part of government that has had the largest cuts or most reduced expenditure is local government. Planning departments have probably been the worst hit. I appreciate what you said about £46 million for the planning system, but is what has been committed already enough? I have heard from industry—this was a concern mentioned earlier by Adam Berman from Energy UK—that what has been committed may not be enough. The Government are hoping to deliver not just on clean energy projects but on an enormous number of other infrastructure and housing developments. Is what has been committed by the Government enough? Is more needed?

That is a very fair critique. We have made a start. There is rather a lot more to do. It is a very complicated system, but it is also a very complicated system to reform and speed up. We clearly need to go further than we have gone already. The next set of really key reforms will be through the forthcoming primary legislation, but the idea of that is to help the system run more smoothly and to free up some of the resource, which is very tied up. To some extent, these organisations are running to stand still. We are quite clear that we need to make their lives easier and make the very tightly stretched resource go further.

We are putting extra resources into the planning system, but that does not give you an immediate return. I have spent 15 years looking at these things. There is never an end to how much extra resource you could put into the planning system. We absolutely need that, but we can help by giving much clearer priority to what the key projects are. We can now identify those projects that are most required, closest to being developed, in key locations and offer the key strategic advantages that we need. That is a way in which we can help and drive priority into the planning system itself as we grow the resource.

This is something that I asked the previous panel, but the clean power plan makes several proposals to strengthen nature protection. One of the advisers on the previous panel suggested that probably more needed to be done to get consent or at least consult with the public.

Yes.

Yet we have to deliver an enormous number of projects in the next two years. Can you deliver the level and scale that we need while also protecting nature and bringing people with us? That is an enormous task. It is not just about delivering the infrastructure; it is about bringing people with us and ensuring that that infrastructure is nature positive.

It really is an enormous task. In the end, it is the biggest task before us. There is quite a good bit of analysis looking at the linkage between public sentiment and those nature priorities that you see on countless occasions. One of the people who serves on the clean power commission is Craig Bennett, who is the chief executive of the Wildlife Trusts. I invited him to serve on the commission because he is passionate about our ability to build energy infrastructure alongside what he calls nature’s infrastructure. I am very sure it is possible. I have spent quite a bit of time looking at these issues at the Climate Change Committee. It is often hard to measure, but it is definitely possible for us to have restorative practices alongside the need for these new projects and new infrastructure. What is critical to that is the ability to think strategically about it. What blights us is that at the moment what drives the nature discussion is a discussion about an individual length of cable between point A and point B. What we can do with this is say, “Look, we have a plan for the country to 2030. Let us stand back and look at the strategic impacts of that”. The idea of looking strategically at that and building in some of the wider and very exciting concepts of strategic compensation allows us to say credibly that overall we can have a positive impact on nature and site these projects well so that we build the public support for them. The last part of that jigsaw is that we also need to bring a clear offer to the communities that host that infrastructure. Again, there will be some further measures later this year, I hope, in the planning and infrastructure Bill on that front.

Slightly changing tack, one thing that could delay decarbonising the grid or, indeed, potentially benefit consumers in terms of their bills is REMA. We heard from the previous panel a concern about it coming in too close to the next CfD round, round 7. If zonal pricing were to be introduced or committed to, for example, even if that is not going to come in until after 2030, developers are going to be making 25-year bets. They normally have only a month to plan. Why is REMA taking so long? When are we going to see the results?

There is a really important piece of work that began during the last Administration to look at the reform of the wholesale electricity market, and we came in in the middle of that. In a sense, our biggest contribution to the overall REMA discussion—it is not all about zonal pricing, but zonal pricing is the thing that people are most concerned about—is to produce an action plan that clarifies the basis on which you should assess the benefits or otherwise of the REMA package. Again, by putting clarity into what we are trying to achieve by 2030, you give a much stronger basis from which then to make an assessment of changes to things such as zonal pricing. My other big contribution in coming into this role is to hasten that whole process to an early decision. We have committed in the action plan to concluding REMA and making decisions before summer this year. That is appealing on all sorts of levels. It brings to a close a process that has already lasted more than two years and will bring certainty to an industry that needs it. We also just need to complete it because we will not be able to move forward on some of these enormous infrastructure projects unless there is clarity about how they will be treated into the future. You can see how much we have considered and thought about it in the commitment, again, in the action plan that we would grandfather the existing arrangements for the projects that will go into the next auction round so we build as much investor certainty as we can about making that a successful auction.

