Greg Jackson is the founder and CEO of Octopus Energy, a global energy and technology company headquartered in London.
Set up in 2016, it now has 7.2 million customers across 18 countries, as well as a portfolio of £6bn worth of renewable energy assets. The group’s proprietary technology platform, Kraken, is now used to run more than 40m customer accounts across the globe.
The company’s energy supplier arm recently became the largest in Great Britain, surpassing legacy giant British Gas when it added 1.3 million customers after buying Shell Energy in late 2023.
Jackson is a “serial tech entrepreneur”, having built and sold a number of start-ups before Octopus Energy.
Carbon Brief sat down with him for an hour, to discuss the UK’s energy transition, the upcoming general election, misinformation in the media and much more.
- On the energy transition: “The reality is that it just boils down to electrification.”
- On technology neutrality: “This isn’t primary school, there are going to be winners and losers.”
- On Labour’s “zero-carbon power by 2030” pledge: “It’s totally achievable.”
- On using hydrogen for heating: “It’s like flushing our toilets with champagne. It might work, but it’s inordinately expensive and impractical.”
- On renewable forecasts being revised upwards: “It’s like Groundhog Day when you look at the revised [solar and wind] forecasts.”
- On misinformation in the media: “I think some of it is organised and some of it is cultural…EVs have taken 1.8m barrels of oil off the road per day. That’s enough that the global oil industry is suddenly seeing what used to look like a minor inconvenience in the future is suddenly a real and present danger.”
- On the psychology of climate change: “I think hope is as important, knowing there is a solution, is as important as knowing there’s a problem.”
- On stopping “burning stuff”: “Look at the cost curves for solar and wind and all the other technologies…Honestly, it’s going to be cheaper to stop burning stuff. That was an amazing moment, when I realised that we didn’t have to arrange the forces for saving the planet against the force of economics, because they actually lined up.”
- On the cost of renewables: “Our addiction to fossil fuel is so damaging, it even makes the solutions to fossil fuels more expensive.”
- On investment: “The demand for electricity is only going to go up. And when there’s demand for a product, you can invest in producing it.”
- On the demand flexibility service: “It’s just the equivalent of supermarkets pricing goods to clear, rather than letting them go off.”
- On concerns over digital exclusion: “People who try to hold new technology to the bar of universality are typically protecting some sort of legacy against the technology improvements that benefit consumers, and we should not have much patience for that.”
Carbon Brief: What do you think should be the key priorities when it comes to energy and climate policy for the next [UK] government over its first six months or so?
Greg Jackson: I think the energy transition used to sound like quite a complicated process. The reality is that it just boils down to electrification. We need to electrify everything we can and then be generating as much electricity as we can from renewable resources.
Now, underneath that, there may be a whole lot of policy priorities. But electrification has got to be the one word.
CB: So, when the next government comes in, whenever the election is, are there specific things you really need to see, or that you’d like to see, to really ramp up this decarbonisation process?
GJ: So, again, I’m going to talk about, for me [its] electrification. Because even when we talk about decarbonisation you’re kind of weighing up loads of different things. If we talk about electrification, primarily, then we can say, OK, what does that take?
And I think the first thing we need to do is recognise that, even today, the electricity markets we’ve got are not fit for purpose. We spend billions a year balancing and curtailing renewables – that’s turning windfarms off when it’s windy. And we need a market that means that, at the times when we’re generating a lot of electricity, it’s super cheap for people. And we need to do that on a regional basis, or even more locally than that.
So that, for example, if today we had regional pricing, every region would be cheaper than it is because we’ve been reducing waste. But, more than that, Scotland would be the cheapest electricity in Europe. These are important because as soon as people can see that renewables can lead to cheaper energy, we get public support for renewables – as we should – and it becomes a much more efficient system. We’re not putting a cost on everyone’s bills to pay for waste, which is what happens today.
I think, alongside market reform, you then get the right investment signals. So we are going to be investing in the places that need the infrastructure. And that’s not just generation, it can be things like batteries.
It’s kind of mad at the moment that a lot of people think we should put batteries next to windfarms. But, if you do that, then before anybody’s had a chance to make the most of cheap electricity, you’ve already eliminated the price signal. So the best places for batteries, for example, might be close to population centres.
Take somewhere like the southeast [of England], where, obviously, it’s hard to build new generation. But we can build infrastructure that will make electricity cheaper by, for example, deploying batteries in places that have got peak time constraints [to] enable us to reduce peak issues and benefit more from the times it’s off peak and we can store that electricity.
So I think market reform is absolutely number one. And that means the most dynamic pricing possible.
By the way, it doesn’t mean that consumers will necessarily face dynamic prices, just to be really clear. Companies will be able to wrap-up that dynamic pricing in any number of tariffs. So, for those who want it, you’ll still have flat tariffs – and they’ll probably be cheaper than they are today, because the system is more efficient. But, for those who can shift demand, or want more dynamic stuff, it will enable them to benefit by using electricity more efficiently and that makes for a more efficient system for everyone.
Obviously, we need reform of two sets of regulations. We critically need grid reform, so that you can actually connect stuff to the grid. We’ve spent years talking about this publicly because of the frustration that we’ve got enormous amounts of capital to build new generation. But you can’t. You literally have no way of connecting to the grid. I mean, there’s a project we’ve got to build a solar farm in County Durham, where I think there’s a 14-year wait to connect it.
CB: So is that just planning reform?
GJ: That is grid reform. So, basically in the UK – and, by the way, this applies in many other countries as well – you’ve got a national monopoly grid and you can only build new generation if you can connect it to the grid. You haven’t got any alternative. So, if the grid tells you you’re going have to wait 14 years, you’re going to wait 14 years.
And I contrast this with what has happened in gas. During the energy crisis, Germany alone built five liquified natural gas terminals in one year. Meanwhile, because of these grid connection issues, we can’t build new renewables. And I think that the reform for that is largely bureaucratic; the government and grid need to agree on a process to enable stuff to be connected faster.
The second thing, of course, is planning. And I think, at the moment, I mean, famously, England built two onshore wind turbines in the time that Ukraine during a war built hundreds, because you can’t get planning permission. And that doesn’t just apply for wind turbines, there’s a real challenge building the infrastructure to transmit electricity around the country.
And I think the reality with this is we need to find ways to enable communities to benefit when we build new infrastructure. Wherever you build it, you get NIMBYs [“not in my back yard”]. But we need to have IMBYs as well, people who will directly benefit and can see the direct benefit of building infrastructure. And so we need reform that enables us to deploy new electricity infrastructure, but in a way which embraces, to the maximum extent possible, local communities.
Between those two priorities – i.e. market reform, planning and grid reform – we can unleash the forces that actually will mean that throughout most of the country – everywhere, in fact – consumers will be benefiting from clean energy. And the moment people are benefiting – it’s like when the new iPhone launched. The sudden demand for data meant that the mobile networks just had to build masts, because it had to meet consumer demand. And we can do that with energy, with clean energy, which is the more we enable people to benefit, the more demand there will be for rapid transition. And that’s what we need.
CB: So, moving on to Labour’s now kind of quite high-profile pledge to get net-zero power by 2030…is that broadly achievable? Is that doable if what you laid out there gets implemented? Or are there extra things that, to hit that 2030 target, would need to happen?
GJ: It’s totally achievable. And, by the way, I mean, the government’s pledge [for 2035] is not that different, right? Everyone’s pledging net-zero carbon electricity by roughly then, I can’t remember all the details, but they’re all quite similar.
But the reality is, what it does need is commitment. I was recently at a meeting of governments. Lots of industries were lobbying governments to say: we need to be technology neutral, everyone’s got to be given a chance to be part of this future. Which is all lovely, but this isn’t primary school, there are going to be winners and losers. And we need the commitments from governments that enable investors to invest in the stuff that’s going to be part of the future.
So a really good example would be, there is still this kind of crazy suggestion that hydrogen might be used to heat homes. I mean, it might just be physically possible, but it’s like flushing our toilets with champagne. It might work, but it’s inordinately expensive and impractical. It’s just a delaying tactic from the companies who own the gas infrastructure.
Now, of course, a transition that means that the gas infrastructure, over time, won’t be so valuable, or may even become entirely redundant, is not the future that they [the gas industry] want. But it’s not like we’re still running stuff down the canals. The technology changes already made [mean] that renewable electricity is the cheapest form of power we’ve ever had and is getting cheaper every year. Of course, there are minor blips like recent inflation in offshore wind, but even that was driven by the inflation and interest rates, which largely came from our addiction to fossil fuels.
So, the path should be clear, and what we need from policymakers are those brave decisions that say: “Hey, look, there are going to be some losers in this process.” But…the quicker we’re clear about that, the more we can embrace, for example, the workers in those sectors and make sure that they’ve got a bright future, as we transition, and the more we can manage the transition in a way which will be good. Good for the people who were affected by it.
CB: Can the market do all of this? Or Labour’s talking of GB Energy, and you hear about nationalisation or quasi-nationalisation of the railways. What do you make of the ideas like GB Energy?
