Dec 23, 2025 · 29 min · 9 segments
In the latest episode of Beyond Curious, Nigel Timperley talks to Sam Hollister and Mark Watts about how recent policy signals are landing with investors and consumers, whether Clean Power 2030 is…
I mean, we're paying wind generators to curtail output at the same time as pushing electrification.
Is that a sign that planning networks and generation aren't aligned? We're sort of moving fast over here and slow over there?
When we're kind of progressing through, you kind of stop sometimes to kind of stop and look back and go, actually, that's been an incredible success that we've actually got 14 gigawatts of offshore wind on the system.
There's another kind of 14 gigawatts again on the power system, kind of that's got contracts and should be online in the next kind of two or three years.
And now in a few years time, we're going to be having kind of 28 gigawatts of offshore wind.
And to give that into perspective, right, I mean, I kind of, peak demand can be as low as 30, 35 gigawatts of power, and we'll be serving pretty much all of that with offshore wind.
We've done some analysis recently, actually, that says probably, I think it's something like 15% of hours, just in a couple of years' time, we're going to be having too much low-carbon power on the system.
So we're going to be suffering from this kind of almost, if you like, a glut of low carbon power.
Approximately, what's that, 15% of the time, so one in six, one in seven hours is going to be too much low carbon power on the system.
That's encouraging, but I guess the problem is the one in six or whatever it is when there is no wind and there is no sun.
And it's very hard to talk about targets without recognising that reality that what you need varies enormously depending on the time of year.
And the risk is that we just overbuild massively and we end up with immense, your phrase, gluts of power at certain times and not enough at other times.
If you don't mind, I'll kind of jump in from an investment standpoint here, because one of the central themes that we play when we give investors advice, and we've been advising investors on building energy transition portfolios on both the private equity and the private credit side for a while now.
And one of the things, the biggest themes that we're interested in is treating the energy transition as a system-wide issue to be solved, rather than one of just pumping more renewable generation onto the grid, onto the system.
If you're going to have all those renewables, as you pointed out, intermittency is an increasing problem.
What we've seen in the investment landscape is lots of money starting to be deployed into storage.
Lots of money started to be put into networks, improving the grid, hardening the grid, digitizing the grid.
I mean, we're paying wind generators to curtail output at the same time as pushing electrification.
Is that a sign that planning networks and generation aren't aligned? We're sort of moving fast over here and slow over there?
When we're kind of progressing through, you kind of stop sometimes to kind of stop and look back and go, actually, that's been an incredible success that we've actually got 14 gigawatts of offshore wind on the system.
There's another kind of 14 gigawatts again on the power system, kind of that's got contracts and should be online in the next kind of two or three years.
And now in a few years time, we're going to be having kind of 28 gigawatts of offshore wind.
And to give that into perspective, right, I mean, I kind of, peak demand can be as low as 30, 35 gigawatts of power, and we'll be serving pretty much all of that with offshore wind.
We've done some analysis recently, actually, that says probably, I think it's something like 15% of hours, just in a couple of years' time, we're going to be having too much low-carbon power on the system.
So we're going to be suffering from this kind of almost, if you like, a glut of low carbon power.
Approximately, what's that, 15% of the time, so one in six, one in seven hours is going to be too much low carbon power on the system.
That's encouraging, but I guess the problem is the one in six or whatever it is when there is no wind and there is no sun.
And it's very hard to talk about targets without recognising that reality that what you need varies enormously depending on the time of year.
And the risk is that we just overbuild massively and we end up with immense, your phrase, gluts of power at certain times and not enough at other times.
If you don't mind, I'll kind of jump in from an investment standpoint here, because one of the central themes that we play when we give investors advice, and we've been advising investors on building energy transition portfolios on both the private equity and the private credit side for a while now.
And one of the things, the biggest themes that we're interested in is treating the energy transition as a system-wide issue to be solved, rather than one of just pumping more renewable generation onto the grid, onto the system.
If you're going to have all those renewables, as you pointed out, intermittency is an increasing problem.
What we've seen in the investment landscape is lots of money starting to be deployed into storage.
Lots of money started to be put into networks, improving the grid, hardening the grid, digitizing the grid.
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