Cleaning Up: Leadership in an Age of Climate Change

Are Fossil Fuel Cars About to Have Their Kodak Moment? Ep248: Fiona Howarth

Episode Notes

What happens when millions of electric cars become part of the energy grid? And could the key to cheaper, cleaner power already be sitting in your driveway? And why are so many automakers pushing back against EV targets?

This week on Cleaning Up, host Bryony Worthington speaks with Fiona Howarth, founder of Octopus Electric Vehicles, about the rapid transformation of the global car industry and the powerful role electric vehicles are beginning to play in the energy system. From her early fascination with clean energy to building one of the UK’s most innovative EV businesses within Octopus Energy, Fiona shares the inside story of how electric mobility moved from niche curiosity to mainstream disruption. She explains why falling battery costs, bold policy like the UK’s ZEV mandate, and fierce competition from Chinese manufacturers such as BYD are accelerating the transition faster than many expected.

The conversation explores how EVs are evolving beyond transportation. With vehicle-to-grid technology, cars could become distributed batteries: storing renewable power, stabilising the grid, and even providing drivers with free electricity for their journeys. It’s a vision that could reshape both the energy market and the economics of driving.

But as some companies race ahead, some traditional automakers are pushing back, asking for slower timelines. Fiona argues that the real risk isn’t moving too fast, it’s backing the wrong players in a historic technological shift.

Leadership Circle:

Cleaning Up is supported by the Leadership Circle, and its founding members: Actis, Alcazar Energy, Davidson Kempner, EcoPragma Capital, EDP, Eurelectric, the Gilardini Foundation, KKR, National Grid, Octopus Energy, Quadrature Climate Foundation, Schneider Electric, SDCL and Wärtsilä. For more information on the Leadership Circle, please visit https://www.cleaningup.live.

Links and more:

Octopus EVs website: https://octopusev.com/
Cleaning Up interview with Greg Jackson, CEO of Octopus: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Gl-cRh35Hm4
Earth Set Podcast: https://www.youtube.com/@TheEarthSetPodcast

Episode Transcription

Fiona Howarth

Part of the challenge has come because the Chinese manufacturers started investing quite a bit earlier and they had that legacy kind of benefit of having been making batteries for so long. They've really come so far with battery technology that they are now bringing cars to Europe which are not just low cost and affordable but are also really very good cars and people really like them. So now some of the legacy car manufacturers are saying, whoa, can we just hold back on this policy a bit because we're not ready.

But actually consumers really like good cars and they like affordability. And so the ones that are kind of ahead of the pack are really stealing a march there. So there are a number of legacy manufacturers that have stayed at the front of the pack, but some of the more noisy ones that are kind of lobbying against the policy are struggling a bit to keep up.

And it's similar to things like transitions in the camera sector with Kodak, having a Kodak moment or even BlackBerry, for example. And I think the important thing is that we don't want to invest in the kind of BlackBerrys. We want to make sure that we are as a country investing in the future of the sector too and getting behind those that are making the iPhones and the kind of cars in the future too.

Bryony Worthington

Hello, I'm Bryony Worthington and this is Cleaning Up. My guest this week is Fiona Howarth, founder of Octopus Electric Vehicles, a part of Octopus Energy, who are a member of Cleaning Up's Leadership Circle. Fiona is a true pioneer of the UK energy space, not just with electric vehicles, but also home heating and smart tariffs. I wanted to ask Fiona about the future of the UK electric car market, what the world can learn from China's endless EV ambitions and how vehicle to grid charging could change our energy system. Please join me in welcoming Fiona Howarth, founder of Octopus Electric Vehicles, to Cleaning Up.

Fiona, thanks for joining us on Cleaning Up. I wanted to kick things off, as we always do, by asking you to introduce yourself, please, in your own words.

So I am Fiona Howarth. I am the founder at Octopus EV, but I'm also a mum of two girls and I'm passionate about climate inequality.

That is a very truncated version, thank you. But I want to unpack slightly that journey to your current role at Octopus, looking after all things electric vehicles. But you started out your career as an engineering undergraduate, right, at Oxford, which I can imagine might have been, you know, how many women were on the course at that point when you were there?

I think engineering itself was about 4%. And my degree was engineering with economics management. And that was slightly better. That was maybe about a third to a quarter women. But they were fantastic. It was a small group. It was a really kind of tight-knit group. But the kind of main lectures that were engineering, yeah, there were only 4% of us, so not that many.

And what was it about engineering that you thought, yep, that's what I want to do, right? What was the path that led you to that?

