Chris Stark on AR8, connections reform, grid charging and more

So it just keeps being interesting, and, um, I'd rather be here than on the outside, I suppose.

And when you come to, you know, all tight, good things must come to an end.

[laughs]

You know, when you come to hang up your spurs in this position, w-what for you will constitute, you know, a, a job well done?

So I'm not ready yet to hang up my spurs, but I might, you know, there might be a...

Maybe I'll take one boot off.

Um, because if you think about the challenge for 2030, we, we went hard at the, the, the first challenge really is to go hard at trying to change the pace at which we were deploying renewables and also the grid that supported that, and, and some of the big energy storage projects.

And if you don't do that in your first two years, it cannot feature in the 2030 power system because of the time it takes to develop a project like that.

Um, so here we are talking roughly the two-year mark, and, uh, sort of phase one is not done, but w- it's gonna be limited influence that we can have sort of daily dwindles on that story as we go into the, the la- latter half of this year when it comes to 2030.

Um, and that is all by design, right? We had, we, we had, we knew we would use that two years for that purpose, and I don't feel we wasted a single day on it.

Like we t- tipped everything into that, built a plan for 2030 that was based around those things, used that- In anger to try and bring better policy in place to deliver the things that were gonna be in that plan.

I've done difficult things like connections reform, which continue to be challenging but needed to be done.

Changed the contract for difference, made difficult decisions on things like zonal pricing.

Um, and all of that is sort of behind us.

Um, uh, some of those things are still playing out, but the decisions have been taken.

So I feel we've sort of locked in the, in terms of the big infrastructure of a system that we'll have by 2030.

It will, it will largely steer what happens after that too.

Now we're in a sort of new phase where job's not done, right? We've gotta make sure that's delivered.

Huge task to make sure that happens.

We're in the room where we do a lot of that now with these big screens in front of us.

But there's a new part to this story, which is how you use that power, right? That's, that has to be the more...

I, I think that is the, the, the bigger challenge now.

The, this clean power is great if you care about climate and decarbonization, of course I do.

Um, but we want it to be use- useful power for consumers, and we want that to be part of the story in the next phase.

So that takes you away then from the exposure that we're seeing in the country right now to, uh, to fossil fuels, uh, and imported fossil fuels especially.