GJ: Yeah. I don’t think there’s any read-across from railways. It’s an entirely different sector. And the reality when you look at energy, I mean, first of all, GB Energy isn’t the sort of nationalised energy supplier, which is good, by the way. I mean, energy retail is one of the most competitive sectors in the UK. Margins are 2%, if energy companies are lucky.
The big problem in energy is the rest of the cost stack. It’s largely those kinds of very regulated, often monopoly parts of the system, which need reform. And so I think if GB Energy is about, for example, helping pioneer stuff that isn’t yet ready for market risk…I mean, take tidal as an example. Maybe we should have tidal power, maybe GB Energy would be a great way of kick-starting that, in the same way as government subsidies kick-started a lot of wind and solar. But, increasingly, we could run wind and solar on a merchant basis, i.e. an unsubsidised basis in many energy systems if you’ve had the market reform I talked about. So, if GB energy is helping kickstart stuff we need, that would be incredible.
If GB Energy helps get government backing for projects to enable them to, for example, overcome some of the planning and connections issues that I’ve described, that could be great. So it really depends on the role GB Energy is playing.
CB: Before we started speaking, I was looking at this Ladybird book from 1981, which I picked up from a charity shop, talking about energy conservation. Obviously, whatever that is, 40-odd years ago [and we’re now] talking about 2050 [for net-zero emissions]. What, in your view, does the UK energy system, EVs and all the rest of it look like then? What does the UK look like in 2050? And what does it need to look like?
GJ: So, first of all, I guess the question here is, if this [book] was roughly 30 years ago and 2050 is roughly 30 years away…how well did this predict where we are today? Or how dated does it look, right?
Look, I think a real challenge with targets like 2050 is that almost everyone who sets those targets will be retired by then. They’re not responsible for it. Indeed, almost everyone who’s working for them will be retired by then. It’s incredibly easy to set a target that you’re not going to be around for.
So, I’m much more of a believer in setting much shorter term targets. And given that we have the technologies we have available today, we can set really challenging targets. If you are talking about 2030, for example, net-zero electricity, that’s a much more tangible time. Because it tells us about the decisions we need to make right now.
I think one of the interesting things about predicting the future, is how wrong we get it, especially in sectors like energy, where you’ve got very powerful incumbents who have very strong views about what the future will be, but are often wrong. I mean, Kodak’s view of the future was wrong, Nokia’s view of the future was wrong, Blockbusters’ view. They were all wrong. But they didn’t get to lobby for their view of the future, they just had to compete. And the market and technology made the decision for them.
So I think if I look at energy, wind and solar, [they] have repeatedly beaten every target. They get cheaper, faster than anyone’s ever estimated. And it keeps on happening. It’s like Groundhog Day when you look at the revised forecasts, because every forecast that comes out, kind of looks back and goes: “Whoops, we underestimated how well solar would do or how well wind would do.” And then they make an estimate, and then they have to go and do the exact same process again because it keeps beating it.
It’s been the same, by the way, with batteries. Battery prices keep on plummeting way ahead of expectation. And EV adoption has kept on accelerating ahead of expectation. So, all the clean-energy technologies beat the forecasts.
By the way, the only ones that don’t are the dirty-energy technologies. No one forecast the horrific gas crisis we’ve just lived through. Nuclear keeps getting – and I’m not anti nuclear – but it keeps getting more expensive and slower than expected. And so I think the challenge with setting things like 2050 is, if we start building infrastructure based around our best guesses now, it’ll almost certainly under-deliver and it will cost too much. We’re far better off with the kind of things I talked about at the beginning, which were market reforms, so we can rapidly deploy the technologies we’ve already got.
An incredible thing that happens in technology is, each time you deploy something, it teaches you about what is possible. When the iPhone launched, no one foresaw that QR codes would get you out of a pandemic, or that Uber would change the global cab industry.
In the same way, for example, we are already discovering that if we give people, if we integrate our technologies directly with people’s electric cars, we can charge them at three or four times less than grid cost, because we’re able to grab the electricity when it’s most abundant. That means that, today, for some of our customers, they can drive electric cars for £2.30 for 100 miles, whereas with a diesel car it would be £18.
Now, no one forecast that kind of thing. It’s just what we discover, when we build out new technology. And that’s why, you know, I really believe we need the reforms to let us build the technology. And we will discover it gets cheaper, faster, easier and better for consumers, far more quickly than anyone realised.
CB: What do you make of the current mood in certain sections of the media, which is very negative, relentlessly attacking EVs, electrification, solar? What’s your view on that? It’s almost like organised misinformation, it sometimes feels like.
GJ: I think there are two layers to it. I think some of it is organised and some of it is cultural.
Let’s talk about the cultural first. Let’s look at EVs. EVs are not just an electric version of petrol cars, they are a fundamentally different creation. So, the assumption that, for example, the long-standing car makers, the manufacturers of Europe and elsewhere, were going to be able to just start making EVs, is kind of wrong. Right? They spent 100 years becoming unbelievably good at complex transmission and drive shafts and all of the engineering required to take what is actually a remarkably complex thing, a petrol or diesel engine, and turn it into a consumer device.
Meanwhile, for the last 20 years a bunch of Chinese companies that just set out to build EVs from the beginning, or Tesla, which has only ever done EVs, have re-engineered cars, built around the fundamentals of an EV, in which things like transmission becomes much simpler, but your ability to build really smart battery management, really smart software is actually a competitive edge.
Now, what we’re seeing at the moment is EVs emerging that traditional automakers find very, very difficult to compete with. And, so, their answer is: “Hang on, we can’t make money in EVs. Therefore, something’s wrong with EVs.” Because no company ever says there’s something wrong with us.
Now, that means that everyone in those companies, there’s huge numbers of people there, good people, but that are genuinely thinking EVs are too hard, they are too challenging, they’re not going to work. And they’re the people that have a 20-year relationship with motoring journalists. Their lobbyists have had the 20-year relationships with the political correspondents, their CEOs are the ones that have the relationships with the business journalists and with the editors. So, this isn’t a conspiracy, it’s just that those companies are facing existential threat from something that is really challenging for them. And that means that all the conversations these people have are about the problems with EVs, right?
Now, actually, I have lived with an EV for seven years. There are very, very few problems with an EV. And, you know, for example, the latest generation of EVs are getting cheaper and cheaper and cheaper, as all the technology scales up. And we get these great cost curves as batteries come down. But those automakers are not seeing it, in fact, this is a threat to them.
So, I think the primary layer here is simply that the influential people in the motoring industry, simply don’t get EVs.
I think the second thing is, of course, there is a backlash from the fossil fuel industry, including some car companies, because, even today, I think EVs have taken 1.8m barrels of oil off the road per day. Right? That’s enough that the global oil industry is suddenly seeing what used to look like a minor inconvenience in the future is suddenly a real and present danger. Now, we saw the ability of the tobacco industry to lobby against tobacco restrictions. The oil industry is vastly more powerful than tobacco ever was. And so, on top of the sort of cultural thing that I’ve described, you have then got a genuine concern and lobbying efforts.
And I guess the last part of that is cultural wars. There are organisations who deny climate change, who are combining anti-climate change with anti-EV, with anti-renewables and a whole load of other social topics to try and create political divides. That’s why when I talk about the market reforms that will make, for example, clean energy cheaper, it’s so critical, because if we can show people this transition is good for them, we kind of undermine that attempt at a culture war.
I spend a lot of time talking to, for example, people on the political right, because they are free marketers. They believe in entrepreneurship, they believe in efficiency and talking to them about the way in which renewables and EVs can lead to a more efficient competitive world. Actually, we make the culture war go away and we talk about the economics instead. And then we can align people’s self-interest with that industry, with that of the climate.
CB: Talking about a culture war, we obviously got an election here in the UK looming, but we’ve obviously got a US election looming too and a very, very stark choice between a Biden versus Trump presidency. In that context, given what the Trump 1.0 presidency did, what do you make of the Paris Agreement? Obviously, Trump tried to pull, or did pull the US out of it and then Biden reinstated it. Do you think the Paris Agreement has achieved things to date? Is it the international framework system that we need, or not?
GJ: I’m generally impressed that most governments really do take the commitments they’ve made seriously. And, even, while on a political level, I’ll often hear these kind of culture-war discussions, underneath that, you see the real actions.
Now, the US has obviously swung massively because you had the Trump rowbacks, but then you had, under Biden, the IRA [Inflation Reduction Act], which, by the way, is a very bipartisan programme. I speak to people from the US administration and, just yesterday, [we talked] about the kind of risk of a rowback depending on what happens in November and their view is, of course, there is a very real risk.
But a lot of what the IRA has done has been in red [Republican] states. The Biden officials talk about touring America and meeting all these mayors, Republican mayors and governors in red states, who have seen the benefits of jobs and the industrial regeneration created by it. And so you hope that a lot of that will mean that the underlying programmes survive any political change.
I think in terms of the global picture, we’ve also got to be a bit honest about this. Paris was about 1.5C. I think last year we exceeded 1.5C. Now, climate comes and goes, it’s very important we all recognise that, but, we’ve got to accept that we’re facing an accelerating challenge and we’ve got all the tools to solve it.