If REMA does not come forward in sufficient time, is it possible that the auction round will be delayed?

No, I do not think so. We have already delayed the auction round slightly so that we can consult on different parameters for it. The intention is to try to make the auction as big and as successful as we can and deliver the best price that we can to the consumer. It is really important to say that the next auction round, AR7, will be the first where we have had the opportunity to change those parameters. For the last auction round, we largely inherited the parameters that were set by the Government before. We want to make full use of that because we know that for the 2030 projects, in terms of the really enormous volume of wind that we can produce offshore, we really only have AR7 and AR8, so this auction and the one after it. We want to make those a success. I regret any delay, of course, but that short delay is worth it because it will allow us to frame an auction up that is even more successful. I do not see REMA causing a delay to that process.

Very quickly, because I have already run out of time, do you have a view on zonal pricing?

Interestingly—I do not know whether it is interesting or not—I said at an event recently that I am zonal curious. The reason I say it is that I absolutely see the value of zonal pricing. I am driven by clean power to 2030. I also see the potential for a chilling effect on that investment. To give a more straightforward answer, in a world where REMA is looking at addressing the price differentials that we get across the country, such as when the wind blows in the north and does not in the south, the most obvious short-term thing to do is what we have announced that we will do, which is to build the network to relieve the constraints north to south. The most important short-term thing to do is to construct the network that we need. That is where we have been most ambitious in accepting the plans of the transmission operators to build the network that we require for 2030. In a sense, that slightly reduces the signal that REMA is trying to address, but it does not go away all together. We will have situations in the future, particularly as we build out that renewables fleet, where the issues that the REMA team is considering become more and more pressing. It is very important that we address them. It is not just a 2030 concern, though. That should look into the 2030s and beyond.

Rather than asking you to get off the fence—

I am on the fence, though. Genuinely, I am not hiding anything.

Yes, that is understood. A number of developers are saying to us that zonal pricing will make it impossible for you to achieve clean power 2030. How do you respond?

That is not true, but any change is tricky to manage. We need to bring that process to an early conclusion because we need to give as much clarity early as we can about any change. There is not a world where we stand still on some of these issues. Broadly, just to deal with the zonal pricing issue, you have two options. One is the zonal pricing option. The other is some reform to the existing single GB price that we have. In both worlds there is change. I am confident that the developers in the private sector can accommodate that. We need to give them the clarity about how it will be treated so they are able to bid keenly in whatever auction they are able to join.

Thank you. That is helpful.

Hello again, guys. Can I ask a few questions about carbon capture and storage? We heard evidence in our earlier session from the Green Alliance that CSS would have a limited contribution to the 2030 targets. Will CSS make any meaningful contribution to 2030?

It will. It is super-important that it does. The analysis that we have been talking about from NESO showed very clearly that there is a huge value to having what it calls clean dispatchable power. That is basically something that gives you the properties of a gas-fired power station today without the emissions. There are a couple of ways in which you can do that. In fact, there are many ways in which you can do that. One is gas with CCS; the other is something such as hydrogen to power. Both of those technologies are going to be very important for this country into the 2030s. It is now credible for us to have gas CCS on the system by 2030.

Does that mean new-build gas stations that take carbon out or do you retrofit existing gas stations?

The projects that we are looking at would be new-build on the cluster sites that are being supported with the CCS support that the Government announced last year.

All of that is very expensive. Who should be paying for that, the consumer or the investor?

It is a combination of both. The cost of those projects is indeed big. They are the first of their kind, at least for this country. The value to the system is enormous. You can see that most obviously in the NESO analysis. By having a little bit of clean dispatchable power on the system, you need to deploy far less of some of the other technologies that you need. Having the flexibility that comes with gas CCS is the real value to the system. It is worth paying for. Although the projects are expensive, they demonstrate really important technology that the world will need and they demonstrate that the UK is a place to do CCS, but they also have a big value to the power system itself.

Who should pay, the industry or the public?

In the end, all these costs must be recovered somehow. We have a taxpayer and bill payer challenge. You cannot really duck it. It has to be one of the two.

Will it be the consumer?

No. It is important to say that. The balance between bill payers and taxpayers is really the only tool we have at our disposal. It would be nice if we could ask developers to pay for it, but they generally want a return on their investments. That is the challenge before us: “What is the best way to do it?” rather than, “Should we do it?”

