It’s rich in cloud data centers, but can the U.K. compete for AI assets?

Perhaps the best place to start is on the evolution of the power system.

First of all, it'd be great to get your thoughts on how you see the expected change in UK electricity demand after what's been quite a stable period, what you see as the key drivers and what this means for the system as a whole.

You're right to sort of flag this change that we've gone through because For the last two decades, we haven't really seen a huge amount of growth in electricity demand.

It's been really stable or at times has fallen.

I think across the country, we've seen relatively large levels of deindustrialization, increased in energy efficiency, And then, you know, electrical appliances have also become more efficient.

And if I think back to my time in the sector, I've been with Drax now for coming up eight years, but I think back to 2010, I worked at National Grid.

And at that point, you know, my job was to look at how we rewire the country on the anticipation that we were going to electrify the economy.

It feels like that's something we've been talking about for a very long time.

We're almost there, I think.

So heat pumps having a modest impact, EVs having increasingly significant impact on demand.

We're seeing big increases in demand driven by data centres.

The UK has a large proliferation of data centres driven by our mature telecom sector.

and our financial services industry in particular, so we know that the sort of concentration on the M25 is driving up demand, but these three things are all contributing to what does appear to finally be the electrification of the economy, this sort of much heralded hockey-sticking growth, and I think If you look back over the last three quarters, we've started to see that demand tickle.

How we respond to that challenge in the UK at the moment is that we have focused on bringing more renewables into the mix.

Policy interventions over the last five years has driven growth in that area in particular.

Now that's great in terms of decarbonising the economy, decarbonising the grid, but it does mean that our system is more vulnerable to weather-dependent events.

And we're finding there is more value and real interest in how do you power the country when the wind isn't blowing and the sun isn't shining.

So what we're seeing in response to this sort of increased penetration of renewables is a greater demand on flexibility services.

The mix is changing quite profoundly.

And the value in the system is at a different place than it was historically.