Chris Stark on the UK's Clean Power Future

And when we're talking about the sort of top, I don't know, three or four things where you feel the clean power mission will live or die, to an extent, by these, uh, what are they? What are the...

You know, when you're doing all this analysis and you're feeding it up to these are the things that we need to prioritize, what are the few that really, really jump out to you?

So the...

It's actually changed over time, and that's, that's part of the plan.

So, so, so if you'd asked me this on day one, I would've said the most important thing is to have a plan, right? So we...

So, so laying that out quickly, having that informed by, uh, you know, deep analysis that was done in NESO rather than in this department so that we get the sort of extra independent challenge on it.

That was the number one priority initially.

We then moved into, well, if that's the plan, there are certain bits of this that you know you've gotta get really quickly cracking on.

And back to your old world, that is big infrastructure.

Yeah.

And that is mainly, uh, in the early phase at least, getting the, the environment right for us to procure much higher capacities of renewables, and also getting the green light for the grid upgrade.

Now, we set those out as early priorities.

We then moved into pretty successful set of auction rounds, um, and seeing the, what we call T3 projects, the big transmission upgrades across the three transmission owners.

Uh, they are now underway.

So interesting, we sort of move into a different world now.

And I, I mentioned it earlier, where those things are up and running.

Uh, AR8 in terms of 2030 is probably the last roll of the dice for big infrastructure.

Like, we will get some 2030 projects through there, but there'll be a lot that are post-2030.

Now we're into a much more interesting world where you've gotta integrate all of that properly, and the integration of those technologies is really where the action is at.

And actually, you want to introduce a new factor, which is that we wanna grow demand for electricity alongside that.

Mm.

So we have focused, I think rightly, on generation and grid, because we knew we had the capacity to do that in the early phase, and we frankly would run out of road to have influence by 2030 if we didn't do that.

We now move into a different phase of work where we want to focus more in terms of the priority on making sure that we have a well-integrated system which brings in things like storage assets, how flexible that system is.

Um, and then the last part of this story, which is ultimately the most important pa- important part of the story of all, is that we now want to see electrification.

Like, we are building a system that is prepared for a much bigger electricity demand.