Sometimes electricity prices rise and fall with natural gas prices, even if the power being made is from wind or solar. “Delinking” means trying to make renewables’ pricing not depend on gas prices.
An electric vehicle is a car that runs on electricity stored in a battery. Instead of burning fuel in an engine, it uses electric motors to move the car.
It means using electricity when it’s cheaper or more useful to the power system. With an EV, smart charging can help you charge at the right time instead of whenever.
Vehicle-to-grid means your EV can act like a small power battery for the grid. Instead of only taking power to charge, it can potentially send power back when it’s needed.
Electrification means using electricity instead of burning oil or gas. The big idea is that countries can make electricity from different sources, which can make them less dependent on fuel imports.
Subsidies are money the government gives to help EVs and clean energy cost less. If those subsidies are cut, EVs and clean energy can become more expensive, so fewer people and companies invest.
Data centers are the buildings full of computers that power cloud services. If they use much more electricity, it can strain the electric grid and make clean power upgrades more urgent.
Concept
AI infrastructure into space
This is a speculative idea: putting computer hardware for AI in space instead of on Earth. It’s mentioned to highlight how big the demand for computing power could become.
EVs are cars that run on electricity stored in a battery. Instead of buying gasoline, you charge the car, and how expensive electricity is can make EVs feel cheaper or more expensive to own.
A heat pump is a home heating system that uses electricity to move heat into your house. “Adoption” just means how many people are choosing to install them.
Concept
spark gap
They’re talking about the price difference between electricity and natural gas. If electricity costs a lot more, it can make electric heating or charging feel too expensive compared to gas.
Gas boilers are home heating systems that burn natural gas to produce heat. The comparison to heat pumps highlights the transition from fossil-fuel heating to electrified heating, which is central to decarbonization efforts in the UK.
Concept
thermostatic divide
They’re describing an inequality in who can afford better home energy setups. People with more money can handle the switch to cleaner tech more easily, while others may struggle with the costs.
The California Air Resources Board is a government agency that works to reduce pollution in California. Because it sets emissions rules, it can strongly influence what kinds of cleaner cars get developed and sold.
A catalytic converter is a part of a gas car’s exhaust system that helps clean up the dirty gases coming out of the engine. It’s one reason modern gas cars can meet air-quality rules.
A hybrid is a car that uses both a gas engine and an electric motor. The electric part can help the car use less fuel and produce less pollution than a typical gas car.
Electric cars are powered by electricity stored in a battery. Instead of burning gas, they drive using electric motors, and they can be cleaner—especially when the electricity is generated from cleaner sources.
“Throaty roar” means the car sounds deep and aggressive, like it’s really revving or breathing hard. It’s just a colorful description of exhaust noise.
In an electric car, the battery is like the fuel tank—but it stores electricity. How good the battery is affects how far the car can go and how quickly it can be recharged.
Efficiency means how effectively a car turns its energy source into actually moving. The hosts are saying EVs waste less energy, so they get more “go” out of the same input.
An internal combustion engine is the traditional engine type that burns gasoline or diesel to make power. The hosts are saying it’s impressive engineering, but not the best way to turn energy into movement.
This highlights a key difference in how steam power works: a steam locomotive makes heat externally, then uses it to create motion. Because the heat source can be varied (coal, wood, etc.), the system is more “fuel-flexible” than an internal combustion engine that is tied to specific fuel chemistry.
The speaker is making a point about energy sourcing: even if you drive an electric car, the electricity could theoretically be generated from almost any heat source. Burning rubber tires is an extreme example meant to show that “electric” doesn’t automatically mean “clean” unless the upstream power generation is clean.
The Toyota Prius is a hybrid car that runs on both a gas engine and an electric motor. The hosts are saying that after the Prius became popular, many people who later bought electric cars did so for reasons beyond just being “better” or “holier.”
Solar panels are panels on your home that make electricity from sunlight. The host is saying people often buy them for personal or social reasons, not only to cut costs or help the environment.
A tariff is basically a tax on imported stuff. If energy-related imports get more expensive because of tariffs, the price you pay for fuel or power can go up too.
If deliveries of fuel get disrupted badly enough, there may not be enough supply for everyone. When that happens, prices can spike and some places may limit how much people can buy.
Diesel is a type of fuel used by many cars and trucks. If fuel supplies get tight, diesel availability and pricing can change differently than other fuels.
Jet fuel is the fuel airplanes use. If there’s a fuel shortage, airlines can feel it differently than drivers because jet fuel is handled and delivered through separate supply chains.
“Fossil fuel crises” means times when oil and gas become scarce or expensive. The discussion is saying that switching to electricity can make everyday life less dependent on those fuel-price swings.
“Bifurcation” means the world is splitting into two different situations. Some countries are getting less affected by fuel-price problems because they’re switching more to electricity.
Norway is mentioned as a real-world example of a place that has switched a lot to electric cars. Because of that, changes in oil and gas prices don’t hit as hard.
Spain is mentioned as a country that invested a lot in renewable energy. The claim is that this helps keep energy costs from spiking the way they do in places still relying more on fossil fuels.
Demand reduction means people are buying less of something. Here, the speaker is saying EVs reduce how much gasoline and diesel people need, and that has big ripple effects.
Octopus’s “zero bills” idea is that you can use electricity at the right times so your bill becomes extremely small. It usually relies on smart scheduling—like charging an EV when electricity is cheapest.
Instead of electricity coming mostly from a few huge power stations, a decentralized system uses lots of smaller sources around the grid. That can make it easier to charge EVs when clean power is available nearby.
Battery storage is like a rechargeable buffer for the grid. When renewable power is plentiful, batteries store it for later—so electricity is steadier and EV charging can be cheaper and more reliable.
Instead of only paying for electricity itself, the grid may pay for helpful services—like keeping the system stable. EV charging and home batteries can become part of those services.
Company
BP
BP is mentioned as an example of a big energy company that has to figure out how to make money in a world that’s moving toward electricity and EVs. The discussion is about adapting to new market rules.
Shell is mentioned as another big energy company that might need to change how it earns money as the world electrifies. The hosts are asking what happens to oil-and-gas profits when electricity trading changes.
They’re talking about a future where cars run on electricity instead of gasoline. The point is that if the world is set up for electric cars, a gas car proposal would feel out of place.
A “petrol car” is a regular gas-powered car that burns gasoline for energy. The conversation is basically saying that if everyone is moving to electric, gas cars don’t fit the new system.
Charging at home is a key advantage for many EV owners because it reduces reliance on public charging and can lower effective charging costs. The hosts contrast this with the reality that not everyone has access to home charging (e.g., renters or people without a driveway), which affects EV adoption and the overall charging ecosystem.
This means big, established companies can have trouble adapting when the market changes. In this episode, they’re using it to explain why old energy companies may struggle as EV charging and electricity markets evolve.
Harm reduction means you don’t wait for a perfect solution. You focus on making something safer or less harmful, even if it’s not the best possible option.
Electronic cigarettes are devices that heat a liquid so you can breathe in the vapor. The speaker is using them as an example of a new option that might help people quit smoking, even if it’s not perfect.
Term
gas generation
This means making electricity using natural gas. It can be useful for meeting demand, but it still produces carbon emissions because it burns fuel.
They’re saying the carbon numbers being used are incomplete because they ignore pollution from gas that gets imported. If you don’t count where the fuel is actually produced, the emissions comparison can be misleading.
Concept
EV Association annual meeting
An “EV Association” is a group that represents people and companies interested in electric cars. Their annual meeting is where they share updates, talk policy, and try to influence how the market develops.
Formula E is a racing series where the cars are fully electric. The sponsor is saying their EV tire tech comes from that high-performance racing experience.
They’re talking about how EV charging prices are set. The point is that the pricing system can feel wrong—like you pay for someone else’s electricity use instead of just your own.
Marginal pricing is how electricity prices are set: the market looks at what it costs to make the next bit of power. If the next power source is expensive, prices jump—even if cheaper power is also available. That’s why prices can change a lot from hour to hour.
A home charger is the device that lets you charge your EV at home. It’s limited by what your house’s wiring can safely support. The point here is that you usually don’t need the highest charging speed to be fine day-to-day.
Seven kilowatts (kW) is a common upper range for typical residential AC EV charging. Whether you can install it depends on your home’s electrical service, wiring, and sometimes load management. The hosts argue that insisting on 7 kW is often unnecessary for “most normal people,” since lower rates can still cover typical daily driving.
They’re discussing practical charging-rate sizing: around 3.5–4 kW can be sufficient for many drivers’ daily mileage. The underlying idea is that charging needs are about energy per day, not just maximum charger speed. If you charge for enough hours overnight, a lower kW rate can still meet your routine.
Wind turbines only make electricity when there’s enough wind. If it’s calm, they produce less or nothing. That’s why the grid needs other ways to fill the gap when wind output drops.
