ScottishPower

Welcome to From Combat Boots to Business Suits, the podcast brought to you by the Officers Association Scotland.

Today, we are in the wonderful auditorium in the Scottish Power Offices in Glasgow, and we are joined by a great friend of the OAS.

He is the lead consultant on the Armed Forces Recruitment Programme.

It is Stevie McFaul.

So yeah, no, it's a fantastic space and we're lucky to have it.

So on this series of the podcast, I have shaken up the format a little bit where I have been coming in, not just, not just been interviewing veterans and service leavers themselves.

I've been coming in and I've been calling it the employer edit because what I thought was really important is to hear from companies such as Scottish Power to give a good bit of advocacy as to why hiring veterans is just a good business decision and why they make fantastic colleagues.

So we couldn't have done this without having Scottish Power involved because you guys are, we really rate you guys and you're always at every event of ours, you're always flying that flag but also we've been having a bit of a chat before starting to record and you've got some very exciting things coming up on the horizon which I think a lot of our clients and audience will be very, very interested in hearing all about.

So the challenges are, are real around that in terms of building the right assets in the right places where there is population density.

Clearly, we see at the moment National Grid SSE and Scottish Power's program of works around the Eastern Green Link projects.

Um, another project that's currently underway is Sea Link connecting Suffolk to Kent, and we're seeing a lot of projects now that probably 10, 15 years ago we would've thought, "Really? Would they build those assets?" But actually now we're seeing the reality of that play out, and they are desperately needed to get that power from Scotland into England and provide power to where it's needed.

Yeah, I mean another challenge is connection availabilities and backlog.

phenomenal

well people who really care Scottish Power chief executive was there Keith Anderson and his wife Angela honestly people turned out something's happening marching towards 100 million so what do you do on it? Well, you can either walk 20 miles yesterday, you could walk 11, or you could walk four miles.

And everything you raise goes to the charity that you want.

So it's not Tom Hunter that chooses, it's you.

So I had a, I had a normal job.

I was a, I was 40 years man and boy with Scottish Power.

Basically paying the mortgage and, and doing a real job, if you like.

But when I, when I left, I decided I was gonna do something that I wanted to do and enjoy.

I have a structure.

I have a, a sort of...

I, and Scottish Power as a project manager, so everything you...

Old project managers don't go away.

I don't know what, what's happening, but I think it is...

I think if you look at the Scottish Power deal that, you know, we worked on that for a good couple of years, um, for the original deal to come in, and I was...

You know, we were speaking to them when we had SWPL as well at the same time, and the Scottish Cup.

So the time it took for Scottish Power to approve the deal, obviously things had changed, but we were able to still say, "Well, SWPL is now in this environment.

Scottish Cup is in that environment." So we actually went down the kind of SWPL, SWF, um, kind of deal with Scottish Power.

So they have been investing i- in both of these really important parts of the game, which is fantastic.

I think it's the biggest investment that we've had.

But the Iberdrola investment, the, the amount of money that we are working so hard to bring into the game has gone up significantly, right? If you, if you were to map it from 2016 to now, it's gone up significantly, and that's, uh, we still very much focus on that.

This article was by Gabriel Mackay.

This is from the Herald on the 27th of August 2026 from the news section and the headline reads Scottish Power and SSE in Spotlight as household energy bills rise.

This article is by Mark Williamson.

The latest rise in the energy price gap has shown claims of profiteering by big businesses as Prime Minister Andy Burnham ponders whether to approve the controversial Rosebank oil field development off Shetland.

We need a complete overhaul of the energy market based on public ownership to drive down bills and end profiteering.

The calls will focus attention on firms across the energy supply chain, including those that generate and sell electricity and oil and gas companies.

Glasgow-based Scottish Power is one of the major players in the market to supply gas and electricity to UK households.

In July, the Spanish-owned group posted a 17% increase in first-half earnings to £1.7 billion from £1.45 billion last time.

The volumes produced by the extensive gas fields there declined in the ensuing decades, and in the mid-1990s a massive, depleted reservoir was repurposed as an underground gas storage facility.

INSTER, then part of Scottish Power's PPM Energy subsidiary, purchased the storage facility in 2004, and built out a dual-header system that now connects the company's 23.5 BCF of Katy storage capacity to 16 gas pipelines that flow into and out of the hub.

Insta subsequently went through several ownership changes, most recently being sold by Arclight Capital Management to its current owner, Infrastructure Investments Fund, or EIF, in 2022.

For many years now, INSTER's Katy Hub, also known as Katy Storage and Transportation, has served as a critically important gas transportation junction switching station and one of the U.S.'s most liquid gas trading hubs.

And then, of course, very quickly came Yvonne's redundancy and supporting her and making sure that she felt that she could get through that period of change with me or her husband at her side, helping her, advising her, reading documents, helping process.

numbers and an exit from a company that she'd been at for 10 years, and as I've shared in recent weeks, British Gas and Scottish Power, the complaints that have lasted years at this point, two years with British Gas, and then finally my own personal insurance battle, what that's been like to manage over the last months, not just the getting healthy from ending up in hospital, kidney stone surgery, sepsis, and thinking about, you know, looking after myself.

Podcasts, I mean, I take a breath there and think, right? Podcasts, YouTube channels, weekly newsletters, building a small business, content creation, showing up.

And then lastly, travel and logistics and money.

That's the most important thing.

Last week I talked about those battles.

British gas, Scottish power, them all drifting away.

I'm not trying to find another battle in this now.

I heard that, like, quite recently, actually.

There was a, it was Scottish Power, like, of all the businesses.

Ooh.

They do a lot of internal training, and they were saying what they do is right at the beginning of, say, like, a webinar they'll ask a question, and they ask exactly the same question at the end of the webinar-

I stayed with that business until 2006, where I rose to the rank of CEO of that business.

I then joined Scottish Power for two years, spent a year after that in built asset consultancy, and then joined Northern Gas.

So really seen a lot of the energy system from both the electricity side, transmission distribution, and now electricity.

into the gas side.