Octopus CEO Jackson puts his family at heart of energy transition plea

The boss of Octopus Energy, Greg Jackson, introduced a very personal plea to a room of hundreds of energy professionals.

Showing a photo of his seven-year-old son and his 100-year-old grandmother, Jackson said that what he wanted from the energy transition was “my grandmother to know she will be able to afford to pay for her energy, and I want my son to know he has a future.”

And speaking during the opening ceremony of Enlit Europe in Milan, he said all the elements were coming together to ensure this acceleration to a clean energy landscape can happen now.

Pointing to the continued falling price of renewable energy, he said you “would be mad” to build a new gas plant. “We are using our atmosphere as a sewer if we build new gas. There is no world in which renewables are not cheaper than fossil fuels.”

And he said the technologies of today were exactly the technologies needed to pave the way for the future.

“We don’t need to wait for fusion or space solar – great as they will be. We have the solutions today for transition.”

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Jackson also highlighted how the energy transition needs to be “an upgrade for our citizens” and that this is critical for competitiveness and the economy. In turn, this requires making the most of new technologies, with digitalisation being key.

One of these is electric vehicles and he anticipated that just as new onshore wind is now cheaper than even existing gas plants, EVs would be cheaper than fossil-fuel run vehicles within the next couple of years.

And he suggested they are already in China, where over half of new vehicles on the roads are now EVs.

“EVs will be the single biggest feature of the energy system, at least in the next decade,” he said.

Other innovations also are taking place at an astounding place in China, with over half of new renewables globally being developed there and companies such as Huawei typically spend up to 11% of their revenue on R&D and Huawei itself has 30,000 working in R&D.”

Comparing China with Europe, he said the former was moving at unprecedented pace while the latter seemed to be holding back.

“Clean tech is the next wave of technology and China is leading the way. The west needs to learn to run at the same pace as China.”

Originally published on enlit.world