Instead of only counting pollution from the tailpipe, “end-to-end emissions” looks at the full journey of the fuel—from where it’s made, to how it’s shipped, to what happens when it’s burned.
A heat pump is a home heating system that uses electricity to move heat into your house. The host’s point is that if electricity is expensive, heat pumps become harder to justify.
Brake pads are a consumable wear item in conventional cars, replaced when friction material thins. EVs often use regenerative braking, which can reduce brake wear and the frequency of pad replacement.
Auto Trader is a UK site where people buy and sell cars. The host is using its reported pricing data to argue that EVs are becoming cheaper to buy than gas cars.
Electricity prices can change depending on how much power the grid needs. The “marginal price” is basically the price for the next bit of electricity, and that affects how cheap it is to charge an EV or run a heat pump.
Latency just means how long it takes for information to get from one place to another. For AI data centers, shorter delays can make systems feel faster and more responsive.
Onshore wind is wind power generated on land, typically closer to existing electrical grid infrastructure. The discussion contrasts it with offshore wind, emphasizing that grid access can reduce the cost per unit of electricity delivered.
Offshore wind turbines are built out in the ocean. They can be harder and more expensive to connect to the power grid, which can raise electricity costs.
Interconnectors are big power cables that let electricity move between different areas. If one place has cheaper or extra power, these lines can help share it elsewhere.
The segment is framed around the idea that the UK energy market is “broken,” with the hosts contrasting domestic grid scale and interconnection against global buildout. They emphasize cost and global perspective as missing pieces in how EVs are marketed and perceived. Understanding the electricity market helps explain why EV charging prices can vary and why policy affects consumer adoption.
Solar power is discussed as a major part of future electricity generation, especially in Saudi Arabia’s planned expansion. The hosts compare the scale of solar buildout to the UK’s overall system size, using it to argue that electricity markets and EV economics should be evaluated with global generation trends in mind. For EV owners, the key takeaway is that charging costs and emissions depend on the generation mix.
Cognitive dissonance is when your brain feels uneasy because something new doesn’t match what you already decided. If you bought a gas car and then people say you should have chosen something else, it can make you push back instead of reconsidering.
A sigmoid (S-shaped) adoption curve describes how new technologies typically spread: slow at first, then faster after an inflection point, and finally leveling off as the market saturates. The hosts connect this to how people resist changing habits and then gradually adopt once enough others do.
The herd effect (social contagion) is when people’s buying decisions are influenced by what others are doing, not just by the product’s objective merits. This matters for electric vehicles and charging because adoption can accelerate once early buyers and visible usage become “normal.”
This means the process of switching to an EV and learning how everything works. The point being made is that once you’ve gone through the hassle, you’re more likely to stay with EVs.
It’s a psychology thing. If you put a lot of effort into something—like learning how to charge an EV—you start to feel like you “have to” keep going with it, because otherwise that effort feels wasted.
Charging apps are smartphone tools used to find, start, and pay for EV charging sessions. They matter because the transcript frames them as part of the “learning curve” and effort that can increase EV loyalty.
Sunk cost means you keep going because you already spent time or money—even if it’s not the best choice anymore. The point here is that EV owners may stick with EVs because they’ve already put effort into it.
An induction hob cooks by using magnetism to heat the pan directly. That means it wastes less energy and the surface is usually cooler than other cooktops.
The “energy pension” idea is basically: instead of just saving money for retirement, you invest in things that lower your energy bills for years. The savings can feel like a steady benefit over time.
Payback time is the estimated period required for an investment to “earn back” its upfront cost through savings or returns. In energy tech discussions, it’s often used to compare options like solar or heat pumps, but it can be misleading if assumptions (energy prices, incentives, maintenance) change.
EV chargers are what you plug your electric car into to charge it. In this episode, they’re discussed alongside home solar and heating because all of these affect how much electricity you use.
This is about why people actually choose to buy EVs. The point being made is that it’s not always because they care about the environment—money, convenience, and personal beliefs can matter more.
“Off grid” describes living or operating independently from the main utility grid, typically using solar panels, batteries, and sometimes backup generation. In EV contexts, off-grid setups may pair solar with home battery storage and EV charging to reduce reliance on the grid.
A test drive is when you actually drive a car before deciding to buy it. Doing EV test drives back-to-back helps you compare how different electric cars feel and work.
Micro mobility means small ways to get around for short distances, like e-scooters and electric bikes. The host’s point is that electric help makes these options work much better, especially when the roads are hilly.
Autonomous vehicles are cars or shuttles that can drive themselves using cameras and sensors. The host is saying that electric vehicles may make it easier to build and deploy these systems.
Concept
Heathrow pod
The Heathrow pod appears to refer to a small automated transit vehicle used at or near Heathrow Airport. In the segment, it’s cited as an example of electrified, potentially autonomous mobility that could be deployed in constrained environments.
An electric bike is a regular bike with a motor that helps you pedal. The host says that on steep hills, the motor support makes riding much more realistic than a normal bike.
Instead of gas-powered scooters and motorcycles, more cities are using electric versions. That means less exhaust and usually quieter streets, especially in dense areas.
Electric vehicles often make less noise than gas cars, especially when they’re going slowly. So when a city electrifies fleets, the overall sound of traffic can drop a lot.
Electrifying buses is a major step because buses run long hours and high mileage, so they can deliver large emissions reductions. Many cities adopt electric bus fleets to cut local pollution and improve urban air quality, especially along busy routes.
HGVs are big trucks used for deliveries and freight. Making them electric is a bigger challenge than making cars electric, so the sales share is a useful sign of how serious the transition is.
Concept
displace the equivalent of 70 percent of Iran's fossil fuel output
They’re trying to show that EVs aren’t just a small niche—they can reduce how much fossil fuel the world uses. The comparison is meant to make the scale easier to understand.
A hysteresis curve means “what happens now depends on what happened before.” So even if conditions look similar, the outcome can be different because the system has memory—like how adoption and infrastructure build-up don’t move smoothly.
An adoption curve is just a way to describe how a new technology spreads. It often starts slowly, then speeds up once more people and businesses switch over.
This phrase is basically about acceleration—how fast the “speed of change” is increasing. For technology adoption, it means growth can suddenly ramp up once it reaches a tipping point.
LNG is natural gas that’s been turned into a liquid so it can be shipped around the world. The point here is that some places planned to use it a lot, but later changed course as cleaner power got cheaper.
Concept
70 percent electrified
They’re using a rough “if most of transport is electric” scenario to make the efficiency argument. Electric vehicles can do the same driving with less energy overall than gas cars.
Concept
only 20 percent of our electricity energy uses electricity
This refers to a common energy-mix argument: that electricity’s share of total energy use is relatively small. The hosts counter that electrification reduces total fossil-fuel energy needed and that electricity can represent a larger share of “work done” (movement/lighting) even if it’s a smaller share by raw energy accounting.
“Electrify everything” means using electricity instead of burning fuel for more things—especially cars and home heating. Whether it’s cleaner depends on how the electricity is generated.
Symbolic actions are things that are done mainly to look good or get attention, not because they actually fix the problem. The hosts say the real impact is often tiny.
They’re calling out a common online “green” claim that deleting emails saves a lot of carbon. The point is that most emissions come from big energy uses, not tiny digital habits.
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Hello, and welcome to another episode of the Everything Electric Podcast,
where today we have a really special episode for you,
and it is a slightly different format.
So I just wanted to jump in and share a couple of details with you.
So a couple of weekends ago,
we had the privilege of filming a live podcast on Oxford Street,
all thanks to Renault,
and we were joined by Greg Jackson and Rory Sutherland.
That is what you're about to hear.
However, we had a lovely live audience,
so you will hear a few smatterings from our live audience,
and this recording took place prior to the announcement from Ed Miliband earlier this week,
in which he announced the delinking of the cost of renewables from the cost of gas.
So if we sound a little bit toned up on that particular subject,
that is why that news hadn't yet happened.
I, as ever, would be so delighted to hear what you think about this particular conversation,
so do make sure to let us know in the comments.
As ever, please do like and subscribe, and enjoy the episode.
This is really important context, and I'm going to start with a slightly longer spiel
than I would do otherwise,
but I really want to set the scene so that we get the absolute best from this discussion for all of you here.
Because, let's face it, through virtue of being here,
and that little very scientific survey that we did,
you're already familiar with the objective superiority of the electric vehicle,
its unrivaled efficiency, its role as the gateway drug to the kilowatt hour.
You're likely already playing Wolf of Wall Street with your various apps that you have,
showing your consumption, your generation, trading with the grid,
and a future in which you have almost zero energy bills seems like an inevitability.
Vehicle to grid is your utopia.