I think the place that we really need political leadership now is to be able to look at industries and say: “Look, some industries are going to be the future. And their success is not only going to benefit the climate, it’s going to create more economic opportunity than we lose as we allow some industries to start declining.” And they’ve just got to be brave about this.
I saw that G7 has just agreed to phase-out coal by 2035. [Laughs] I mean, you can be proud to be British on this one, because this is our last coal year, and even then it’s miniscule. The idea that we somehow need these forms of energy for another 11 years is mad. And, so, I’m simultaneously pleased that governments really do take these commitments seriously. But I’m also worried that they fail to grasp the opportunity that a far more rapid change could deliver greater economic growth, greater outcomes for their citizens, than in their current shape.
CB: Obviously, looking at this [Ladybird] book, and looking back over previous decades, I’m interested in your own personal epiphany, if you like, on climate change. What was the thing, that moment…was it a book, TV programme, film, a lecture, a conversation with a colleague or family member, where the penny really dropped and you thought: “OK, climate change is a thing and it’s pretty damn serious”?
GJ: I was a child in the 70s and I joined Greenpeace when I was 15. And the thing that first got me into it was actually local air pollution more than climate. Because back then you could literally see the diesel fumes belching out the back of buses, out of car exhausts, often very visible, and you could really smell and feel it in the air. And I thought it was completely unacceptable, that one person’s choice to drive a car that did that created this huge negative impact on the people behind them.
And you remember that when leaded petrol was banned, which was done almost overnight, it was because of the impact on kids’ brains in dense urban areas with a lot of vehicles. It’s just unconscionable. And I think back then what you could see was that there were clean alternatives. This wasn’t about sackcloth and ashes. It wasn’t asking people to give up the huge benefits of industrial progress. It was just we needed ways to enable people to choose better solutions at the same or lower cost.
And so that was always my philosophy and I think, as I became more and more aware of climate change, exactly the same applied.
Now, I think the real two points of epiphany for me on climate were, first of all, realising there’s a solution. I think for a long time, you kind of feel like, how can we power our society without burning stuff? And then you look at the cost curves for solar and wind and all the other technologies. And, honestly, it’s going to be cheaper to stop burning stuff. That was an amazing moment, when I realised that we didn’t have to arrange the forces for saving the planet against the force of economics, because they actually lined up.
I think the second thing was Al Gore’s movie, An Inconvenient Sequel. We’d actually started this company, we started the company in 2015-16. In 2018, it looked like we were doing quite well. And we went away for a couple of days for a management off-site. And, after a hard day slaving over clipboards or whatever you do, I arranged for everyone to watch a movie and they all came in and I think they thought that we’re going to get something fun. And when An Inconvenient Sequel opened up, all the people in the room, you could see their faces drop, because I was forcing them to watch something worthy.
But you know what, five minutes in, everyone’s WhatsApp messages start pinging, and it was like, “wow, we have to do more”. Because it was showing the very real effects of climate change, which, by the way, are only worse now. And then at the end of the movie it had hope, it ended with a deal on solar for India. And, of course, it was for dramatic effect, but the reality of this is that we do have hope.
After the movie finished, we all just sat down and said how can we accelerate the ability our company has to do something about this? And so, I think, hope is as important, knowing there is a solution, is as important as knowing there’s a problem.
CB: You have talked very confidently about the cost benefits of wind and solar and you mentioned earlier how, a couple of years ago, government auctions made offshore wind look incredibly appealing. And then we had a failed auction and now it looks like quite a different picture. Heat pump installations in the UK are still very slow, costs are high. The cost of electricity versus gas makes them probably cheaper to run, but not definitely. How would you respond to lots of people saying: “Is it actually cheaper? It’s going to be more expensive, we need to consider perhaps using boilers?” How do you respond to those very serious concerns?
GJ: The first thing we’re going to do is recognise that today’s markets don’t reflect the underlying physics and economics, which is why I talk about market reform all the time. The second thing we need to do is recognise that there’s always going be short-term blips, those auction failures were driven simply by short-term inflation and interest rates, both of which were largely the consequence of the gas crisis, i.e, our addiction to fossil fuel is so damaging, it even makes the solutions to fossil fuels more expensive.
And then we talk about things like adoption of heat pumps and so on. A year ago, two years ago, no one had heard of a heat pump. Now, the climate change denying parts of the media have made heat pumps famous. Thank you very much. We’ve got to remember that we’ve got long-term transitions and almost everything we talked about there are short-term issues.
So, if we break it down a bit, we can generate electricity from renewable sources in the UK, for between 4p and 8p a kilowatt hour (kWh). New generation in solar and wind can do that.
Consumers traditionally in the UK have paid 17p/kWh. During the energy crisis our bills were paid for by the government, but they went to 40p/kWh or 50p/kWh, right? I.e. the generating cost, the cost to generate electricity, is way below what people pay. We’ve just got a crazily inefficient system for getting it from generation to consumption. We need to fix that. Which is why that was literally the first set of policies that I talked to you about.
Just by way of example, electricity roughly trebles in price in the UK between the point it’s generated and the point you consume it. Milk, which is much harder to transmit, gets schlepped about in diesel lorries, it has to be bottled and pasteurised, is stored on refrigerated shelves in supermarkets with really expensive real estate. I think milk goes up by 50% between the farm and the point you buy it. Our electricity system is just fundamentally far too inefficient. And we have to fix that. And that’s the market reforms.
But then in terms of, for example, running costs of heat pumps…on a smart tariff they’re almost certainly cheaper for the vast majority of homes than a gas boiler to run. And that’s in today’s crazy world where all of the climate and social levies are sitting on electricity. If you take away that distortion, running heat pumps on electricity is dramatically cheaper than a gas boiler.
We’ve still got to make heat pumps cheaper to buy and install. That’s why, again, going back to first principles, I was inspired here by Michael Dell, of Dell Computers. When he was doing his MBA, he sat in his dorm room and he read an article that said that a $3,000 IBM PC only had $1,000 of components. But, you know, you had an inefficient supply chain, loads of wholesalers and, when you look at heat pumps, it’s just the same. So we’ve started making our own, so we can be a bit like Dell, by going direct to make them cheaper. And already we’re seeing a big cost benefit. But the more we invest, the more we scale up, the more we’ll see that, and other companies are doing the same.
So what we’ve got is a situation where we’re at the beginning of a technology change. And if you look at the first iPhones, they cost £435 and today you would feel like you’re holding a brick that barely performed. But they were enough to kick start the smartphone revolution and that’s just the process we’re going through with the heat pumps.
The UK has very specific needs for heating, not only do we have poorly insulated homes, but we’ve got a very temperate climate. We also heat our homes with wet radiators, whereas most countries that use heat pumps have used air to heat the home. And so we’ve needed to make heat pumps that are UK specific. All of this is happening at the moment and it just gives me huge optimism.
And if I compare this to the alternative, by the way – the idea of, for example, piping hydrogen into people’s homes – I don’t know where to start.
We can start with engineering. Hydrogen is the smallest molecule in the universe. When a rocket launch is delayed by a fuel leak, which they are, that’s hydrogen. Rocket scientists can’t keep it in a very closed and carefully designed system. You know, there are bits of our gas network that are unmapped, that are 100 years old, I think there are bits of the piping that have got wood in them! Anywhere you’ve got a leak, hydrogen can get out. And so, before you can pipe hydrogen [into homes], you’ve got to make sure that every single home, every single inch of every pipe in every home, every valve and every joint, every appliance is going to be able to keep the hydrogen in. And this is unbelievably complex.
I saw the other day a hydrogen cooking hob, with an invisible flame, literally invisible flame. I don’t know why you’d want one of those in your kitchen, so you’ve got an explosive leaky substance with an invisible flame, or you could have an electric induction hob for roughly the same amount. The same cost to run, wipe clean, totally safe, incredibly controllable and you don’t need all this stuff piped into your home.
And that’s just looking at the piping, nevermind where’s the hydrogen coming from! 97% of the hydrogen in the world at the moment is unabated carbon emitting hydrogen. And this is years after we were told we’d be starting to get green hydrogen available. And then, if you’re going to use hydrogen to heat a home, if it’s green hydrogen, you’ve got to create renewable electricity, you then use that to power electrolysers, you then have to compress the hydrogen, pump it into the home and burn it. End-to-end, 40% efficient at turning the electricity you started with into heat. And, meanwhile, the heat pump is end-to-end 250% to 400% efficient.
There we go. I’m very optimistic because all you ever have to do is go back to the physics of this stuff.
Oh sorry, the other thing you mentioned, you know…is electricity more expensive than gas? Well, of course electricity is about three times more expensive per unit, maybe four times with the distorting taxes that need to be taken away. But electricity is so much more efficient. An EV turns 80% of the energy and electricity into motion, a petrol engine is 25%. A heat pump, you get 300% efficiency efficiency, a gas boiler gives you 85%. So electricity is so much more efficient.
And then the real magic with electricity is that it’s fungible. If you’ve got an EV, it can store the electricity at the cheapest times, you can’t do that kind of thing with gas. In fact, increasingly, some EVs can put that energy back into your house at peak times, reducing your energy costs.