Nesta has a proposal for balancing the levies between electricity and gas. What is your view on what they are saying?

I cannot hide from the fact that I have spent nearly seven years saying it is very important that we make electricity cheaper. It continues to be my view, in this job, that we should do so. That relative balance between the gas price and the electricity price, the ratio between those two things, is going to be so important. The cheaper we make electricity, the easier the story of decarbonising will become. Electrifying transport, heat and industry itself just takes—

It helps you to achieve 2030.

It will do, yes, because the demand will be there for electricity. There is nothing simple in any of this, sadly, but, if we build it out quickly and it is flexible demand, we will be able to build even more renewables and even more clean power to substantiate it. That is a happy marriage: the new flexible demand driven by, I hope, cheaper electricity prices.

Thank you for the answer about levies. We heard a lot from the previous panel about demand management, which they thoroughly recommended. We heard evidence that the commitment to the warm homes plan does not go nearly far enough. What is your sense of what is possible with demand management?

The clearest and simplest way for us to be more efficient, if I could put it that way, in our use of energy is to electrify. In a sense, my main goal is to drive electrification as quickly as we can. The reason that is important is that fossil fuels, when we burn them, are incredibly wasteful. They are a wasteful source of energy, in the sense that there is a huge loss of energy through heat loss. You do not get that with electrified technologies. As we electrify and as we supply the electricity that the nation needs from clean sources, we will drive enormous energy efficiencies across the economy. It is one of the reasons why the size of the energy system that we have today—and I say “energy” deliberately here—can be smaller in the future, even though we have abundant electricity supplies because the electrical technologies themselves are so energy efficient. Our biggest contribution to the story on demand reduction is to drive electrification generally. The other side of the demand story, though, is demand flexibility. We have really nailed our colours to the mast on that. We have been very ambitious about driving consumer-led flexibility. We want to see the key technologies being used—by that, I mean solar, batteries, electric vehicle charging—to drive a revolution in the way in which we might see flexible demand on the system. That is because, for those consumers who want it, that is also a source of saving. We can save energy and save costs because you are able to play in that market whereby, when the wind blows or the sun shines, it is cheap.

I have a question that follows on here. I want to talk to you about AI in energy. Has your thinking evolved in recent days and weeks, Chris Stark? The evidence that I have been hearing is that there are potentially significant efficiencies to be had, but there is a concern about the amount of energy used to get there, and maybe one cancels out the other. Where are you in the early thinking on this?

Overall, at national level, even very radical increases in electricity demand across the whole of Great Britain are manageable in terms of the national pathways that we are following to 2030 and beyond. I do not know what the new energy demand from datacentres will be. All I know is that it will be substantial. It is very important that we as a country support that compute power because it is really exciting to have it here. The energy demands from it are highly uncertain partly because the location of the investment is highly uncertain, the energy demand itself is highly uncertain and the technologies within those datacentres are also uncertain. We are seeing efficiencies all the time in AI. My ambition is to never have a situation where we are forced to delay or refuse a connection request for one of those datacentres. That requires us to think of that as a core part of this mission. This potentially matches up incredibly well with what we are trying to do on the supply side. I suppose that is what we bring to it. In a world of uncertainty, all we know is that this could be a very significant new source of demand. We think we can accommodate that in terms of the aggregate position, but it is largely a challenge about making sure that there is a grid connection available for that new datacentre, wherever it may be. The Government have set out their ambitions for AI. Part of that is to try to facilitate AI in certain parts of the country. Those parts of the country will need to be ready to accommodate those grid connections when they are made and requested. I think we can do it, basically.

The waste heat from datacentres is considerable. Do you see it as being a contributor to heat networks? There are examples of this happening and there are examples where it has not been possible.

I am more dubious about that, if I am honest with you. The waste heat is there and I can understand how it could be reprocessed and put into a heat network. It would be great to see that happen, but it is probably easiest to do that when you are co-located near a city. Some of those datacentres might have those characteristics, in which case we should not waste any of that heat. If you are in a rural setting or somewhere that is far away from an urban conurbation, it is difficult to capture that heat and use it. It is best that we admit that. Q588       Wera Hobhouse: Since we are in this world of new technologies and uncertainties, what about flexible heat batteries? I understand that there are producers, but there is a need for the typical drivers and interventions from Government and the Department to help users to use them and to switch. How quickly can the Department create incentives around technologies where you have a rough idea about what it is going to deliver but it is still a new technology? What about new technologies? How quickly can you create these incentives?