And so with that context, in this unprecedented weird environment in which we're living,
where we're living through an industrial revolution in real time,
and not just real time, but unfolding in double speed,
things feel strange, because yet we can see the inevitability
of these current technologies, and yet we can also see the stupidity
of a world that seems tethered to an oil-based war,
and the greatest threat to global energy security in history that may come with it.
That triple shock of energy scarcity, food inflation, and GDP downturns,
that freight train which promises to hit the global economy
and potentially plunge 32 million people into poverty.
Sounds bleak, I promise we'll lift the tone up.
But the US-Iran War starkly reveals that electrification is a fundamental pillar
of national security.
And yet, for in a bit of a bifurcated moment,
I've definitely not said that word correctly, bifurcated moment.
You know what I mean.
The US is gutting EV and clean energy subsidies,
whilst Europe quietly retreats into sort of policy uncertainty.
We're bracing for data centers to double their energy consumption by 2030,
driving a desperate surge in both clean energy, but also fossil fuel as well.
We're even debating sending that AI infrastructure into space,
and yet half the world live without a flushing toilet.
It's a very bizarre time, and it almost feels as if this new global economy
is not going to be based on oil and gas production,
but in fact, how much compute power do you have,
and the cost of that compute power as well.
So whilst war is a brutal impetus for a paradigm shift,
it is the history that we seem to find ourselves living.
And here in the UK, we have a lot of work to do.
Nearly one in five households own a low-carbon technology,
so EVs, solar panels, batteries, et cetera.
But high-income families are 1.6 times more likely to have made that leap.
Heat pump adoption.
We're going to have a discussion about this.
It's stuck at a measly 1%, not least as our spark gap,
that price between electricity and gas is so high.
And that makes the maths tricky for the average family.
For every heat pump sold, 15 gas boilers are still being bolted to walls.
And today, 45% of British adults are worried about paying their energy bills.
So we do risk this weird thermostatic divide,
where people here are a little bit more affluent,
can enjoy zero energy bills, whilst people who are less affluent could be crushed by them.
But if the economics of this technology is this clear,
and the geopolitics this loud, why is this past still riddled with debate?
Even on this panel, I know that we have differing views
on the relative merits of a heat pump,
and also potentially differing views on drilling in the North Sea.
So how do we chart the path forward?
Well, if you tuned out from this very long monologue that I seem to have done,
we know the value of clean tech.
But how on earth do we bloody well get on with it in a joined up kind of way?
Well, that is what we are endeavouring to find out on this panel here.
And I'm delighted to be joined by a frankly intimidating lineup.
They need very little introduction.
You know, of course, who these people are.
But joining me, we have Greg Jackson CBE,
the founder and CEO of Octopus Energy Group,
the UK's largest energy supplier,
and a global energy and technology company
that's driving the affordable green energy system of the future.
Your PR team gave me that.
They could win and prove it, to be honest.
Rory Sutherland, these were your own words, and I like these.
Alchemist and behavioral science impresario.
Accidental TikTok star, that's very much true,
and founder of Ogilby's Behavioral Science Division.
And last but by no means least,
Robert Llewellyn, founder of the fully charged show,
Now Everything Electric,
and lifelong actor, presenter and author,
maybe the ultimate early adopter,
and definitely responsible for encouraging thousands of people
to pursue careers in engineering thanks to Scrap Pup Challenge,
and thousands more to adopt green energy technologies.
He's looking rather sheepish there, but it's definitely true.
And between them, they offer game changing solutions,
a clear ability to see into the future,
and I'm wavering love of logic to maximize the solutions
that benefit the most amount of people.
And I think you all enjoy peppering a little bit of magic
in there along the way as well.
So in the rest of this panel, I promise to say as little as I can,
but we're going to talk a little bit about the energy system at large.
We're then going to get into some home energy technologies
before going on to our favorite subject, electric vehicles.
So enough of me, but to kick off,
I guess I think it would be useful to assess
what personally motivates you to talk on the subject
of clean energy technologies.
And under that umbrella, I am referring, of course,
to electric vehicles, solar heat pumps, et cetera, et cetera.
What personally motivates you in this space?
And I'll start with you, Greg.
Yeah, okay, cool.
Look, I joined Greenpeace when I was 15.
I was inspired by the way.
I used to, anyone who's roughly my age will remember
when you used to watch the news in an evening
and have Greenpeace dinghies up against oil rigs.
And I always thought if you joined Greenpeace, you got to do that.
It was my first ever disappointing response to direct marketing
when all you got was a quarterly newsletter.
But the damage that each of us do to everyone else
with our private decisions is something that really bothers me.
And I don't think we should go back to the stone ages.
I think that technology has solutions to a lot of these problems.
And so for me, the real driving passion
for a lot of what you're talking about, electrification generally,
is I think it lets us live the lives we want, or even better ones,
whilst doing less harm to the planet and everybody else.
And we're now at a point where the economics of that
have followed the science.
It was inevitable, and now we're battling that,
really just at the politics and the incumbent interest.
Robert, it's always hard to follow Greg. I really understand that.
I think it was, for me, I think it was my slow but steady understanding
of what was happening in California in the early noughties.
And it was just by chance and into working there
and making the American version of scrappy junkyard wars
that I became aware of things like the California Air Resource Board,
the California government's push to reduce all those things.
I went, oh, catalytic converters, oh, California.
Unledded petrol, oh, California.
Oh, hybrids, California.
Electric cars, California.
And they're so strange now.
They were way ahead of anywhere else in the world,
not now, but they were then.
And that's where the home of that.
And understanding that that technology came out of Silicon Valley
out of computers and nerds with computers,
not Detroit where the automotive industry was.
There's going to be some corrections on this, but that's my understanding.
That was my understanding at the time.
And I was, that was fascinating because I then,
it just changed my attitude to internal combustion engines,
which I grew up adoring.
And in fact, on the way here this afternoon,
I walked around a quiet street and I heard and I went,
why do I know that sound?
Why is that still with me?
And it was an Aston Martin of whatever the one is.
It's one, I can't remember the name of it,
but I heard that exhaust tone and I know it in my DNA.
And I went, oh, and I can't appreciate it anymore
because what that's doing, that man's having fun,
it was a man, is having fun in that car.
And it's got an amazing throttle, you know, throaty roar.
And I can't help thinking,
we've got to breathe in the shit he's sticking out
of his stupid exhaust pipes, the tosser.
It's kind of, I can't, I can't get beyond that anymore.
I cannot, you know, and I still think the human race
should maintain lots of internal combustion engines
for our great, great, great, great grandchildren
to see that and go, you mean, you had a thing,
a metal box that were explosions in it.
Well, it's like the thing you were saying.
And then gas comes out and it was the gas, nice.
No, no, it was poisonous.
And if you breathed it, you died.
You know, that is what we've all lived with
and that's what we've all grown up with.
So that, it was very much clean air and the efficiency,
when I understood the efficiency
of an electric motor and batteries,
it just, it just shot combustion engines in the head.
And that was the end of it.
Shot combustion engines in the head, that's also,
that's probably what we'll call this episode.
Rory, I guess, I feel like there's a few interesting things
going on because you talk about so many different subjects
that you have a particular magic in the way
that you talk about electric vehicles.
I'm very interested in the, particularly when I write
for the spectator and you read the comments,
I'm very interested in the hostility
that electric vehicles generate in certain people,
by the way, which always fascinates me.
Now, I often wonder whether the Prius
did a disservice to the whole category.
Very likely.
Because the Prius was driven by people
who I think were disapproving of other motorists
and were floating around on a kind of smug cloud
of moral superiority.
And I suddenly realized that everybody
used to write hostile things in my spectator articles
when I praised electric cars.
And my conversion to electric cars is actually just physics.
Yes.
Okay, I mean, the elegance of the electric motor
in terms of efficiently, effectively transforming energy
from any source into motive power at an extraordinary level
of efficiency is just too beautiful.
So, I mean, in a sense, I suppose,
the internal combustion engine is loved
because it's like a Swiss watch.
It's an absurd way of telling the time.
I mean, a 20 pound Casio is actually more reliable.
But given that 150 years of craftsmanship
have been poured into perfecting this thing,
we have to love it.
It's not as beautiful as a steam engine, by the way.
A steam locomotive is still more beautiful.
It's still more beautiful.
And the steam engine also has a beautiful,
we were talking about this earlier,
there is an attribute to the steam engine
which the internal combustion engine doesn't have,
which may become more and more relevant,
which is a steam locomotive could run off any fuel source.
So if you could produce heat, you could produce motive power.
And the trains that went from the east coast
of the United States to the west started off
by running on coal, which was plentiful on the east.
And as they neared the Rockies,
they switched to wood and lumber.
Now, one point that I don't think anybody
thinks about in an electric car world
is the fact that you can run an electric car
by burning rubber tyres, if you want to.
I wouldn't recommend it, but it's still possible.