Fundamentally, I think there is one thing here which is that electricity puts consumers far more in control. If they choose to, they can get solar panels and largely eliminate their dependence on anyone else. But with fossil fuels, we’re totally dependent on the countries and, to a degree, corporations that provide that molecule. One reason they don’t want to let go is that control gives them power and it gives them money. And we saw that during the gas crisis.
Any comparison of gas costs versus electricity costs has to remember that, from time to time, we experience these fossil fuel crises, because we’re dependent on people in control. And during the worst of the gas crisis, the price of gas went up to 30-fold. There was a very real chance that Europe was not going to have enough gas. In fact, it is potentially the case that we were saved from a gas crisis by a mild winter.
So we should never allow anyone to get away with this idea that electricity is more expensive than gas, because they cherry-pick the times that gas is cheap and they forget about the times that gas or other fossil fuels brutalise our economies. I think it cost the UK £100bn, the government paid two-thirds of our energy bills during the crisis. That’s how bad fossil fuels are.
CB: You’ve talked already about market reform and how important you think it is. One of the key arguments from people who are in favour of this transition that the economy is going through, is that dramatic reform of the electricity markets puts at risk the investments we need to get 2030, 2035 or whatever our targets are, which currently relies on the system as it is today. How do you respond to that?
GJ: It’s just not true. Of course, investors quite rightly, when investors write a large cheque, they are making a huge commitment and they need to know it’s got a good chance of delivering a return. And, so, whenever investors have got comfortable with one way of doing things, they of course want to see that carry on.
But, first of all, there are plenty of other investors available. Whilst in electricity, investors have long had these kind of guaranteed returns through different mechanisms, oil and gas investors make their colossal investments against enormous technology risk, enormous political risk and enormous market risk. When they decide to start extracting or to buy the licences for an oil or gas field and then make a huge investment required to extract the stuff. And then huge investments in LNG tankers and terminals. They have no idea what the future price of oil or gas will be. And they can still make those investments. So you can make massive investments against degrees of uncertainty.
And what we’ve seen already in electricity in the past was, for example, when we moved to the CfD [contracts for difference] regime, from the RO [renewable obligations] or FiTs [feed in tariffs] or whatever. A lot of investors said: “Well, that will kill investment.” It all [still] happened.
Similarly, when we’ve seen, for example, a number of states in the US have introduced dynamic zonal pricing, the investments carried on unaffected. So, at the end of the day, people need electricity. In fact, the demand for electricity is only going to go up. And when there’s demand for a product, you can invest in producing it.
CB: One of the things that Octopus has been quite involved in is the demand flexibility service being run by the electricity system operator. And that’s obviously encouraging customers to cut their use at peak times. How much importance do you put on that kind of system as we transition to a net-zero power system?
GJ: First of all I’d say Octopus was pioneering that for four years before the ESO brilliantly introduced it. Because the sort of legacy energy system said: “Customers won’t do this stuff.” Everything we’d invested in, in trials and experiments with customers showed that they loved that.
It was brilliant the way the ESO introduced it. And Octopus Saving Sessions accounts for 50% of all of the participation. Because we’d nurtured relationships with customers.
These are not energy geeks, by the way. Energy geeks were already on dynamic tariffs and smart tariffs, which meant, actually, it was kind of hard for them to participate in the Saving Sessions, because they were already fully optimised. This was one and a half million for us, one and a half million ordinary households that finally had the opportunity to shop for bargain electricity the way that they already do with supermarkets.
And giving people the opportunity to cut costs, especially in a crisis, but also to have agency, to be able to make decisions, is so critically important. And I think that this isn’t about renewables, this is just about the way the energy system has treated customers as dumb offtakers, rather than them being the very reason we exist. And as soon as we truly embraced customers, we discover all these ways in which we simultaneously provide them with better service and better value through a more efficient system. It’s just the equivalent of supermarkets pricing goods to clear, rather than letting them go off.
I think the big challenge for the energy sector now – and there’s a real risk that legacy thinking kills this – but the real opportunity and challenge is to make this the norm. It shouldn’t be a weird add-on in one winter in a crisis. It’s like every day, there are a bunch of people, turning electric generation on and off. There’s a whole bunch of companies investing heavily in things like batteries. And the ability to shift demand around is just as big, a potential contributor to an efficient system. In fact, it’s better because you don’t have to buy any assets. And so I think we shouldn’t be thinking this has been an add-on system, it is the system.
It’s insanely popular, too, just be really clear. We got 100,000 customers asking for smart meters during that programme just to participate.
CB: The last question neatly segues into this. Technology is a key part of being able to do that, but also your broader pitch to customers. A big part of this transition to EVs requires integrating very well with your technology. But how do you deal with customers that aren’t up to date? Who don’t necessarily have smartphones, who aren’t digitally savvy? How do you ensure that they’re not left behind?
GJ: I tell you what, those customers were being brutalised in the old energy industry. If they’re calling a legacy energy company that has got a 45-minute wait on the phones and then you get through to someone and they can’t help you, because it’s got to be a different department, so they promise to call you back and they don’t call me back, and then they hand me through to another department, and you just do all of the security questions, just as they’re closing the line, that was the experience those people had in energy.
So the first thing is great technology enables you to provide everybody with a better service. Octopus’s magic is that when you phone us up, 95% of the time, the person you are speaking to can sort out your problem there and then, because of technology [which is known as Kraken]. Fewer things go wrong, because of technology.
Second thing is, I’m so sorry, I can’t remember the number, but, actually, there are relatively few people in the UK that don’t have access to a smartphone. And if we think about things like everything from universal credit to the ability to buy an enormous range of products and services, it requires a smartphone. And the most important thing is making sure that wherever someone has got the access, we enable them to become part of an efficient system.
For the very small number of people that don’t have those technologies, it’s very unlikely you’d have an EV and not have a smartphone. And so a lot of the technologies we really need to optimise to make the system efficient for everyone, like EVs, naturally you are going to find the people that have the kit.
So I think the most important thing is you look at everybody, regardless of where they are, but you don’t get held back by saying that everything’s universal, right? After all, Aldi and Lidl, great supermarkets, but we don’t prevent them from rolling out because some people might not be able to get there. In fact, the more they’ve rolled out, the more they’ve been able to become closer to being universally accessible anyway.
You know, things like when the iPhone launched it was £435 plus I think about minimum £35 a month. It was a super premium product. But, within five years, it paved the way to the $50 Android, $20 Android, the ubiquitous Android that has transformed not only the lives of people in wealthy countries, but many developing countries, too.
People who try to hold new technology to the bar of universality are typically protecting some sort of legacy against the technology improvements that benefit consumers and we should not have much patience for that.
For example, someone recently wrote to me because their 700-year old house had a heat pump that didn’t always work efficiently – by the way, I think it was badly installed and we can fix that – but there’s not that many 700-year old houses, and I’d love to serve them. But 20% of households don’t have gas in the UK, so heat pumps are held to this idea that they have got to work for everyone in all situations, which, by the way, they are better than gas because every house has got electricity and only 80% have got gas. So even when we talk about universality, we are usually using it for a false comparison anyway.
CB: Thank you.
GJ: Thank you.
The post The Carbon Brief Interview: Octopus Energy’s Greg Jackson appeared first on Carbon Brief.
Greenhouse Gases
Cropped 11 February 2026: Aftershocks of US withdrawals | Biodiversity and business risks | Deep-sea mining tensions
We handpick and explain the most important stories at the intersection of climate, land, food and nature over the past fortnight.
This is an online version of Carbon Brief’s fortnightly Cropped email newsletter. Subscribe for free here. This is the last edition of Cropped for 2025. The newsletter will return on 14 January 2026.
Key developments
Economic risks from nature loss
RISKY BUSINESS: The “undervaluing” of nature by businesses is fuelling its decline and putting the global economy at risk, according to a new report covered by Carbon Brief. The Intergovernmental Science-Policy Platform on Biodiversity and Ecosystem Services (IPBES) “business and biodiversity” report “urg[ed] companies to act now or potentially face extinction themselves”, Reuters wrote.
BUSINESS ACTION: The report was agreed at an IPBES meeting in Manchester last week. Speaking to Carbon Brief at the meeting, IPBES chair, Dr David Obura, said the findings showed that “all sectors” of business “need to respond to biodiversity loss and minimise their impacts”. Bloomberg quoted Prof Stephen Polasky, co-chair of the report, as saying: “Too often, at present, what’s good for business is bad for nature and vice-versa.”
Tensions in deep-sea mining
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Sign up to Carbon Brief’s free “Cropped” email newsletter. A fortnightly digest of food, land and nature news and views. Sent to your inbox every other Wednesday.
JAPAN’S TAKEOFF: Japan’s prime minister, Sanae Takaichi, announced on 2 February that the country became the first in the world to extract rare earths from the deep seabed after successful retrievals near Minamitori Island, in the central Pacific Ocean, according to Asia Financial. The country hailed the move as a “first step toward industrialisation of domestically produced rare earth” metals, Takaichi said.