It is worth saying that the decarbonisation of heat is probably at the edge of what we are doing in the clean power mission, but it is still in it and it is still important. If those electrified heat technologies are as flexible as a home with a heat battery in it, for example, that is of great use to us, in a world where the power system itself is becoming more variable overall. That is where it is most important. We certainly have an interest in seeing those technologies deployed. I am personally really excited about some of those technologies. There is a company called Sunamp in Scotland, which I know very well, that produces those heat batteries. It is a great domestic success. You can see how important they will be to the overall story of electrified heat and energy efficiency improvements at household level. It is best to be honest with you. It has not been forefront of the work that we have done on clean power so far, but it is within that line on consumer-led flexibility. We want to see as much of that as we can on the system by 2030. Anything that the Government can do to support that fits extremely well with the clean power mission.

Just on flex, when we had Ofgem in front of us, we had a conversation about the fact that, when we think about switching, there is probably an upper limit on the number of people who really make use of switching, for example. Even some of the most energy-informed consumers are quite time poor. The more time poor you are, the less time you are going to have, frankly, to engage in a flexible market where you are worrying about putting your washing machine on at 4 am. I know I am being slightly facetious. How much time is being spent thinking about how you design a flex system that works for all sorts of consumers and not just those who have the time, frankly, and the will to engage in a system like that? There is also another point about who decides. There are some models out there where it is the supplier that is deciding when to take from the battery. That brings its own risks. If someone suddenly wakes up and needs to use their car, they might find that it has been drained of battery. I am not necessarily asking you to speak to those examples, but who is thinking about how that system is designed, who controls it and who benefits from it?

This is something that we are really very interested in and very engaged with. There is a lot in this. In the action plan, we talked about trying to aim for something like 10 to 12 GW of consumer-led flex, which takes all sorts of forms. That compares to about 2.5 GW on the system now. The form that it takes is going to vary. I will speak to some of that. There is a key principle behind it, which is that this needs to be something the consumer signs up to and is happy with. There might be some consumers who would really like a more automated version of this, where it is built into the tariff that you agree with your supplier. They alter when your car is charging in the middle of the night or whatever the system might be, but that is something that you have signed up to because it saves you money as a consumer or it contributes to the system, whatever your motivation is. It should not be happening to anyone; it should be happening with them. There is a lot of really important enabling work that happens with that. This concept of market-wide half-hourly settlement, which Ofgem is working to deliver, is something that means the market is much more exposed in real time to the costs. That enables these very flexible and quite innovative contracts. Those then become even more enabled by the advent of all of these technologies, so heat batteries, actual batteries and electric cars. There is a lot in this. As Government, we have committed to a flexibility road map, which we will publish in the summer. That is trying to draw a lot of these things together to set out how this might work and how we operationalise that. A lot of that is around quite technical things in the design of the market, but it is critical to clean power. That 10 GW to 12 GW of flex is 10 GW to 12 GW of generation that you do not need, which is a significant system saving and ultimately a bill saving for everyone, whether you are doing the flex or not.

Do you worry that it is only capital-rich consumers who are going to be able to benefit—only those who can invest in an EV or a heat battery, etc, are going to be able to benefit from that system?

That is why there are a couple of important things in this. First, with a lot of these things it is a reality that, to start with, it often is the wealthier or more actively engaged consumers who benefit first when you get these new market models. That is the reality of these things, but they then tend to spread. The key thing there is that there is a system cost benefit to this, if we get this right. Even if only a relatively small consumer base actively participates in flex, there is a system cost benefit to having lots of consumer-led flex in the system. The whole system gets cheaper. That cost is felt by everybody on their bills. The other point is that we are looking to the energy system to try to implement this in a lot of different ways. It absolutely might be that the greatest immediate benefits are felt if you have access to technologies such as electric cars and you are one of those first movers, but there are lots of smaller things. We are seeing some of them already, such as consumers being paid to turn on the washing machine overnight rather than between 4 pm and 7 pm. There are lots of smaller ways in which a lot of people could benefit early, but the systemwide costs will be felt by all consumers.

We had a discussion in the previous panel about the importance of taking people with you, communication and getting support. How much of your role is in building that consumer support?