Whereas, to quote Alan Partridge,
the internal combustion engine is a fussy eater.
Do you remember that?
You're going to pay the price for being a fussy eater.
Basically, unless it comes through the straits of Hormuz,
it's not really happy.
And that strikes me as something that is fundamentally exciting.
Now, the moral superiority problem,
I think is actually the result of a misunderstanding,
because most people post-Prius who bought electric cars
genuinely bought them because they liked the technology
or they thought they were better cars.
And I don't spend any time driving my electric car
disdaining the people who are driving internal combustion engines,
except when they're too slow, to be honest.
The only smug moment I do have, which I can't help,
is that when you watch people filling up with petrol at a pump,
you feel a bit like a primatologist watching bonobos
poking at a termite mound with a stick.
It looks like a kind of primitive behavior,
which some people are still engaged in.
But they are using a tool, which is good.
But apart from that, I genuinely think they're good enough
to sell on their own merits.
We ought to be honest, as an advertising guy,
I'd always say that there are, JP Morgan said this,
for everything people do, there are two reasons.
There's a good reason and there's the real reason.
And a large part of why people want to own solar panels,
I suspect, is not really to save money or to save the planet.
It's for the geeky joy of knowing you're driving around on sunshine.
Now, my argument is, I think we should just amplify that,
because one of my arguments is,
actually, if people do the right thing for the wrong reasons,
doesn't matter.
And that's my great argument.
I don't really mind why people do this, provided they do.
And I'll be absolutely honest with you.
I'm not that fond of polar bears.
They look bloody dangerous, if I'm being honest.
OK, but the idea of driving around knowing
that the sun in the sky is actually powering my trip to the shops,
apart from any other positive externalities,
is just a great feeling.
And we should try and amplify that as much as we can.
Well, we're going to pick up on so many of these things,
because I think that sense of getting a really good deal
is something that motivates us,
as much as we'd like to pretend that the environment
is our primary motivator,
ultimately, if it's going to save us money as well,
that's probably what forces us to act.
Now, I want to just pause on the current energy crisis
that we find ourselves in.
And Greg, I imagine that the last few weeks
have been quite busy for you.
So I wonder if you could just frame for us
how whatever's going on in the Middle East
has changed your immediate priorities at Octopus,
and how it's changed your day-to-day,
and some of the things of how you need to support
your customers in the short term.
The irony is that while we're watching this happening on the news,
and there are so many other levels of shit, right?
Let's just be really clear.
You've basically got, I'm not going to be political,
I mean, honestly.
But the irony is that while this is happening,
we're currently mailing millions of people,
largely saying energy costs are coming down, right?
Because the government have started taking levies
off of electricity bills.
A very good and important thing.
And by the way, I cannot tell you,
funnily enough, the customer satisfaction...
In every time we send a price change email,
it has a satisfaction rating.
Like, how do you rate usefulness?
How do you feel about this and so on?
Funnily enough, we're having currently seeing
the highest ever satisfaction ratings on price changes,
because costs are coming down,
because the government are finally taking some of the structural costs
out of electricity.
There is so much more to go to be absolutely clear.
In France, electricity is twice the price of gas.
In the UK, it's four times.
I mean, broadly speaking.
In bits of Scandinavia, it's...
By the way, there you go.
That was your extra jealousy, wasn't it?
That was actually an electric one with this loud speaker.
But I've got to say, I've got an electric motorbike,
and the only thing I miss is not being able to rev in traffic
to let people know you're there.
But anyway, different work.
But yeah, back on this.
In Scandinavia, electricity can be as little as 1.15 times
more expensive than gas.
In the UK, it's four times.
And the vast majority of that is policy cost
and very bad market design.
It's good that those things are being tackled.
In terms of what's going to start at Hormuz,
because most energy is hedged in advance,
it's bought in advance,
we will see the price rises as of July.
For some people, it's coming sooner,
depending on what kind of tariffs it's on.
But so far, it is genuinely a fraction as bad
as we saw when Russia invaded Ukraine.
But it's a very, very different shape.
So if it doesn't get...
Oil and gas in ships moves at the same speed as a bicycle.
So if the bicycle stopped leaving the Middle East
about six weeks ago, and some start now,
it will still take six weeks for them to get here.
In the meanwhile, there's an awful lot of kind of back-end
rewiring of where oil and gas are going to kind of keep supply.
But you are at a point where if it doesn't get resolved,
at some point, supply just stops coming.
At which point you may see...
The UK's got...
We're very well connected with a lot of sources,
but some countries are already doing rationing and things like that, right?
And it may affect different things like jet fuel
and diesel differently in the petrol.
The big, big picture, though, the big picture is...
I mean, I just sent a video to customers a couple of days ago saying,
look, here we go again.
Because it's only three years since the Russian invasion of Ukraine
similarly caused this.
And I think it is a shocking audacity of the fossil fuel industry
to try and pretend that the answer is more fossil fuels, right?
Because the reality of the fossil fuels is
the great big oil and gas majors will not invest in production facilities
unless they're going to get high utilization.
There is never going to be spare capacity at any scale
in the world of oil and gas.
As soon as they get spare capacity, they start shutting stuff down.
They restrict supply.
And what that means is as long as you're dependent on oil and gas,
you're always at risk of any part of the supply chain being strangled.
And so the lie of oil and gas is that if we invest in more supply,
then we'll stop these things happening in future.
It's just not the case.
If we invest in more supply, in the future, the prices will drop
and then they'll stop producing and we'll be at their mercy again.
And I think one of the great discoveries of the world of electrification,
and you already heard it from Rory, is there are so many sources of electricity.
Now, literally your rooftop, your neighbor's rooftop,
a field outside your town or village, the North Sea, other bits of our coast,
interconnectors to other countries, you've got so many layers.
And oh, and gas of course as well, by the way, and biomass and hydro and French nuclear
because it comes through the interconnectors, we've got so much more resilience and electricity.
So the biggest lesson has just got to be, they all guess we're like an abusive partner.
They keep coming back saying, it's going to be different this time.
It's never going to be different, right?
I was born in 1971 and when I was two or three, there's all these photos of our family with like
candles because fossil fuel crises never stop happening and we can now end them.
And what you're really seeing actually, and you mentioned the word bifurcation,
there are some countries that are just not seeing this anymore.
Norway, its economy is so electric.
I think, what was it?
They sold 16 fossil fuel cars there last month, was it?
Like 97% of all cars being sold are electric, right?
Heat pumps are the majority heating source, direct electric, another bunch.
They're just not as affected by this stuff.
Spain, huge investment in renewables and by the way, not just wind,
so not just other tons of wind as a result, not seeing these cost increases that we do.
So I think that, of course, when the world's most powerful industry is threatened,
they are seeing demand, like you now have measurable demand reduction because of electric vehicles,
right?
And they are very threatened and they're mobilizing an army that makes what the tobacco industry did
look like child's play, right?
This is an industry so powerful governments go to war, right?
That's how powerful the fossil fuel industry is.
And so when you talk earlier about sort of the backlash,
it's not necessarily people are cynically doing this,
but if you look at every driver's group, where's the funding ultimately coming from?
You know, the people that try to somehow paint cyclists as the biggest problem on a road,
right?
You know, I cycled here today, I can tell you,
because it was a lot quicker, easier and more pleasant.
Anyway, point being, I think the big lesson is we have to electrify
and you will hear more horseshit arguments against it, more horseshit promises,
and we have to be brutal now in responding to it.
Well, I think, yeah, I thought that might be coming.
Well, I think there's some really interesting things that I want to pick up,
not least I know that there'll be many questions about marginal pricing and,
you know, getting our electricity not tied to the cost of natural gas.
But I think the other thing that you mentioned there is that, you know,
the oil and gas industry can exist because of supply and demand economics.
And actually, if we take something like the zero bills homes from Octopus as an example,
customers can enjoy a zero bill home because Octopus is there thanks to a crack and sort of
gently trading those things as they sort of fluctuate throughout the day.
So it's very possible that we're heading towards this world and we can see that on a
totally distributed decentralized system, plus we've got, you know, larger scale solar generation,
wind generation, battery storage, et cetera, where actually the value of this energy market
is not so much the supply and demand traditional economics we've seen,
but is actually in trading the service.
And so for people like BP, Shell, et cetera, et cetera,
how do they make money in this future world?
How do they make money? How do they survive?
First of all, you know, like I mentioned the tobacco industry earlier,
I think it's really analogous.
When we first discovered that tobacco caused a lot of illnesses,
the tobacco industry first denied it, right?
There were literally adverts for flags that had doctors in them going,
my doctor spoke to Camel, right?
They then started acknowledging tacitly there was an issue.
So they had low tar and filters because somehow this would prevent you getting cancer.
Obviously it was a marketing shtick.
And then they started heading to poorer countries as life got harder in richer countries.