URGENT CALL: On 5 February, the International Seabed Authority (ISA) secretary general, Leticia Reis de Carvalho, called on EU officials to “quickly agree on an international rule book on the extraction of critical minerals in international waters”, due to be finalised later this year, Euractiv reported. The bloc has supported a proposed moratorium on deep-sea mining. However, the US has “taken the opposite approach”, fast-tracking a single permit for exploration and exploitation of seabed resources, and “might be pushing the EU – and others” to follow suit, the outlet added.
CAUTIONARY COMMENT: In the Inter Press Service, the former president of the Seychelles and a Swiss philanthropist highlighted the important role of African leadership in global ocean governance. It called for a precautionary pause on deep-sea mining due to the potential harmful effects of this extractive activity on biodiversity, food security and the economy. They wrote: “The accelerating push for deep-sea mining activities also raises concerns about repeating historic patterns seen in other extractive sectors across Africa.”
News and views
- ARGENTINE AUSTERITY: The Argentinian government’s response to the worst wildfires to hit Patagonia “in decades” has been hindered by president Javier Milei’s “gutting” of the country’s fire-management agency, the Associated Press reported. Carbon Brief covered a new rapid-attribution analysis of the fires, which found that climate change made the hot, dry conditions that preceded the fires more than twice as likely.
- CRISIS IN SOMALIA: The Somali government has begun “emergency talks” to address the drought that is gripping much of the country, according to Shabelle Media. The outlet wrote that the “crisis has reached a critical stage” amid “worsening shortages of water, food and pasture threatening both human life and livestock”.
- FOOD PRICES FALL: The UN Food and Agriculture Organization’s “food price index” – a measure of the costs of key food commodities around the world – fell in January for the fifth month in a row. The fall was driven by decreases in the price of dairy, meat and sugar, which “more than offset” increasing prices of cereals and vegetable oil, according to the FAO.
- HIGH STANDARDS: The Greenhouse Gas Protocol launched a new standard for companies to measure emissions and carbon removals from land use and emerging technologies. BusinessGreen said that the standard is “expected to provide a boost to the expanding carbon removals and carbon credit sectors by providing an agreed measurement protocol”.
- RUNNING OUT OF TIME: Negotiators from the seven US states that share the Colorado River basin met in Washington DC ahead of a 14 February deadline for agreeing a joint plan for managing the basin’s reservoirs. The Colorado Sun wrote: “The next agreement will impact growing cities, massive agricultural industries, hydroelectric power supplies and endangered species for years to come.”
- CORAL COVER: Malaysia has lost around 20% of its coral reefs since 2022, “with reef conditions continuing to deteriorate nationwide”, the Star – a Malaysian online news outlet – reported. The ongoing decline has many drivers, it added, including a global bleaching event in 2024, pollution and unsustainable tourism and development.
Spotlight
Aftershocks of US exiting major nature-science body
This week, Carbon Brief reports on the impacts of the US withdrawal from the global nature-science panel, IPBES.
The Trump administration’s decision to withdraw the US from the world’s main expert panel that advises policymakers on biodiversity and ecosystem science “harms everybody, including themselves”.
That’s according to Dr David Obura, chair of the Intergovernmental Science-Policy Platform on Biodiversity and Ecosystem Services, or IPBES.
IPBES is among the dozens of international organisations dealing with the fallout from the US government’s announcement last month.
The panel’s chief executive, Dr Luthando Dziba, told Carbon Brief that the exit impacts both the panel’s finances and the involvement of important scientists. He said:
“The US was one of the founding members of IPBES…A lot of US experts contribute to our assessments and they’ve led our assessments in various capacities. They’ve also served in various official bodies of the platform.”
Obura told Carbon Brief that “it’s very important to try and keep pushing through with the knowledge and keep doing the work that we’re doing”. He said he hopes the US will rejoin in future.
Carbon Brief attended the first IPBES meeting since Trump’s announcement, held last week in Manchester. At the meeting, countries finalised a new “business and biodiversity” report.
For the first time in the 14-year history of IPBES, there was no US government delegation present at the meeting, although some US scientists attended in other roles.
Cashflow impacts
Dziba is still waiting for official confirmation of the US withdrawal, but impacts were being felt even before last month’s announcement.
Budget information [pdf] from last October shows that the US contributed the most money to IPBES of any country in 2024 – around $1.2m. In 2025, when Trump took office, it sent $0, as of October.
Despite this, IPBES actually received around $1.2m extra funding from countries in 2025, compared to 2024, as other nations filled the gap.
The UK, for example, increased its contribution from around $367,000 in 2024 to more than $1.7m in 2025. The EU, which did not contribute in 2024 but tends to make multi-year payments, paid around $2.7m last year. These two payments made up the bulk of the increase in overall funding.
Wider effects of US exit
Dziba said IPBES is looking at other ways of boosting funds in future, but noted that lost income is not the only concern:
“For us, the withdrawal of the US is actually much larger than just the budgetary implications, because you can find somebody who can come in and increase the contribution and close that gap.
“The US has got thousands of leading experts in the fields where we undertake assessments. We know that some of them work for [the] government and maybe [for] those it will be more challenging for them to continue…But there are many other experts that we hope, in some way, will still be able to contribute to the work of the platform.”
One person trying to keep US scientists involved is Prof Pam McElwee, a professor of human ecology at Rutgers University. She told Carbon Brief that “there are still a tonne of American scientists and other civil society organisations that want to stand up”.
McElwee and others have looked at ways for US scientists to access funding to continue working with the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change, which the US has also withdrawn from. She said they will try and do the same at IPBES, adding:
“It’s basically a bottom-up initiative…to make the message clear that scientists in the US still support these institutions and we still are part of them.
“Climate science is what it is and we can’t deny or withdraw from it. So we’ll just keep trying to represent it as best we can.”
Watch, read, listen
UNDER THE SEA: An article in bioGraphic explored whether the skeletons of dead corals “help or hinder recovery” on bleached reefs.
MOSSY MOORS: BBC News covered how “extinct moss” is being reintroduced in some English moors in an effort to “create diverse habitats for wildlife”.
RIBBIT: Scientists are “racing” to map out Ecuador’s “unique biological heritage of more than 700 frog species”, reported Dialogue Earth.
MEAT COMEBACK: Grist examined the rise and fall of vegan fine dining.
New science
- Areas suitable for grazing animals could shrink by 36-50% by 2100 due to continued climate change, with areas of extreme poverty and political fragility experiencing the highest losses | Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences
- The body condition of Svalbard polar bears increased after 2000, in a period of rapid loss of ice cover | Scientific Reports
- Studies projecting the possibility of reversing biodiversity loss are scarce and most do not account for additional drivers of loss, such as climate change, according to a meta-analysis of more than 55 papers | Science Advances
In the diary
- 9-12 February: Climate and cryosphere open science conference | Wellington, New Zealand
- 18 February: International conservation technology conference | Lima, Peru
- 22-27 February: American Geophysical Union’s ocean sciences meeting | Glasgow, UK
Cropped is researched and written by Dr Giuliana Viglione, Aruna Chandrasekhar, Daisy Dunne, Orla Dwyer and Yanine Quiroz. Please send tips and feedback to cropped@carbonbrief.org
The post Cropped 11 February 2026: Aftershocks of US withdrawals | Biodiversity and business risks | Deep-sea mining tensions appeared first on Carbon Brief.
The UK government has secured a record 7.4 gigawatts (GW) of solar, onshore wind and tidal power in its latest auction for new renewable capacity.
It is the second and final part of the seventh auction round for “contracts for difference” (CfDs), known as AR7a.
In the first part, held in January 2026, the government agreed contracts for a record 8.4GW of new offshore wind capacity.
This makes AR7 the UK’s single-largest auction round overall, with its 14.7GW of new renewable capacity being 50% larger than the previous record set by AR6 in 2024.
In AR7a, 157 solar projects secured contracts to supply electricity for £65 per megawatt hour (MWh) and 28 onshore wind projects were contracted at £72/MWh.
This means they will help cut consumer bills, according to multiple analysts.
Energy secretary Ed Miliband welcomed the outcome of the auction, saying in a statement that the new projects would be “50% cheaper” than new gas:
“These results show once again that clean British power is the right choice for our country, agreeing a price for new onshore wind and solar that is over 50% cheaper than the cost of building and operating new gas”.
In addition to cutting costs, the new projects will help reduce gas imports.
In total, AR7 will cut UK gas demand by around 90 terawatt hours (TWh) per year, enough to cut liquified natural gas (LNG) imports by two-thirds, according to Carbon Brief analysis.
Below, Carbon Brief looks at the seventh auction results for onshore wind, solar and tidal, what they mean energy for bills and the impact of the UK’s target of “clean power by 2030”.
- What happened in the latest UK renewable auction?
- What does the solar and onshore wind auction mean for bills?
- What does it mean for energy security, jobs and investment?
- What does the auction mean for clean power by 2030?
What happened in the latest UK renewable auction?
The latest UK government auction for new renewable capacity is the second and final part of the seventh auction round, known as AR7a.
It secured a record 4.9GW of new solar capacity across 157 projects, as shown in the figure below, as well as 1.3GW of onshore wind across 28 projects.
In addition, four tidal energy projects totalling 21 megawatts (MW) secured contracts, included within “other” in the figure below.
