Change Election - Where the opportunities lie in Energy & Climate industries

Today's article looks at what change might look like across Energy, Utilities & Climate and where the opportunity might lie for Tech & Change professionals.

Labour under Sir Keir Starmer have up until last year, held a pledge to spend £28bn a year on Green initiatives, by the end of their first term in Parliament. However, citing the poor state of Britain’s public finances, they have revised that pledge.

 The decision by Prime Minister Rishi Sunak to reverse Britain's world leading Net Zero targets & pledges was met with derision by industry leaders and has also proved very unpopular during opinion polls & focus groups.

Despite Labour's perceived policy U-turn on the £28bn green spending, they maintained a pro-Net Zero stance and sees investment in Green initiatives and Net Zero policies as an opportunity to create new British-led industries to replace legacy Carbon fuel production.

This starts with a manifesto pledge to create Great British Energy, which would be a publicly owned Investment vehicle into sustainable green energy production, rather than an energy production company itself. If elected, they’ve pledged to base the company out of Scotland, presumably seeking to replace jobs in carbon industries longer term, that would leave Scotland disproportionately affected by a shrinking of Carbon industries around the North Sea / Aberdeenshire region.

They’ve also pledged to quickly reverse a decision to ban the further development of offshore wind farms, again giving priority to British owned firms to deliver these.

Labour have also pledged much stronger regulation around the Utilities sector - Gas & Electric to provide greater protections for consumers around the enforcement of prepay meters and some controls over bills.

The other major regulatory changes will be strong controls governing the Water industry which has been roundly criticised for pumping large sums of untreated sewage into British waterways and surrounding shorelines. Expect regulations to demand great investment into sewage & treatment infrastructure and perhaps more of a purpose-over-profit approach.

Where is the opportunity here for Tech & Transformation professionals?

There will be lots of regulatory driven change, but also changes at all of the major regulators themselves. I expect many change & transformation programme offices to be bolstered inside the next 12 months to meet new legislative demands.

Upscaling the new Great British Energy organisation will bring a much-needed jobs boost to Scotland. One up-and-running, investments into green energy firms should spark a wave of hiring for a multitude of STEM talent, including IOT and Software Engineering talent.

There appears to be an appetite to encourage many of these ‘green energy’ jobs to be created outside of London – a floating offshore Windfarm near Holyhead in Anglesey is one project that has been mentioned as an example.

Beyond that, at Ministerial level these initiatives would be spearheaded by Ed Miliband, Shadow Secretary of State of Climate Change and Net Zero, a long-time campaigner on Green and Net Zero issues. Stability at Ministerial level has been somewhat absent in British Politics in recent years, so to have this driven by an advocate should derive a lot of confidence from private investors into these schemes.

Challenges

There appeared to have been previous talk pre-Xmas that Labour wanted to re-introduce the 2030 ban on petrol cars, however it’s widely acknowledge that the current EV charging network is inadequate to meet those needs, plus the automotive industry is experiencing a major challenge in selling Second-Hand electric vehicles, as it is hard to know the state of the battery, and they are expensive to replace.

Should that target be re-introduced, investment will be need to rollout the EV charging network. If that happens, existing providers will enjoy a boost and the industry relies heavily on Software to manage and monitor EV charging networks – again, an area of job creation.

I'd also expect that should this happen, some of the smaller EV firms might begin to be bought up by some of the larger operators.

The UK’s largest Water company Thames Water is widely reported to be drowning under the weight of it’s debts. It’s widely anticipated that that should it collapse, the government would be forced to take the firm into public ownership. There is a risk that other Water companies begin to follow suit – others are similarly debt-laden and there has been a recent Supreme Court decision to remove immunity for Water firms, from legal action against their sewage leaks.

Such risks to the government, and the potential expense of having to nationalise a number of Water companies, means that I predict that there will be radical reform of the Water sector in particular to avoid this happening.