The interesting thing is that when the tobacco industry stopped fighting it,
and just admitted, look, cigarettes may kill you, but they're quite fun, right?
They have 30 years of being the highest return on the stock market as a sector,
because it's actually like honestly,
turns out to be a more profitable business than lying in the long run.
And I think in the same way for the oil and gas industry, look,
I fly a lot and we've got an international business, right?
It's going to be a long time before we can replace long haul aviation
with something that isn't fossil fuel based, right?
They've got decades of business in that.
Frankly, they've got decades in businesses.
There are plenty of trucks that have just been bought this year
that are going to be running for another 10, 15 years.
Plenty of cars.
So as a runoff business, you can do very, very well.
But the bigger picture thing really is it's not our problem, right?
I don't remember Argos being able to campaign and say like,
how are we going to survive in a world of Amazon, right?
They just had to try and compete.
And I think that if in every other sector,
we kind of let the competition happen,
it is bizarre to me that suddenly it is a social requirement,
a political need to maintain a sector that,
by the way, is doing more damage to our planet, right?
And they're not cast to getting the sector.
As I said, I fly, I use it.
But it doesn't have a God given right to carry on as it is.
And I think, by the way, and really, I mean,
I know people at BP and Shell very well,
some really great people, by the way,
unbelievable, incredible businesses.
I think one of the things that you guys sometimes talk about
is if we lived in an electric world
and someone came along and proposed the petrol car, right?
You got that nonsense.
You were talking there about the explosions or the little...
But, you know...
Can you charge it at home?
No, don't be ridiculous.
You can't give it here.
Yeah, exactly.
By the way, that's a great example of talking about the nonsense, right?
So, like, all the time people get at me,
but not everyone can charge it at home.
I mean, no one can charge a petrol car at home, right?
But the science and engineering of the oil industry is amazing.
No idea they drilled kilometres into the ground.
Unbelievable stuff they do that drivers go in.
Anyway, all that stuff.
At the point where it had been, they're incredible companies.
But what you see in almost any sector that goes through change
is incumbent struggle.
So, we think about, for example, in the media sector,
when it started going online, Rupert Murdoch,
unbelievably successful media bar,
and regardless of what you think of some of the output,
bought MySpace, and within two years it was dead, right?
And it took a news group, like, maybe 20 years
to learn how to make money online.
Shell and BP will get there in this world, probably.
But the more pressure comes on them from actually forcing change,
the more they'll have to do it in the ways that will actually be beneficial.
At the same time, there are enormous news,
I think you mentioned there,
that, for example, optimisation is in industry.
It doesn't really exist in fossil fuel.
Hugely important in electricity.
There are loads of companies, big and small,
and Britain's been a real breeding ground for them,
that are now taking optimisation services around the world.
If you go to the US, the companies that are working past utilities
to try and optimise electrification are often very British,
because we've had, because we've got high energy costs,
optimisation is more important here.
The skills you learn here then work really well elsewhere.
I know that when we've had a conversation previously,
you had, because maybe I shouldn't be saying this,
maybe we'll edit this out, we'll find out.
You had to do some work with the cigarette industry many, many decades ago.
I've only worked on vaping campaigns.
So one of the things I think is important is the concept of harm reduction,
okay, which is sometimes where I would criticise either idealists or sometimes scientists,
is they design for perfect and anything less than that is considered a compromise.
And I remember talking to someone, it was an academic actually.
So my influence in the vaping world was going to the government's behavioural insights team,
crikey, back in the 90s, and saying there's this new technology called electronic cigarettes.
I had two predictions.
One, it might be the biggest thing in helping people quit smoking in, well, in, ever, okay.
My second prediction was that everybody conventional in the anti-smoking campaign groups
would try and ban it because they'd see it as an inferior substitute for quitting altogether.
And my argument was, not enough, which Ash also adopted, who are a fanatical anti-smoking group.
They simply said, our job is to stop people dying.
It's not to stop people consuming nicotine, they're two different things.
And one thing I've noticed in this world is that people tend to plan for this sort of perfectionism.
I'm pretty comfortable with a degree, I don't know, with a degree of gas generation
picking up a bit of load from time to time doesn't seem to be that problematic.
I would prefer it if the money we made was put into innovation and scientific research.
Because we have a greater comparative advantage in the UK
in terms of being able to come up with really good inventions
than we do in being able to reduce the world's carbon output.
We're only 1% of carbon output.
We're probably over 150 years, 25% of meaningful world-changing inventions.
If you go to the Royal Institution about a quarter of a mile away,
in the basement, I don't know why it's in the basement,
is Faraday's first electric motor, which should be a source of pilgrimage to people.
So there is a bit of me which goes, I don't particularly want a country that produces
1% of the world's carbon to get involved in this symbolic hair-shirtered act
which damages our economy, moves manufacturing offshore to places where they're using
even dirtier energy, just so Ed's metrics can look cute.
That metric of your own carbon emissions which don't account for imported gas
strikes me as just a total nonsense.
The Norwegians are, to some extent, buying all those electric cars on our dollar.
We're buying their gas and they're swanning around in some electric car at our expense.
Can I just say one thing? I've presented two times the Norwegian EV Association annual meeting
thing when I was on stage introducing the speakers and the second time I went I did,
I thought of an amusing skit about the fact that we all hate Norwegians because we give you so
much f***ing money for your oil and gas while you pounce around in your electric cars and
interestingly I was never invited back. I think it's taking place.
They laughed at the time.
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You know that person who said if I came back I'd come back as the bond market because you can
do anything you like. If I came back I'd come back as a country of about three to four million
people of the 21st century because no one beats up on you because it's a bad look. You
tax evasion or you're Norway with fossil fuel production. Everyone loves you because there
are only three million of you who would look really mean to get nasty and so we do actually
let them off the hook to a remarkable extent I think. My point would be I'm not sure I wouldn't
rather burn our own gas and then tax it and then put the money towards innovation because the other
problem which I do accept from people like Martin Wolf is that we've set quite a bad example because
other countries have looked at what we've attempted to do in reducing our carbon emissions.
We've ended up with very high energy costs so not many people are going to follow our lead.
So if our hope was that we're going to set a precedent my other I suppose my what would my
other question be I mean I think um uh no I'll leave it at that it's not a great precedent
to set and actually innovation is probably a better use of the money uh than purely self-sacrifice
I think. Greg I can I can see your mind worrying and any thoughts. By the way I mean the way we
charge for electricity is the stupid thing which we could change really quickly which you know much
more about than me. So it seems to be a system where you go out to the pub and if nine of you order
a pint of beer and one of you orders a bottle of Chateau Petrusse everybody pays for a bottle of
Chateau Petrusse that's more or less how it works. It's marginal pricing. I think it's the most
elegant description of marginal pricing I've ever heard of. I try to tell it with fruit yours is
better. Yeah um Greg. Well first of all I couldn't agree more on the gas point right yeah the light
really came on for me a few years ago you talked to me about the efficiency of EVs if all of the
electricity that powers an EV is coming from gas generation it still has lower emissions than a
petrol car even more amazing if all of the electricity that powers a heat pump comes from gas
it has lower emissions than a gas boiler uses less gas than a gas boiler that's how efficient
electricity is. Yes. So at the margin honestly if having like when people always say your point
about perfection is so important right everything that's a new technology in this space you get held
to a standard of perfection that doesn't apply elsewhere. Yes you're right. They always get
like ah but no everyone can afford an EV it's like a gripping family can't afford a fucking car
right. I didn't hear that objection from the car industry from the first place. It's not fair if
you can't afford a car. Right. By the way can I just say to everybody listening because I learned
this the hard way everybody who tries to get a home charger installed at home someone comes along
and goes pfft no way this wiring will take seven kilowatts but she goes oh I can't have a charger
eventually I rang out my brother who's an astrophysicist who just goes you don't need seven kilowatts
for most normal people to be honest if you've got four to be like 3.5 is okay right it's enough
for most practical purposes but the people turn up and go no no no it's got to be seven kilowatts
otherwise it's not a proper car charger. I'm just going to phone our ops director. Exactly yeah
we have roughly a thousand people in that every day anyway right. Please do because I have great
chargers though. Yeah you're right. See the um but the standard perfection that everyone's held to right
you know not everyone can have solar panels. One of my favourites you know like all right it's not
always windy you know we kind of work this out right and but you flip it around and it's like
every turn of a wind turbine means we use less gas that's great it's cheaper it doesn't need
maintenance it's not trash on the planet but when it's not windy until we have other solutions
gas as a backup is absolutely fine and you know for me uh another light that came on was I think
I might achieve I might have learnt this from you Robert. Oh my god. You did an incredible video
on the end-to-end emissions of the fossil fuel. Oh yes yes yes. How how much waste it's not just
what happens when you burn it in a car or in a boiler it's from the the point of production
right through to getting it here the amount of like 40% of the world's fuel is used