Most of the solar that secured a contract has a capacity of less than 50MW. This is the cut-off point for projects to be approved by the local council. Larger schemes must instead go through the “nationally significant infrastructure project” (NSIP) process, subject to approval by the secretary of state for energy.
For the first time, one 480MW solar project – approved via this NSIP process – won a CfD in AR7a. The West Burton Solar NSIP is being developed in Lincolnshire and Nottinghamshire by Island Green Power. It is named after the grid connection it will use, freed up by the shuttering of the coal-powered West Burton plant.
However, Nick Civetta, project leader at Aurora Energy Research notes on LinkedIn that this site was only one of four eligible solar NSIPs to secure a contract.
Civetta adds that “wrangling these large projects into fruition is proving more painful than expected”.
Solar projects secured a “strike price” of £65/MWh in 2024 prices, some 7% cheaper than the £70/MWh agreed in the previous auction round.
In previous auction rounds CfD contracts were expressed in 2012 prices. For comparison, AR6 and AR7a solar contracts stand at £50/MWh and £47/MWh in 2012 prices, respectively.)
Alongside solar, 28 onshore wind projects secured contracts in the latest CfD auction, with a total capacity of 1.3GW.
This includes the Imerys windfarm in Cornwall, which at nearly 20MW is the largest onshore wind farm in England to secure a contract in a decade.
(Shortly after taking office in 2024, the current Labour government lifted a decade-long de facto ban on onshore wind in England.)
Overall, Scotland still dominated the auction for onshore wind, with 1,093MW of projects in the country in comparison to 38MW in England and 185MW in Wales.
This includes the Sanquhar II windfarm in Dumfries and Galloway in Scotland, which will become the fourth-largest onshore wind farm in the UK at 269MW.
In total, Wales secured contracts for 20 renewables projects in AR7a, with a capacity of more than 530MW. This is the largest ever number of Welsh projects to get backing in a CfD auction, according to a statement from the Welsh government.
Onshore wind secured a strike price of £72/MWh, up slightly from £71/MWh in the previous auction in 2024.
The prices for solar and onshore wind were 13% and 21% below the price cap set by Department of Energy Security and Net Zero (DESNZ) for the auction, respectively.
In its press release announcing the results, the government noted that the results for solar and onshore wind were less than half of the £147/MWh cost of building and operating new gas power stations.
Finally, four tidal energy projects secured contracts with a total capacity of 21MW at a strike price of £265/MWh, up from £240/MWh in 2024.
In total, taken together with the 8.4GW of offshore wind secured in the first part of the auction, AR7 secured a total of 14.7GW of new clean power, as shown in the chart below.
This is enough to power the equivalent of 16 million homes, according to the government. It also makes AR7 the single-largest auction round by far, at more than 50% larger than the previous record set by AR6 in 2024.
This means that the two auction rounds held since the Labour government took office in July 2024 – AR6 and AR7 – have secured a total of 24GW of new renewable capacity. This is more than the 22GW from all previous auction rounds put together.
However, several analysts noted that the AR7a results did not include any old onshore windfarms looking to replace their ageing turbines with new equipment – so-called “repowering projects” – despite the auction being open to them for the first time.
What does the solar and onshore wind auction mean for bills?
Onshore wind and solar are widely recognised as the cheapest sources of new electricity generation in almost every part of the world.
The latest auction shows that the UK is no exception, despite its northerly location.
The prices for onshore wind and solar in the latest auction, at £72/MWh and £65/MWh respectively, are comfortably below recent wholesale power prices, which averaged £81/MWh in 2025 and £92/MWh in January 2026.
This means that the new projects will cut costs for UK electricity consumers, according to multiple analysts commenting on the auction outcome.
The government lauded the results of AR7a for securing “homegrown energy at good value for billpayers – once again proving that clean power is the right choice for energy security and to meet rising electricity demand”.
In a statement, Miliband added:
“By backing solar and onshore wind at scale, we’re driving bills down for good and protecting families, businesses, and our country from the fossil fuel rollercoaster controlled by petrostates and dictators. This is how we take back control of our energy and deliver a new era of energy abundance and independence.”
As noted in Carbon Brief’s coverage of the offshore wind results under AR7 in January, electricity demand is starting to rise as the economy electrifies and many of the UK’s existing power plants are nearing the end of their lives.
Therefore, new sources of electricity generation will be needed, whether from renewables, gas-fired power stations or from other sources.
In his statement, quoted above, Miliband said that the prices for onshore wind and solar were less than half the £147/MWh cost of electricity from new gas-fired power stations.
(This is based on recently published government estimates and assumes that gas plants would only be operating during 30% of hours each year, in line with the current UK fleet.)
Trade association RenewableUK also pointed to the cost of new gas, as well as the £124/MWh cost of the Hinkley C new nuclear plant, in its response to the auction results.
In a statement, Dr Doug Parr, policy director for Greenpeace UK, said:
“These new onshore wind and solar projects will supply energy at less than half the cost of new gas plants. Together with the new offshore wind contracts agreed last month, these cheaper renewables will lower energy bills as they come online.”
Strike prices for solar dropped by 6% compared to last year and while onshore wind prices rose, this was by less than 2% despite a “difficult environment for wind generation”, according to Bertalan Gyenes, consultant at LCP Delta.
In a post on LinkedIn, he noted that “extending the contract length [for onshore wind projects] by five years seems to have helped keep this increase low”.
The January offshore wind round secured 8.4 GW at £91/MWh, as such, the onshore and solar projects are 25% cheaper per unit of generation.
(The offshore wind projects secured in January are nevertheless expected to cut consumer bills relative to the alternative, or at worst to be cost neutral.)
Parr added that while the AR7a auction results “show we’re getting up to speed” ahead of the clean power 2030 target (see below), “an even faster way for the government to make a really big dent in bills would be to change the system that allows gas to set the overall energy price in this country”. He adds:
“That would allow us to unshackle our bills from unreliable petrostates and get off the rollercoaster of volatile gas markets once and for all.”
What does it mean for energy security, jobs and investment?
The onshore wind and solar projects secured in the latest auction round will generate an estimated 9 terawatt hours (TWh) of electricity, according to Carbon Brief analysis.
This is equivalent to roughly 3% of current UK electricity demand.
Combined with the estimated 37TWh from offshore wind secured during the first part of the auction, AR7 projects will be able to generate 46TWh of electricity, 14% of current demand.
If this electricity were to be generated by gas-fired power plants, then it would require around 90TWh of fuel, because much of the energy in the gas is lost during combustion.
This is several times more than the 25TWh of extra gas that could be produced in 2030 if new drilling licenses are issued, according to thinktank the Energy and Climate Intelligence Unit (ECIU). As such, AR7 will significantly cut UK gas imports, ECIU says, reducing exposure to volatile international gas markets.
Furthermore, ECIU says that the impact of renewables in driving down gas demand – and subsequently electricity prices – is already being seen in the UK.
Five years ago, gas was setting the wholesale price of power in the UK 98% of the time due to the way the electricity market operates.
This price-setting dominance is being eroded by renewables, with recent analysis from the UK Energy Research Centre showing that gas set power prices 90% of the time in 2025.
A further effect of new renewables is that they push the most expensive gas-fired power plants out of the system, reducing prices. This is known as the “merit-order effect”.
Recent analysis from ECIU found that large windfarms cut wholesale electricity prices by a third in 2025.
Lucy Dolton, renewable generation lead at Cornwall Insight, said in a statement that the AR7a results will provide a “surge in momentum as [the UK] pushes toward secure, homegrown energy”, adding:
“These investments ultimately strengthen the UK’s position against volatile gas markets. If the past few years have shown us anything, it’s that remaining tied to international energy markets comes with consequences.”
The projects that secured CfDs will help the UK avoid burning significant quantities of gas, “the bulk of which would have been imported at a cost which the UK cannot control”, said RenewableUK in its statement.
Together with previous CfD auction rounds, the latest new renewable projects are expected to generate some 155TWh of electricity once they are all operating, according to Carbon Brief analysis. This is around half of current UK demand.
Generating the same electricity from gas would require some 316TWh of fuel, which is similar to the 339TWh of gas produced by the UK’s North Sea operations in the most recent 12-month period for which data is available. This figure can also be compared with the 130TWh of gas that was imported by ship as liquified natural gas (LNG) in the same period.
The government added that the AR7a projects will support up to 10,000 jobs and bring £5bn in private investment to the UK.
(In total, the new projects secured via AR7 are expected to bring investments worth around £20-23bn to the UK, according to Aurora.)
Additionally, the onshore wind projects are expected to generate over £6.5m in “community benefit” funds for people living near them, according to RenewableUK.
The AR7a results were released alongside the publication of the Local Power Plan by the government and Great British Energy.
This is designed to provide £1bn in funding for communities to own and control their own clean energy projects across the UK.
What does the auction mean for clean power by 2030?
The AR7a results put the UK “on track for its 2030 clean power target”, according to the government.
Over AR6 and AR7, several changes have been made to the CfD process to help facilitate more projects to secure contracts.
A total of 24GW has been secured over the last two auction rounds – which have taken place under the current Labour government – compared to 22GW across the five auction rounds previously.
