Great British Energy

And what was happening is that the frequency on the system was falling lower and lower and it was falling below normal limits.

And what's happening in the political scene up in Aberdeen as GB Energy opens its offices?

One in four people were reliant on the oil and gas energy supply chain for their livelihoods

That's a lot to talk about if you're just me, Aberdeen Features Lead, Ryan Duff, but thankfully I'm joined, as always, by a crack team of reporters.

Well, we certainly will.

If you want to find out more about that or if you want to read Jess's full report, it'll all be on energyvoice.com. That will do it for this segment.

But stick around because GB Energy opened its offices in Aberdeen this week.

Maybe they'll be investing in some grid support.

Unveiling plaques can be a slightly hazardous occasion, which I have discovered to my cost on many occasions.

He joked at Great British Energy's headquarters.

He had reason to be wary.

Early this month, a plaque fell onto the grass during a Victoria League anniversary event, another toppled during his March visit to Oxford Photovoltaics.

So the first is that in the UK, our fiscal rules are biased against public ownership and they aren't in Europe.

So in Europe, Great British Energy would be a public corporation.

It would be off the sort of central government's balance sheet.

It would be an organization that can borrow directly from markets and that borrowing wouldn't push directly against the fiscal rules.

introduced that into the system again.

I think it's still very early days for GB Energy.

The founding statements are remarkably bold about this is going to be setting up a British-owned, state-owned enterprise that's going to take advantage of the natural endowments that Britain has and the fantastic wind that we've got and and build a kind of organization that will scale up and then hand back more of the benefits of the energy transition back to citizens.

But you can see kind of small chips, you know, in that, like, you know, it's not got that big a pot of money.

The fear of crowding out sort of, you know, that phrase is, bubbles up very very quickly you know so rather than thinking of it as like there are asset classes where we want the state to have a greater share and that you know that that's not something to be embarrassed about uh the language of being fearful of crowding out sort of comes in uh and then as i argue in the book you also see this kind of retreat to And overall, a lot of British energy policy since the early 2010s has been really focused on this idea that the state's role is to de-risk investments for private sector individuals.

And that has also started to become prominent.

I think it's fair to say that the foundation of GB Energy hasn't been like the foundation of the British Gas Council or the CGB or the other state-owned enterprises or the Central Electricity Board, the other state-owned enterprises that the book sort of tells the story of.

Pro football is back, and so are the predictions.

They've coughed up 30 million and it's going to be offered to local community groups and local authorities to apply for this fund whereby they can develop or build up stakes in little you know, community wind farms or little solar projects and that sort of stuff and derive benefits from it.

But the bigger part of this, part of, you know, it's going to be led by GB Energy, but they are also looking at taking... up to 20% stakes in big energy generation projects, probably a lot of offshore wind, floating offshore wind, big developer-led solar projects.

as a way to give communities access to the benefits and revenues from that.

And also to ensure that they're almost kind of like paid up kind of members.

They have a skin in the game so they can benefit from that investment and also kind of feel probably more engaged with the energy projects that are in their community.

Now, interestingly, just listening back to the first section, there's not one message of one mention of net zero in this.

It is talking about how are you going to bring communities along with the development of solar projects, wind turbines in their communities, or maybe the overhead lines that are connecting those projects to the grid running through their communities or over their gardens or whatever, that by giving communities an option to either set up their own through this fund that they can apply to through GB Energy, Or again, a little bit later on, you know, just come up with options to buy stakes in, you know, kind of big offshore wind farms and just kind of sit back and reap the profits of that.

I mean, it is an interesting thing.

So how does the community avail itself of this opportunity? What are they meant to do? So

the grants have been run by Great British Energy, which is our publicly owned energy company.

And they can go on to the GBE website today and they'll be able to find information about how to apply for it.

There's already, as I said, lots of community energy projects across the country, which have been working really effectively for a number of years.

Grateful for your time.

Thank you.

Talking about how great British energy can roll out and for communities, how they get involved as well.

Thank you for your time.

Speaker.

Our local power plan, backed by £1 billion from Great British Energy, is making sure that every community in the country, incu- including her constituents in Bath, can benefit from clean, affordable, locally generated, uh, a, uh, energy.

And I will ensure, if she wishes to, uh, I will facilitate a meeting for her with Great British Energy so she can see how the plan can benefit her constituency more.

Dr Laurence Mullan.

Hear, hear.