shipping fuel. Shipping fuel yeah yeah and so when you see that and you look at the liquid
natural gas industry and by the way we now got satellites that can spot leaky methane
um uh you realize that it's we it's brutally inefficient to be shipping gas from uh a Qatar
of the US and Australia to here um so to the extent we've got to use gas use use the nearby one
use the stuff nearby it's genuinely miles lower emissions and you can tax it and you can use that
tax to reduce energy costs invest in the future do what Norway did which is go electric right
but I think our current policies really don't serve as well in bringing people what we need
which is super cheap electricity the biggest barrier to heat pumps is electricity is too
expensive the biggest barrier I mean I think we've moved on on EVs known public charging EVs are
too expensive at home charging at the moment thanks to the government's reduction on levies
I think it's currently seven or eight times cheaper just to charge an EV at home never mind the fact
that you know you never get through I've never needed new brake pads and maybe I don't drive
hard enough I don't know but there's just no consumables in an EV my I had a Tesla for three
or four years and I think the total I spent on service was 120 quid right so all those costs I
think you know people people are now becoming aware of it and just last week or this week
auto trader has said the average cost of an electric vehicle in that they advertise is now
for the first time ever lower than the average cost of a fossil fuel vehicle to buy
so I think that's working well but the big thing here is like just relentlessly focusing on how do
we make doing the right thing cheap and you mentioned the marginal price of electricity look
it's not even just the marginal price I mean I've spent a long time banging on this I'm worried
about being boring but so far this year the UK spent about 400 million pounds paying wind farms to
turn off and paying gas to replace it instead of just having cheap electricity near wind farms
the in energy in electricity we've got two markets you've got the wholesale market
and now on the accounts for maybe 35 percent of a typical bill because we're spending so much on
inefficient infrastructure and the plans mean that even if the wholesale price goes to zero
there's every chance that by 2030 electricity bills will be higher than they are now so it's not
only how you set the price which matters that's the marginal cost but it's actually the entire
system design and management is was designed around fossil fuels and there's a real risk
that we end up making electricity expensive not just now but for the next 20 every decision we're
making that's locking in costs these are all 10 20 year costs so if you if we were to hand you a magic
wand and you can just wish let's cap it at three wishes to kind of resolve for some of these things
what would you do yeah I mean look so I've reformed the electricity market I've talked about the
zonal pricing a lot it by the way doesn't need to even affect consumer prices in terms of every
region could be the same if you wanted um why why I'm not saying I'm saying I don't agree
as a Welshman where Wales is a net exporter of uh of energy I don't see why the Welsh
shouldn't get cheaper power than no ironically right now Wales is an expensive area because the
fixed cost of the system vary by region and uh because there's a lower population density there's
more sort more kilometers of cable per person than for example in London so London has very low fixed
costs Wales and Scotland are very high so in Scotland and Wales you currently pay more
electricity than in London even though you generate more than you use Scotland generates
three times more than users and has among the highest prices in the UK and that's that's that's
a grid cost uh effectively it's nothing to do with the actual cost of energy itself yeah it's just the
infrastructure cost being divided by the number of people got it um by way it's crazy just to be
really clear um and what we don't have is the the wholesale cost balancing the other way which is
saying Scotland's generating shed loads so when it's windy in Scotland I mean it you literally
turn off a turbine a wind turbine you however you probably at least let us get the electricity and
use it for something so right now um I speak to one of the biggest data centers it's always
talked about AI data centers you mentioned it at the beginning I speak to one of the biggest builders
of AI data centers in the world and um they said look we've got to be within 100 kilometers of London
um and I said um well there's latency by the way it turns out a data moves very very quickly
because when I said to him if the electricity in Scotland was half price because we're going to
Scotland right yes and the thing is like at the moment because we don't have we don't give them
that option they either don't build in the UK at all so TikTok have just built their biggest AI
data center in the world to announce it in Norway because it's got cheap electricity um uh it's not
as a big population right they're there for the cheap power Scotland can have some of the cheapest
power in Europe um and you could the point we even know how you pass it on to pass the huge
saving on to consumers can't the savings will be six eight billion a year right you could pass it
on to consumers it might be you could flatten the prices for consumers stuff it variable for
industry there's a ton of things you could do it would just be good to reduce the waste so number
one would be market reform that's one example there may be others the second one to do is uh
more on shorewind um so we're told like often the myth is that we've built loads of offshore wind
in Scotland uh because it's windy and it is um but uh because it costs a lot of money to build grid
the cost per unit electricity delivered is it's something like one and a half to two and a half
times more expensive if you build offshore wind in Scotland than if you build onshore wind in
England where you've already got grid right um so if you wanted a cheap electricity system you
wouldn't just be building this you know like you know I always think really like if the wind
farms wade something Britain would be tilted like you know Scotland will be going sinking
all right um uh and I think we really have to understand that in a renewable world or clean
energy in electricity world distributed stuff is really important and the third thing I'd do is use
long distance interconnectors if I look at what's happening in in place like China uh they ship huge
amounts of electricity very very high voltage from one end of the country to the other our equivalent
is connecting us to other bits of Europe to uh Africa and it is happening so if you look in
Saudi Arabia they're currently building four interconnectors because they they know that
one-day fossil fuel is numbered uh so Saudi Arabia's currently got a plan to build 70 gigawatts of
solar power by the way the UK as a whole is a 50 gigawatt system across all our power right and so
the next five years Saudi is building one and a half times the UK just in solar and then interconnectors
into four different regions of the of the world to be selling that cheap electricity so I think
something we really miss in the UK is we don't have enough global perspective to see what's
happening and specifically really uh the Middle East uh China and then pockets the world who knew
that Nepal is one of the biggest adopters of electric vehicles Ethiopia all right massive
penetration electric vehicles um and of course we talk about China all the time yeah classic
for fossil fuel nonsense they say oh it's all coal plants you know China's currently building
nearly 80 percent of all the 75 percent of all of the renewables have been built in the world right
now have been built in China um uh you know the US president said China builds wind farms and
sells them for everyone else but they use coal themselves you know that's changing so fast it's
unbelievable uh I guess I should also win that we're not allowed to buy Chinese wind turbines here
because they're 30 or 40 cheaper than European ones but anyway we'll talk about the point is we
should be focusing relentlessly on cost I want to pivot for this last section to electric vehicles
because as we have painted very eloquently on this panel the pursuit of doing less harm the pursuit
of the beautiful elegance of electric vehicles that can be fueled by anything um and just how
efficient they are without wasting energy as well it's become very very clear but for whatever reason
and I think you can tell by how impassioned this this panel is they're still quite politicized
they're still quite a divide in the perception of EVs even though we start to see the economics
stack up and I wonder in this last section if we can iron out a few things a few bits that are
missing from how electric vehicles are currently being marketed and what we can do to fix it and I
know that you Rory in particular will have some thought I mean there's one fantastic bit of good
news by the way which is by no means universal in many many categories which is uh no one who
well don't quite very very few people who make the transition ever avert there there is a tiny
minority I think it's less than 10 percent isn't it probably five percent less than that I mean the
only real guide in human behavior I would argue is repeat purchase because it's based on what you
have experienced yourself do you do it again and that's you know now there are lots and lots of
fun here on Oxford Street about 50 yards away um I used a mobile phone in 1989 on the street and
two people shouted abuse at me from passing cars okay so this this isn't new by the way I mean most
of you are too young in the room to remember the stage when people would say I don't I don't want
a mobile phone why would I want to make phone calls on the street which was a standard phrase
and so it's not uncommon for new technologies to be met with disproportionate skepticism and
hostility because we don't like changing our behavior you know fundamentally and if you've
bought a gasoline car a year ago and you're effectively being told you were wrong it's hardly
surprising that people react to that it's a kind of cognitive dissonance if you like you know there's
natural reactance to that kind of thing um what is really interesting about human behavior which is
where I'm really optimistic is just as in a digital camera you have a default mode you know it's shutter
speed priority and it you know and after we first fiddled around with our did our new digital camera
we basically leave it on auto don't we the human brain's two automatic behavioral things are
basically habit and social copying do what I've done before and do what everybody else does
so when you come up with something that's genuinely new you're asking someone to go
against both of those defaults you're asking them to do something they haven't done before
and which not many people they know are currently doing and that's why you always get this sigmoid
curve in the adoption of any new technology it's slow at first then it reaches an inflection point
and gets faster and faster so one of the most interesting thoughts I work with a company called
herdefy who look for herd effect social contagion in buying behavior and tom ridges made a brilliant