As part of its goal for clean power to meet 100% of electricity demand by 2030 and to account for at least 95% of electricity generation, the UK government is aiming for 27-29GW of onshore wind and 45-47GW of solar by the end of the decade.
As of September 2025, the UK had 16.3GW of installed onshore wind capacity and more than 21GW of solar capacity. Taken together, the onshore technologies therefore need to double in operational capacity over the next four years to reach the 2030 targets.
Analysis by RenewableUK suggests that the government will need to procure between 3.85GW to 4.85GW of onshore wind in the next two auctions for the 2030 goal to remain possible.
Writing on LinkedIn, Aurora’s Civetta said that the onshore clean power 2030 targets “remain a long way off”.
He continued that the gap for solar to reach its 45-47GW target is still a “whopping 18GW”, but added that there may be other ways for new capacity to be secured, beyond the CfD auctions.
He said these included a growing market for corporate “power purchase agreements” (PPAs), economic incentives for homes and businesses to install solar and the government’s recently released “warm homes plan”, all of which “should drive further procurement”.
Dolton from Cornwall Insight adds that “the challenge now is delivery”, continuing:
“2.5GW of the winners have a delivery year of 2027/28, and over half – 3.7GW – have a delivery year of 2028/29, which brings them very close to the government’s 2030 clean power target.
“Historically, renewable projects in the UK have faced delays, often due to grid connection backlogs and planning holdups. With AR7 and some of AR8 representing the only realistic pipeline for pre-2030 capacity, keeping to schedule will be essential.”
When built, the projects announced today will help to bring the total capacity of CfD-supported wind and solar to 50.6GW, according to Ember.
While solar and onshore wind are expected to play an important role in decarbonising the electricity system, offshore wind is set to be the “backbone”.
The government is targeting 43-50GW of offshore wind by 2030, up from around 17GW of installed capacity today.
This leaves a gap of 27-34GW to the government’s target range.
Prior to the AR7 auction, a further 10GW had already secured CfD contracts, excluding the cancelled Hornsea 4 project.
The 8.4GW secured in January brings the gap to reach the minimum of 43GW over the four years to just 7GW.
The post Q&A: New UK onshore wind and solar is ‘50% cheaper’ than new gas appeared first on Carbon Brief.
Q&A: New UK onshore wind and solar is ‘50% cheaper’ than new gas
Greenhouse Gases
IPBES chair Dr David Obura: Trump’s US exit from global nature panel ‘harms everybody’
The Trump administration’s decision to withdraw the US from the intergovernmental science panel for nature “harms everybody, including them”, according to its chair.
Dr David Obura is a leading coral reef ecologist from Kenya and chair of the Intergovernmental Science-Policy Platform on Biodiversity and Ecosystem Services (IPBES), the world’s authority on the science of nature decline.
In January, Donald Trump announced intentions to withdraw the US from IPBES, along with 65 other international organisations, including the UN climate science panel and its climate treaty.
In an interview with Carbon Brief, Obura says the warming that humans have already caused means “coral reefs are very likely at a tipping point” and that it is now inevitable that Earth “will lose what we have called coral reefs”.
A global goal to halt and reverse biodiversity loss by 2030 will not be possible to achieve for every ecosystem, he continues, noting that a lack of action from countries means “we won’t be able to do it fast enough at this point”.
Despite this, it is still possible to reverse the “enabling drivers” of biodiversity decline within the next four years, he adds, warning that leaders must act as “our economies and societies fully depend on nature”.
The interview was conducted at the sidelines of an IPBES meeting in Manchester, UK, where governments agreed to a new report detailing how the “undervaluing” of nature by businesses is fuelling biodiversity decline and putting the global economy at risk.
- On US leaving IPBES: “Any major country not being part of it harms everybody, including themselves.”
- On reversing nature loss by 2030: “We won’t be able to do it fast enough at this point.”
- On the value of biodiversity: “Nature is really the life support system for people. Our economies and societies fully depend on nature.”
- On coral reefs: “We will lose what we have called coral reefs up until this point.”
- On nature justice: “The places that are most vulnerable don’t have the income, or the assets, to conserve biodiversity.”
- On IPBES’s latest report: “One of the key findings is all businesses have impacts and dependencies on nature.”
- On the next UN nature summit: “We need acceleration of activities and impact and effectiveness, more than anything else.”
Carbon Brief: Last month Trump announced plans for the US to exit IPBES and dozens of other global organisations. You described this at the time as “deeply disappointing”. What are your thoughts on the decision now and what will be the main impacts of the US leaving IPBES?
David Obura: Well, part of the reason that I’ve come to IPBES is because, of course, I believe in the multilateral process, because we bring 150 countries together, we’re part of the UN and the multilateral system and we’re based on knowledge [that provides] inputs to policymaking. We have a conceptual framework that looks from the bottom up on how people depend on nature. I’m also doing a lot of science on Earth systems at the planetary level, how our footprint is exceeding the scale of the planet. We have to make decisions together. We need the multilateral system to work to help facilitate that. It has never been perfect. Of course, I come from a region [Kenya] that hasn’t been, you know, powerful in the multilateral process.
But we need countries to come together, so any major country not being part of it harms everybody, including themselves. It’s very important to try and keep pushing through with the knowledge and keep doing the work that we’re doing, so that, over time, hopefully [the US will] rejoin. Because, in the end, we will really need that to happen.
CB: This is the first IPBES meeting since Trump made the announcement. Has it had an impact so far on these proceedings and is there any kind of US presence here?
DO: This plenary is like every plenary that we have had. The current members are here. Some members are not. And, of course, we have some states here as observers working out if they’re going to join or not. And then we have a lot of private sector observers and universities and so on. The impact of a country leaving – the US in this case – has no impact on the plenary itself, because they’re not here making decisions on the things that we do.
We, of course, don’t have US government members attending in technical areas, but we do have institutions and universities and academics here attending as they have in the past. So, in that sense, the plenary goes on as it goes on – the science and the knowledge is the same. The decision-making processes we have here are the same. And, as I said earlier, what has an impact is the actual action that takes place afterwards, because a lot of the recommendations that we make are based on enabling conditions that governments put in place, to bring in place sustainability actions and so on. When governments are not doing that, especially major economic drivers, then the whole system suffers.
CB: When you were appointed as chair of IPBES more than two years ago, you said that your aim was to strengthen cohesion and impact and also get the findings of IPBES in front of more people. So how would you rate your progress on this now that it’s been about a couple of years?
DO: Well, like any intergovernmental process, we have a certain amount of inertia in what we do and it takes a few years to consult on topics for assessments and then to do them and to improve them and get them out.
One of the main things we’re discussing right now is we have had a rolling work programme from when IPBES started until 2030 and we need to decide on the last few deliverables and how we work in that period. We are asking for a mandate to spend the next year really considering the multiple options that we have in proposing a way forward for the last few years of this work programme. I feel that the countries are very aligned. We have done a lot of work, produced a lot of outputs. It is challenging for governments and other stakeholders to read our assessments and reach into them to find what’s useful to them. They make constant calls for more support, in uptake, in capacity building and in policy support.
The second global assessment in 2028 will be our 17th assessment [overall]. We would like to focus on really bringing all this knowledge together across assessments in ways that are relevant to different governments, different stakeholder groups, different networks to help them reach into the knowledge that’s in the assessments. And I think the governments, of course, want that as well, because many of them are calling for it. Many of the governments that support us financially, of course, want to see a return of investment on the money that they have put in.
CB: Nations agreed to halt and reverse biodiversity loss by 2030. Back in 2023 we had a conversation for Carbon Brief and you said that you were “highly doubtful” this goal could be achieved for every ecosystem by that date. Where do you stand on this now?
DO: I work on coral reefs and part of the reason I’ve come to IPBES platform is because the amount of climate change we’re committed to with current fossil fuel emissions and the focus on economic growth means that corals will continue to decline 20, 30, 40 years into the future. I think of that there’s no real doubt. The question is how soon we put in place the right actions to halt climate change. That will then have a lag on how long it takes for corals to cope with that amount of climate change.
We can’t halt and reverse the decline of every ecosystem. But we can try and bend the curve to halt and reverse the drivers of decline. So, that’s some of the economic drivers that we talk about in the nexus and transformative change assessment, the indirect drivers and the value shifts we need to have. What the Global Biodiversity Framework [GBF, a global nature agreement made in 2022] aspires to do in terms of halting and reversing biodiversity decline – we absolutely need to do that. We can do it and we can put in place the enabling conditions for that by 2030 for sure. But we won’t be able to do it fast enough at this point to halt [the loss of] all ecosystems.
We’re now in 2026, so this is three years plus after the GBF was adopted. We still need greater action from all countries and all stakeholders and businesses and so on. That’s what we’re really pushing for in our assessments.
CB: Biodiversity loss has historically been underappreciated by world leaders. As the world continues to be gripped by geopolitical uncertainty, conflict and financial pressures, what are your thoughts on the chances of leaders addressing the issue of biodiversity loss in a meaningful way?
