Tom Fairless

I mean, everyone's energy bills in Europe have gone up substantially.

And that is exacerbating a cost of living crisis in the UK.

And it's also feeding into a sense that the system has failed them.

They were promised cheap energy as part of this transition.

And politicians across the board said that this is something that would leave people better off.

But in fact, they're paying more.

The fact is Europe's quite far down this transition road.

It's not something you can just stop at this point.

Once you start it, you kind of have to try and see it to some form of conclusion.

Goldman Sachs did some work on this and they found that over the next decade, around 3 trillion euros worth of investment will have to go into grid infrastructure in Europe.

And that's double what Europe spent in the last 10 years.

That's a massive outlay.

especially at a time when a lot of these countries are fiscally constrained.

It's a bit of a conundrum as to what you do.

Do you race ahead to try and get this thing done in the hope that electricity prices do fall and you just suck up a big hit over the next few years?

Do you try and stretch it out?

Or do you end up with a sort of half-completed transition, which kind of could end up with the kind of worst of both worlds?

And I think a lot of people fear that we'll end up with that last scenario.