point he said if I sold solar panels I'd rather sell to the despair of my finance director I'd
rather sell five solar panels to five people who live on the same street than 12 solar panels to
12 people who live 20 miles apart because fundamentally the way in which human behavior goes is that we
are massively comfortable doing things that other people are doing because we're a herd species
basically you know we're comfortable doing things that lots of our friends do I'll be honest with
you I people ask me why did you buy your first electric car and I came up with a load of bullshit
answers the real reason was my brother had bought an electric car first and therefore he he knew
all the physics stuff so I was comfortable enough to do it myself had my brother not bought an
electric car would I have bought an electric car five years ago no probably not didn't know enough
people simple as that and actually you know the most important advertising medium is each other
to a large extent and so one of the things you'll see is that the whole thing will become easier
and easier and easier and that sort of natural mobile phone reactance I mean literally I was
making a call it was a thing like a brick I didn't ring anybody because it was too embarrassing in
1989 but someone had rung me put the phone to my ear someone pulls down the back window of a
London taxi wonka it could have been unrelated to the phone I suppose yeah but but I mean we
shouldn't be surprised by this and also the great thing but the great thing is that people now
actually I'm going to be a little bit naughty here the fact that it's a bit of a pain in the
ass transitioning to electric is actually a loyalty mechanism it's like the Ikea effect
because I've invested all this time and effort becoming proficient in using six charging apps
and you know knowing what a kilowatt hour is and I've wired up my house now I'm actually
disproportionately inclined invested in it yeah okay invested in the thing and I'm reluctant to
go back it's called the Ikea effect because once you've been to Ikea and you've driven to Croydon
and you've gone and walked through a serpentine corridor you've got to at least buy a set of
tea lights because otherwise you'd feel your whole journey was totally wasted okay it's sunk cost
so one of the other things is that the electric car buyers once they've actually overcome the
hump of adoption will become disproportionately loyal because actually it's a bias but we're happy
to exploit it because of their sunk cost in terms of effort and mental investment so you won't see
much reversion which is the main thing it's like air fryers basically once you have one no there's
no going back oh I finally transitioned to an air fryer resisted it you saw the light yeah why did
you resist it I don't treat I think you're you're gonna you'll be like oh of course it takes up
room on the side it's only a matter of time before the Chinese EV with a built-in air fryer
exactly you don't even need to stop for a snack don't don't bother with vehicle to load just vehicle
to air but this is by the way bizarre because the world is being I work a bit with John Roberts at
AO and I think female territorial ownership of kitchen surfaces is holding back the consumer
electronics industry okay seriously you go where would you put it right you go well maybe on those
six acres over there the interesting for me was when I got a heat pump the last thing left I had
there was non there was gas was the hob and an induction hob was the greatest life change I actually
phoned my mum while I was cooking was it interesting and she said I've got one too and we were swapping
notes on like how easy but honestly I think the induction hob is is is actually one of the greatest
benefits of electrification all right it's extraordinary efficient of course and it's clean
and you can't even burn yourself if you try it's genuinely brilliant well I've won it well also
from the controls which is a heat pump problem though yes just an induction hob with knobs and
these knobs would be quite good it's a german interface I'm not saying they're about german
design yeah but but I mean the heat pump thing is is interesting because I'm absolutely convinced
that there's a wonderful reframing here which is you allow people to access their pensions
to create effectively an energy pension okay right now if you think about it one of the
daft things they do with solar panels is they say it pays back in nine years okay that's typically
what they say the payback time and it's always the question that we get on our videos
the point is I'm getting an 11 percent return which is a lot better than I'm getting from a bank
okay so actually taking some money out of your pension and punting it into a heat pump or a solar
panel I'm literally opening my app that not my app my phone because yesterday one of the guys in
charge of helping customers finance heat pumps solar panels and dv chargers sent me a chart and
then actually so quick seven percent of our customers who install solar panels say they
pay for it from their pension and three percent their heat pumps and they're just doing that with
organically without any actually you bang on to a point and actually then if you've got people to
reframe it as I'm buying a source of income which you are yeah you know you're effectively
protecting your retirement uh by investing this money out front well you mentioned the spectator
earlier and the interesting thing is like look again I have to work with all media and all
politicians I genuinely and by the way surprises happen all the time there's always surprises one
of the surprises is the telegraph which look our team always get really upset about the way they
cover heat pumps and and and to a degree electric vehicles and the spectators in the same world
but the interesting bit is they love solar panels on roofs because they've got so many customers who
are readers who are living on a fixed income on a pension for whom exactly what you say applies
and I think the interesting bit for me is I think the ev may be the next thing because if as a if
a sort of retired solicitor reading the telegraph you're now proudly the owner of solar panels
the ability to fill a car cheap like the price going forward is fixed as well is really powerful
but I think you do get these surprises when you look at what the behavioral drivers are for
different people there's no correlation between ev ownership and and concern for the environment
apparently in fact it's slightly reversed slightly reverse yeah um you asked that question
what would you do marketing evs right there I think there were there are two very quick thoughts for
me uh the first one is uh I got our we've got a business in Texas and we've got them to do a
massive billboards promoting evs as freedom cars right because I think the whole prepper world
right like the most the most kind of I don't know I'm I'm assuming largely going to be quite right
wing quite you know um anti-liberal yeah um for them solar panels like you're like get there get there
whatever they call that it's sort of their their their their back garden in America fill up your
solar panels get a cyber truck he's got vehicle to grid basically right you go off grid yourself
reliant you're self-reliant your prep like it goes with your cans of beans right so I think that
there's a genuinely there's a really interesting case for people who distrust authority distrust
the man distrust governments they should all be fully solar and fully ev right um and so anyway
we've been genuinely playfully trying this idea because I think it's got legs well we've very
interestingly we've got Mike Murphy coming back on the podcast in a couple weeks time if you're not
familiar with Mike Murphy he runs a campaign which is Republicans for evs and it's so fascinating how
not just with evs but I think clean energy as well the opposite ends of the political spectrum
are definitely coming full circle Robert I feel like we can do a little we can do a little
live show plug because okay the success of our drive um vehicle test vehicle test drives electric
vehicle test drives has been pretty profound phenomenal I think we've passed 145 000 test drives
that we've facilitated around I can say around the world but that is a mate because I have no idea
because I'm usually at the other end of whatever we're doing so there's some stuff the test drives
are down there I don't see it but that is an incredible number of people have been in electric
very often for the first time and can test things back to back speak to the experts make those side
by side comparisons to different models um and we've done them we can we can never say it without
going into voiceover mode but in Harrogate Twickenham Sheldonam Netherlands Vancouver
and our show's down under in Sydney anyway um but also Robert I just coming back to the point
around actually it's about your the people that you know who have evs and I think there's two
things here actually all of you now need to move to the same street but secondly your wife's book
club okay they have all adopted electric vehicles as a consequence no not all of them no because some
of them don't drive but no so there's eight so it's very briefly there's eight women in
my wife's in the same book group including her uh and uh just a completely cross section of very
amazing women and I never heard any of this until every year or two years some of the husbands who
are still hanging on are allowed to have dinner we all have we all meet up you know so and one of
them women said to me you know you're well now we love our Tesla they got a Tesla it's a few years
and she said we couldn't believe it and every time we saw Judy she would she would tell was that one
of Robert's special cars and she said if I'm not here to talk about f***ing cars you just plug it
in like a phone I don't want to f***ing talk about it shit four of those women have now got electric
cars so that one I went of the hours I've spent going maybe we should consider it and I mean think
about the environment and what it says about you and all you need to say is it's just like a f***ing
phone shut up I mean there's more too which is that uh obviously current electric cars look very
much like conventional cars because you have to manage people across that transition but the
real I mean the real uh excitement might be in micro mobility of all sorts of kinds because you
can miniaturize an electric motor in and also you can have self-driving and autonomous vehicles
and the Heathrow pod and everything else uh with with electricity in a way you can't do with an
internal combustion engine so I mean I'm quite pleased to see Renault deciding basically to
have fun with the whole thing because you will eventually be able to be much more experimental
with the vehicle you buy much more eccentric actually with design it's almost like the swatch
rescuing the swiss watch industry I think it will go highly eccentric and there'll be a kind of
Cambrian explosion right in terms of different kinds of mobility and there is that place on
Kensington high street in the micro lino place I'm not allowed to go to Kensington high street
drunk because my wife's convinced I just wander in and buy one on impulse
but but actually I mean one of the most exciting things I mean we should mention scooters and
