Sam Hollister

speaker

442 appearances 5 recordings 1 series first heard Jul 2026 last heard 11 Aug

Sam Hollister’s voice in public audio — every appearance, attributed to the second.

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recordings per month · last 12 months

Recordings per month over the last 12 months — 5 in all, peaking in Jul 2026 with 4.

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Talking New Energy · 250. SSE on why we're measuring energy bills wrong · 28 Jul 2026 podcast

I mean, a few years ago, when you thought about the trilemma and you had energy security and renewables and affordability, renewables was kind of almost the challenge.

Challenge of energy security because of the intermittency.

Now with storage and with long duration storage and flexibility, it's now actually renewables are becoming a security line as well, on politics.

What's been your take on how that evolved in the world of SSE and how you're seeing renewables, but also the external engagement that you do as your role in talking to politicians, talking to governments, talking to

third party stakeholders and bits and pieces.

But listeners, it's a stat that I've been using quite a bit recently in all of the engagement that I've been having is LCP using our power modeling ran two different scenarios.

One was a scenario, a gas price shock like we've had this year, and said actually, if we built the renewables, we kind of even accelerate and go harder.

The increase in your electricity part of your bill is only going to be four percent in twenty thirty because of the amount of renewables you have on the system.

Compare that to a system where you haven't had any CFD backed renewables on.

So you might have had a bit of merchant solar and a bit of wind, but you certainly wouldn't have had any of the government support projects come through.

Actually, the bill impact is about twenty-four percent of an increase in electricity.

So you can just start to see, and obviously, if you go to a Russia Ukraine style point, that becomes exponentially higher, I think, the impact without any renewables is a seventy percent increase.

Really is that showing that installation.

I hadn't quite

thought about it in the way that you have today, Sam, in that actually you can see even in this setting of the recent price cap, just the change in in electrification versus gas pills.

One statement in the report that I think might surprise many listeners is that there's a line in there about new gas generation can actually be as expensive as renewables, even before carbon costs are included.

How's that happened and why hasn't the public debate caught up with that story?

Sam, what's kind of driving that?

I mean, is it data centers, AI, like what is it that's causing that demand, I suppose, or shortage of gas turbines?

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