Emma Pinchbeck

products, technologies, which are smaller and sit this side of the grid.

And then you've got the folks who build like big stuff on the other end of the grid.

You've got the network companies in the middle.

You've now got lots of companies joining those things up.

There are very few energy companies that do end-to-end and then oil and gas companies are a separate thing entirely.

One of the challenges about my last job for sure is that no one could really agree on the right way forward, but there were very strong views depending on which bit of the market you represented.

Because you had the incentive, depending on which bit of the market you sat in.

fundamentally what that comes down to is a political choice between an immediate consumer benefit in the short term, but maybe risking your long-term investment and the infrastructure that you need for 2030, 2040 and beyond, or... But government always has the ability, if the incentives are going to be changed, government always has the ability to change the incentives.

Yeah, apart from it took us like five to ten years to do electricity market reform the last time around.

It was slow and complicated because of the complexity in the market.

So, again...

I studiously avoided having a dog in the fight in the last job.

Now we're going to do like post-1980s market liberalisation.

But how does that happen?

Because they're set through two different bits of the market and those two sets of companies are different too.

So I think until 2022, this is a...

you know, honest assessment.

I think from the 1980s in the UK, one of our fundamental problems is post-1980s, we've been used to an economy with lots of cheap and available gas.

And over the last...

In my lifetime, over 25, 30 years, we've watched cheap gas become less available.