bikes we haven't mentioned them I mean in large parts of the UK uh the I'm the dirty seeker of
a bicycle is that going uphill it's not much faster than walking a conventional manual bike
okay now in if you live in Bath or any of those places which are just
deeply hilly okay the electric bike is a complete game changer suddenly because it's not really a
very effective mode of transportation in anywhere you know anywhere remotely mountainous and now
suddenly everything changes very very interesting and so the very small modes of transport are just
as exciting I think I think an incredible thing when you visit China now and I think uh by the
government in January did a visit with the Prime Minister of China and I thought one outcome we
should have done that and is we should have agreed that we'll do like 10 000 students or
school kids going both ways on on research visits because you learn so much but one one thing that
um you experience now is on the streets of Beijing and Shenzhen and Shanghai
all of the two-wheel vehicles are now electric yeah they all are right yeah all are um so there
are you know the streets are still thick with them in places with two-wheel vehicles and yet you'll
hear more noise in London from moped and delivery vehicle and stuff like that uh and in any UK
town or city then you do in China because they're silent and it is an absolute pleasure um the
change in road noise um of course by the way all the buses are electric pretty much all the tax
is pretty much 25 percent of the hgv sold in China so far this year they're incredible 25
trucks um that's the pace of change there and on electric the specific electrification
of transport and I think we we need to take a global view because we have these little arguments
in Britain and you forget other people are doing it and we can just see how it works and learn from
them um one thing I just wanted to say because I mean it's very relevant to all the things we've
been saying but and it's a piece of news so I don't know how well researched it is but effectively
the the report I think was in electric originally and then it got picked up a lot
is that the total number of electric vehicles in the world which is now well over 100 million
which includes two wheels very importantly because they all used to use they all used to use petrol
and they don't anymore and they're two strikes yeah really bad but but but what it's done is
displace the equivalent of 70 percent of Iran's fossil fuel output in total in the world so
so there's the world now consumes that that much less and and I think this is what we're
harking back to what you said that has there's some alarm bells ringing in some boardrooms of some
fossil fuel companies because they've actually witnessed for the first time not a not a pandemic
or a war or anything else it's people are using less of their product and they're going to get
nasty yeah well then they'll get you nasty I think when you talked earlier um about their
sort of hysteresis curve yeah the adoption curve um it gets steeper and and it's I think a lot of
time uh Silicon Valley kind of taught us about it's not where you are today it's not even the rate
of change it's the rate of change of the rate of change yes and the acceleration yeah in the
electrification yeah in many countries really is causing there's problems like if you look at
Latin America now if you look at um uh Southeast Asia a huge explosion in electric vehicles um
and the other report those have come out is about LNG the long-term decisions of
China and Asian countries that had said we're going to be using LNG a lot because it's cleaner than
coal and they're gone oh shit we're not going to use that it's not going to come here so let's let's
reinvest in renewables to a hugely greater degree which is you know makes economic sense
well I also just you know reminds me that you did a podcast this week with the wonderful Jan
Rausner who um many of you may be familiar with that is coming out on Monday and if anyone
listened to this podcast it is already out and the fact is is that you know if we have a world
which is about 70 70 percent electrified then we halve the overall energy requirement I think
that's something that's become abundantly clear in this really quick thing this you'll hear this a
lot now what happens is each type each defense layer of the arguments placed by the sort of
demolished they come with new ones right now you will see a lot of people saying well only 20 percent
of our electricity energy uses electricity maybe 25 percent right first of all when I was in China
it's north of 30 percent it's happening but the interesting bit is that as you electrify you just
reduce your total energy use so um uh every percentage point the electricity increases
it takes down the fossil fuel percentage point uh percentage by maybe two or three points uh i.e
uh if you don't look at the amount of energy consumed but you look at the amount of work
being done by the energy then you'd see electricity is a much higher proportion of the work the work
of movement or the work of lighting obviously yeah but if you take lighting okay how much
I mean the whole oil industry started with lighting didn't it okay now if you take so
there's a brilliant podcast Saul Griffiths Australian guy if you come across him on
cleaning up podcast he's terrifying right yeah his basic point is electrify everything yeah
by the way one thing I will have a dig at government for is dicking around with symbolic actions which
just irritate people for no real benefit so the classic example of that is making vacuum cleaners
a bit rubbish okay I just bought one of these coffee machines and witch said it's terrible for
energy consumption okay it's on for like three minutes a day okay a vacuum cleaner if it's an
industrial vacuum cleaner being used all the time there is a significant benefit to you know
increasing energy efficiency or whatever but those things which simply irritated people
but you know by effectively and you know but by just imposing I don't really understand the eco
setting on my dishwasher because it basically says you know um uh it says it's going to take five
hours to wash your dishes and it'll use a bit less water and I go I live in the UK and it's
December for god's sake right and I think there's an awful lot of just as there's green washing
which is bogus green activities which don't really mean a damn thing well I used to call
planting a flower bed on the death star you know you know you're a huge oil company but you do this
one cute little thing and talk about it all the time there's also the opposite which is symbolic
it's like when you read those press releases about how much you know carbon emissions come from your
email not not deleting emails yes that's right that's a horseshit right yeah you know look the
things that use like the energy are the things that move big weights vehicles and heat yeah pretty
much everything else is irrelevant yeah well I am super aware that we are desperately running out of
time that some of you need to catch trains that there are probably questions which I'm afraid we
don't have time for however you can approach these guys as we sort of turn the cameras off and enjoy
a couple of drinks um so honestly I can't believe how much time has flown thank you so much for
joining us for this discussion thank you so much to everyone here in the audience um and for those
who are listening on Spotify or a podcast or whatever um thank you for listening so what do
we say at the end of these please you like and subscribe oh yes and tell your friends about it
and just particularly your annoying uncle or aunt yes who daily telegraph journalists in general
the old daily telegraph journalists it's worth doing it just for the laughs uh and and if you
have been thank you for watching
About this episode
A live panel discussion on why the UK energy market still behaves like it’s built for oil and gas—despite EVs, heat pumps, and renewables making electrification inevitable. Greg Jackson (Octopus Energy) argues policy and market design keep electricity artificially expensive and fragile, while Rory Sutherland and Robert Llewellyn focus on the behavioral and messaging side of adoption. They debate marginal pricing, heat-pump barriers, fossil-fuel incumbents’ incentives, and how to market EVs beyond “moral superiority,” using social proof, freedom/prepper narratives, and the sunk-cost “I’m in” effect.
Welcome to a special live episode of the Everything Electric podcast, recorded right in the heart of Oxford Street thanks to @renaultgroup . This is a rare, unfiltered conversation with three of the most influential voices in clean energy and human behaviour:
Greg Jackson (CEO, Octopus Energy)
Rory Sutherland (Behavioural Science, Ogilvy)
Robert Llewellyn (Fully Charged)
We're living through a strange moment. Clean energy is advancing faster than ever… yet the global system still clings to fossil fuels, geopolitical instability, and outdated market rules. So what's really going on? In this episode, we explore:
Why fossil fuels are fundamentally inefficient (and losing ground)
The surprising psychology behind EV adoption (spoiler: it's not about saving the planet)
How the UK's electricity pricing system is distorting costs
The idea of an "energy pension" and how solar could deliver ~11% returns
Why countries like China are racing ahead while others hesitate
Standout moments:
"Oil and gas are like an abusive partner… it's never going to be different."
The "Château Pétrus" analogy that perfectly explains energy pricing
Why petrol stations might soon look… completely outdated
"You just plug it in like a phone. Shut up."
This conversation is about technology, economics, human behaviour, and what the future will actually feel like. Enjoy! 00:00:00:00 Welcome and a little caveat! 00:01:10 Ad Break 00:01:32 Set the scene 00:05:20 Greg Jackson, Rory Sutherland & Robert Llewellyn 00:07:00 Why? 00:09:41 Robert Llewellyn on Efficiency and Internal Combustion Engines 00:11:18 Rory Sutherland on EV Hostility 00:16:14 The Energy Crisis and Fossil Fuel Industry "Audacity" - Greg Jackson 00:20:53 Oil and Gas - an "Abusive Partner"?! 00:22:56 Market Reform and the Future of BP and Shell 00:28:10 Harm Reduction vs Perfectionism 00:30:45 The Norwegian Paradox and Imported Emissions 00:33:11 Marginal Pricing: The "Pint of Beer" Analogy 00:34:31 Overcoming the Standard of Perfection in New Tech 00:37:46 Greg Jackson's Three Magic Wishes for Energy Reform 00:40:14 AI Data Centres and Localised Pricing 00:43:46 The Perception and Politics of Electric Vehicles 00:45:52 Behavioural Science: Social Copying and the Sigmoid Curve 00:48:21 The IKEA Effect: Loyalty through Sunk Effort 00:50:11 Induction Hobs and the Benefits of Electrification 00:51:03 Reframing Clean Tech as an "Energy Pension" 00:53:08 Preppers and "Freedom Cars" in Texas 00:54:39 The Success of Global EV Test Drives 00:56:53 Micro-Mobility and the Quiet Streets of China 01:00:08 Displacing Global Fossil Fuel Consumption 01:03:03 Symbolic Action vs. Meaningful Energy Change 01:04:45 Closing Remarks and Audience Farewell Why not come and join us at our next Everything Electric expo: www.everythingelectric.show Check out our sister channel: https://www.youtube.com/c/EverythingElectricShow
