Quentin Cole: Hello, I’m Quentin Cole, member of our UK Management Board at PwC and Head of Industries. I’m delighted to be joined today by Ben Wilson, Chief Strategy and Regulation Officer at National Grid, and Vicky Parker, PwC’s Sector Leader for Power and Utilities.
Ben, it’s particularly great to have you join us today. And I guess there’s some pretty powerful telling statistics in the Energy Survey which are quite revealing around the impact of energy volatility.
Ben Wilson: I thought it was a really interesting survey and for me the first thing it did was just underline, in case any of us need reminding, the foundational importance of energy for the health of the economy.
And whilst the Ukraine war and what that’s done to the price of global gas has had an impact in the US, it’s nothing like what we’ve seen here. So you know, and you see, you know, some of that pain frankly coming through in the survey results for business.
It’s a reminder of that, and I think what it does for us at National Grid is it really underlines the responsibility that we have to play a significant part in making energy, you know, affordable, reliable these days, clean and accessible for all our customers and for all the people that need to access energy in the UK. So building more offshore wind, building new nuclear, onshore wind and solar batteries, they will help, but it’s going to take quite a long time for that to come through and gas will still set, the power, the price of power for a long time. So we do need to build, build, build. But it’s not just the supply side. We do also need to focus on the demand side.
Quentin: Vicky, one of the authors of the report, I know you’ve been very close to what’s coming through the book from an insights perspective, but also you’re talking to a lot of our clients about the implications. What are you hearing from the market and hearing from our clients?
Vicky Parker: One of the most striking statistics in there was the 81% of companies that have yet to put their prices up going forward. That’s higher probably than we thought it was going to be. And why is that? You know, as Ben’s just talked about to some extent, we’re seeing a lag effect of what happened with Ukraine and all of the other issues around volatility still yet to play through. That’s an enormous impact on UK PLC that we’re still yet to see.
The bit that really sort of struck me though on the report was this tension a little bit between regulation, carbon, cost, and it’s not straightforward for companies to navigate through this. And I think there is still quite a lot to do to make sure companies understand that, well, what steps can they take to manage their demand.
I think the third aspect for me and you touched on it a bit obviously with National Grid having both a US and a UK presence, competitiveness of the UK is critical going forward. Competitiveness, when we look at our position from a low carbon economy perspective, but also as a UK PLC.
So when we’re looking at solving for this, yes, we are absolutely solving for, you know, greater stability around energy costs, both on supply and demand. But we are also, for many companies, looking at how we make sure that we’re shoring up and supporting that competitiveness internationally.