DO: What are the chances of addressing biodiversity loss? I mean, we have to do it. It’s really our life support system and if we only focus on immediate crises and threats and don’t pay attention to the long-term threats and crises, that only creates more short-term crises down the line, we make it harder and harder to do that. I hope that what I’m hoping we get to understand better through IPBES science, as well as others, is that we’re not just reporting on the state of biodiversity because it’s nice to have it, but it’s [because] diversity of nature is really the life support system for people. Our economies and societies fully depend on nature. If we want them to prosper and be secure into the long-term future, we have to learn how to bring the impact and dependencies of business, which is a focus of this assessment, in line with nature. And until we do that, we will just continue to magnify the potential for future crises and their impacts.
CB: You mentioned already that your expertise is in coral reefs. A report last year warned that the world has reached its first climate tipping point, that of widespread dying of warm water coral reefs. Do you agree with that statement and can you discuss the wider state of coral reefs across the world at this present moment?
DO: The report that came out last year in 2025 was a global tipping point report and it’s actually in 2023 the first one of those [was published]. I was involved in that one and we basically took what the IPCC [Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change] has produced, which [is] compiled from the [scientific] literature [which said] that 1.5-2C was the critical range for coral reefs, where you go from losing 70-90% to 90-99% of coral reefs around the world. [It is] a bit hard to say exactly what that means. What we did was we actually reduced that range from 1.5C-2C to 1-1.5C, based on observations we’ve already made about loss of corals. In 2024, the world was 1.5C above historical conditions for one year. The IPCC number requires a 20-year average [for 1.5C to be crossed]. So, we’re not quite at the IPCC limit, but we’re very close. Also, with not putting in place fast enough emission reductions, warming will continue.
Coral reefs are very likely at a tipping point. And, so, I do agree with the statement. It means that we lose the fully connected regional, global system that coral reefs have been in the past. There will still be some coral reefs in places that have some natural protection mechanisms, whether it’s oceanographic or some levels of sedimentation in green water from rivers can help. And there’s resilience of corals as well. Some corals will be able to adapt somewhat, but not all – and not all the other species too. We will lose what we have called coral reefs up until this point. We’ll still continue to have simpler coral ecosystems into the future, but they won’t be quite the same.
It is a crisis point and my hope is that, in coming out from the coral reef world, I can communicate that this is, this has been a crisis for coral reefs. It’s a very important ecosystem, but we don’t want it to happen to more and more and more ecosystems that support more [than] hundreds of millions and billions of people as well. Because, if we let things go that far, then, of course, we have much bigger crises on our hands.
CB: Something else you’ve spoken about before is around equity being one of the big challenges when it comes to responding to biodiversity loss. Can you explain why you think that biodiversity loss should be seen as a justice issue?
DO: Well, biodiversity loss is a justice issue because we are a part of biodiversity and – just like the loss of ecosystems and habitats and species – people live locally as well. People experience biodiversity loss in their surroundings.
The places that are most vulnerable and don’t have the income, or the assets, to either conserve biodiversity, or need to rely on it too much so they degrade it – they feel the impacts of that loss much more directly than those who do have more assets. Also, the more assets you have, the more you can import biodiversity products and benefits from somewhere else.
So, it’s very much a justice issue, both from local levels experiencing it directly, but then also at global levels. We are part of it [biodiversity], we don’t own it. It’s a global good, or a common public good, so we need to be preserving it for all people on the planet. In that sense, there are many, many justice issues that are involved in both loss of biodiversity and how you deal with that as well.
CB: How would you say IPBES is working towards achieving greater equity in biodiversity science?
DO: One of the headline findings of our values assessment in 2022, which looked at multiple values different cultures have and different worldviews around the planet, [was that] by accommodating or considering different worldviews and different perspectives, you achieve greater equity because you’re already considering other worldviews in making decisions.
So, that’s an important first step – just making it much more apparent and upfront that we can’t just make decisions, especially global ones, from a single worldview and the dominant one is the market economic worldview that we have. That’s very important.
But, then, also in how we do our assessments and the knowledge systems that are incorporated in them. We integrate different knowledge systems together and try and juxtapose – or if they can be integrated, we do that, sometimes you can’t – but you just need to illustrate different worldviews and perspectives on the common issue of biodiversity loss or livelihoods or something like that.
We hope that our conceptual framework and our values framework really help bring in this awareness of multiple cultures and multiple perspectives in the multilateral system.
CB: When this interview is published, IPBES will have released its report on business and biodiversity. What are some of the key takeaways from this?
DO: Our assessments integrate so much information that the key messages are actually, in retrospect, quite obvious in a way. One of the key findings it will say is that all businesses have impacts and dependencies on nature.
Of course, when you think about it, of course they do. We often think, “oh, well ecotourism is dependent on nature”, but even a supermarket is dependent on nature because a lot of the produce comes from a natural system somewhere, maybe in a greenhouse or enhanced by fertiliser, but it still comes from natural systems. Any other business will have either impacts on the nature around it, or it needs tree shade outside so people can walk in and things like that.
So, that’s one of the main findings. It’s not just certain sectors that need to respond to biodiversity loss and minimise their impacts. All sectors need to. Another finding, of course, is that it’s very differentiated depending on the type of business and type of sector.
It’s also very differentiated in different parts of the world in terms of responsibilities and also capabilities. So small businesses, of course, have much less leeway, perhaps, to change what they’re doing, whereas big businesses do and they have more assets, so they can deal with shifts and changes much better.
It’s a methodological assessment, rather than assessing the state of businesses, or the state of nature in relation to businesses [and] they pull together a huge list of methodologies and tools and things that businesses can access and do to understand their impacts and dependencies and act on them. Then [there is] also guidance and advice for governments on how to enable businesses to do that with the right incentives and regulations and so on. In that sense, it helps bring knowledge together into a single place.
It has been fantastic to see the parallel programme that the UK government has organised [at the IPBES meeting in Manchester]. It has brought together a huge range of British businesses and consultancies and so on that help businesses understand their impacts on nature. There’s a huge thirst.
To some extent, I would have thought, with so much capacity already in some of these organisations, what would they learn from our assessments? But they’re really hungry to see the integration. They really want to see that this really does make a big difference, that others will do the same, that the government will really support moving in these directions. There’s a huge amount of effort in the findings coming out and I’m sure that that will be felt all around the world and in different countries in different ways.
CB: As we’re speaking now, you’re still in the midst of figuring out exactly what the report will say and going through line-by-line to figure this out. Something we’ve seen at other negotiations…has been these entrenched views from countries on certain key issues. And one thing I did notice in the Earth Negotiations Bulletin discussion of yesterday’s [4 February] negotiations was that it said that some delegations wanted to remove mentions of climate change from the report. Has this been a key sticking point here or have there been any difficulties from countries during these negotiations?
DO: The nature of these multilateral negotiations is that the science is, in a way, a central body of work that is built through consensus of bringing all this knowledge together. It’s almost like a centralising process. And, yes, different countries have different perspectives on what their priorities are and the messages they want to see or not.
We still, of course, deal with different positions from countries. What we hope to do is to be able to convene it so that we see that we serve the countries best by having the most unbiased reporting of what the science is saying in language that is accessible to and useful to policymakers, rather than not having language or not having mention of things in in the agreed text.
How it’ll work out, I don’t know. Each time is different from the others. I think one of the key things that’s really important for us is that you do have different governance tracks on different aspects of the world we deal in. So, the [UN] Sustainable Development Goals, as well [as negotiations] on climate change – the UNFCCC, the climate convention, is the governing body for that. There’s two goals on nature – the Convention on Biological Diversity and other multilateral agreements are the institutions that govern that part.
We have come from a nature-based perspective, with nature’s contributions to a good quality of life for people…We start in the nature goals, but we actually have content that relates to all the other goals. We need to consider climate impacts on nature, or climate impacts on people that affect how they use nature. The nexus assessment was, in a way, a mini SDG report. It looked at six different Sustainable Development Goals.
We try and make sure that while on the institutional mechanisms, certain countries may try and want us to report within our mandate on nature, we do have findings that relate to climate change that relate to income and poverty and food production and health systems [and] that we need to report [outwardly] so that people are aware of those and they can use those in decision-making contexts.
That’s a difficult discussion and every time it comes out a little bit differently. But we hope we move the agenda further towards 2030 in the SDGs. We have an indivisible system that we need to report on.
CB: The next UN biodiversity summit COP17 is taking place later this year. What are the main outcomes you’re hoping to see at that summit?
DO: The main outcomes I would hope to see from the biodiversity summit is greater alignment across the countries. We really need to move forward on delivering on the GBF as part of the sustainable development agenda as well. So there will be a review of progress. We need acceleration of activities and impact and effectiveness, more than anything else.
That means, of course, addressing all of the targets in the GBF. Not equally, necessarily, but they all need progress to support one another in the whole. We work to provide the science inputs that can help deliver that through the CBD [Convention on Biological Diversity] mechanisms as well. We hope they use our assessments to the fullest and that we see good progress coming out.
CB: Great, thank you very much for your time.
The post IPBES chair Dr David Obura: Trump’s US exit from global nature panel ‘harms everybody’ appeared first on Carbon Brief.
IPBES chair Dr David Obura: Trump’s US exit from global nature panel ‘harms everybody’
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