It is not explicit, but it is essential. One of the roles that I have taken on in leading this work is to be more present externally and to be willing to engage with people. We have naturally focused on the developer community initially. There is never an end to the number of trade groups that you can meet. I am sure MPs suffer the same issues. The desire to meet is never-ending. The bit that I do not want to miss is the fact that we are also going to have to talk to people about what we are doing here. In particular, we have to take the sting out of some of this. The story is occasionally told that we are going to carpet the country in infrastructure. That is not true. It is really important that we talk about this. A host of benefits come with this. Notably, with the level of investment that we are targeting, there is a big economic benefit. The jobs story is very exciting. We have just talked about the story about having a more flexible energy system. If it is consumer-led, as we intend it to be, we want to turn that story on its head. Those consumers who are least able to pay should benefit most from the technologies that give you that flexibility. There is a host of things here that need to be described and described well. I can do some of that; I am certain Ministers can do some of that. There is a broader question here about who the right people are to bring that to the country. Maybe that means an Ed Miliband-fronted campaign on your telly, but I tend to think we have to start by laying out very clearly what we are trying to do here.

I am tempted to ask you whether that is a recommendation, but perhaps that is best not answered.

We need to lay this out clearly. Of course, publishing an action plan allows us to come before you and talk about what is in it, but that is not a public information campaign. We have one planned for later this year, as do the electricity networks in particular, to talk about the great grid upgrade, as they call it. That is part one of this. Bringing clarity to what we are trying to do helps us immensely with the message.

Ben Golding, I was struck by what you said. Luke teed this up beautifully, although I set mine at 1 am rather than 4 am. That is such an easy thing for people to understand. Is it really about taking it down and making it that simple for people?

It is about making it simple. There are two aspects to this. First, there is a certain amount of this that most people in the country will not see or feel at all, and that is absolutely fine. If this happens in the background, if it makes your bills ultimately a bit cheaper and if it insulates you from the price spikes that we saw a year or two ago, that is fantastic on its own. Where people do engage with this, where they do see it, a huge amount of it is about making it simple, easy to understand and easy to engage with, if you want to. We also have to change the narrative around it. We talked earlier about the nature-positive approach to this. There is a massive opportunity in some of these things for the communities who host this infrastructure to do it in a way that comes with a wildlife meadow underneath the solar farm or a nature corridor under the pylons. Turning it into something that positively impacts nature, communities and people’s daily lives feels hugely valuable.

Torcuil Crichton, do you want to ask some questions about nuclear?

There is a “Columbo”-style last question.

We have had this before, where we have said, “This is the final question” and then another three or four hands go up.

It comes from the Secretary of State. He stressed that he sees nuclear power playing a very important part in the electricity mix. The think-tank E3G’s recent power report was very critical of nuclear. It suggests that there is vulnerability to delays and closures, and it is expensive. We wonder what your view is on the role of nuclear in reaching 2030.

There is an enormously important role for nuclear in reaching 2030 because we are relying on an existing nuclear fleet that we would like to see safely operating for as long as possible. We now have more clarity on that from the nuclear regulator, which has given us clarity, along with the operators, about how much longer we can expect nuclear to be in the system. Happily, we are going to have more on the system than I feared when I began this job in 2030. That helps immensely. Internally, we call that the hump—getting over the hump—and having nuclear in the system helps immensely with that. The other story on nuclear pre 2030 is a hope that one unit of Hinkley Point will be on by 2030. The developer tells me it will. We need to make sure that is delivered. The story of new nuclear will also be playing out over the period to 2030. We need some new nuclear beyond 2030. Again, you can look to the advice of the Climate Change Committee and others to show that it will probably be offering an important contribution in whatever pathway we take to net zero. New nuclear is something that this Government will shortly be able to say more about.

That was my final question, but I would like to ask a final, final substitute question on behalf of Josh MacAlister, who is not here. Do you agree that action needs to be taken to ensure appointments are made more swiftly to arms-length bodies related to nuclear, most notably Great British Nuclear?

Yes. That is always a good aim. We do not mess about in the clean power unit. We are keen to see every process in Government act more quickly.

When will we see an appointment?

I do not have an answer to that question. I am sorry.

Thank you both very much for going on so long—that is our fault, not yours—and for your answers. I hope you are looking forward to coming back soon and repeatedly to update us on your progress.

Of course.

Chris Stark and Ben Golding, thank you.