Well, I'm a problem solver. I think all engineers are problem solvers. And I like the idea of solving some of our biggest problems. But actually, when I was at school, my physics teacher, I remember having a conversation about energy. Why are we burning all these fossil fuels that are also really bad for the environment and causing a lot of pollution? And he was like, and there's another alternative. And I was like, is there? And he's like, yeah, we can harvest solar power and wind power. And I was like, well, why don't we do that? That sounds great. He's like, it's expensive, and it's hard to change incumbent industries. So that made me quite interested to dig into that, and also particularly in mobility, actually. So I've been a bit of an energy nerd from my teenage years.

So your interest in vehicles led you to BMW, right? You did a piece of work for them, but not on electric vehicles.

I turned up and I had a conversation with some fellows at the Royal Academy of Engineering in about 2002. And they were like, what do you want to be when you grow up? And I said, well, I'd like to start an electric car company. They're like, no, no, it's not electric cars. It's hydrogen fuel cells. So I was like, oh, OK, well, I'll look into that. So BMW had been developing hydrogen cars since the 80s. So they had like 20 years of experience under their belt. And I was like, OK, well, I'll apply to them. And I went to Germany, to Munich, and I did six months on their hydrogen fuel cell team there. And actually, technically, there were loads of challenges. Hydrogen has a lot of problems in terms of efficiency as well when you're busy. If you're using green hydrogen, you're turning electricity into hydrogen. And it's a medium of storage, and then you have to turn it back. But there's also storage and transportation problems as well. So it was clear even back then that EVs would come first. Hydrogen could potentially follow, but there were loads of reasons why it wouldn't anyway. So I got excited about that. But I wanted to then help commercialise technology rather than create the technology. So then I went and did some other things while the technology matured in EVs.

So this would have been, when would this have been? Is this sort of early 2000s?

2003-2004, yeah.

Yeah, I can remember being at Friends of the Earth around the turn of the millennium and thinking about what they were doing on climate campaigning. And they were trying to attack the oil industry by running a boycott of ESSO. And I was kind of like, I don't think that's going to work. I mean, what are the alternatives? Boycotting ESSO doesn't seem to achieve very much. And it was all because of their influence on climate policy and their negotiations. That was the sort of rationale. But I remember thinking then, where are the electric vehicles? Why can't we just get people to do a positive campaign to demand more electric vehicles? But back then, it just wasn't mainstream, was it?

No, exactly. Batteries were so much more expensive. So even if you could get one, the ranges of the vehicles tend to be a lot less. And also, there wasn't the public charging that there is available today. And also, you didn't have smart EV tariffs from great energy companies so that you could charge up in the middle of the night for a fraction of the cost. But we'll come back to that, I'm sure. But there were some around. Actually, I don't know if you remember Mark Goodyear, the Radio 1 DJ. He used to run the Top 40 in the 90s. I used to listen to it every week. And anyway, so he, I think, had his first electric car in 2004. He was really, really keen on electric vehicles. I think he said it's a Ford Think. And so there were people in those early days buying electric cars and driving them. But they just didn't go very far. And they were much more niche. So I came back to it. We might come around to the story of how, but in 2017, there are still only five cars that could go over 100 miles on a single charge. And so they were pretty nerdy ones or they were really expensive Teslas. And so really, the world has changed so much, even in the last, you know, eight, nine years to where we are today, which has opened up electric vehicles completely.

There's a really interesting little story about the lead singer of A-ha. Do you know this story of who, why is Norway so progressive on electric vehicles? And he was just a nerd, it turns out, and had a very, very early electric car, a little runaround thing, didn't do very much miles, but he refused to pay road tax on it. And so they kept impounding it, taking it off him, and then he would buy it back from auction because he was very wealthy being a successful pop star. And then he'd run it around the city again and refused to pay any taxes. And then they kept this process of impounding and taking his car off him and then buying it back. Basically, they gave in and said, okay, all right, we'll give you a concession because it's a clean vehicle. So this may be a completely apocryphal, but we have the lead singer of Aha to thank for Norway's progressive taxation policy on EVs.

It's an A-ha moment.

It is an A-ha moment, exactly, for the world.

Amazing how much influencers can do. If you think about that and the kind of coverage that it must have got and the kind of profile, it's really fantastic what people can do if they want to.

Yeah, when you've got a voice, you've got to use it. But I suppose, if we think back to the rise of EVs, it was kind of driven by California, wasn't it? Like there was this kind of very progressive idea that for air quality purposes, because LA was choking, they needed to bring electric vehicles on. And I think GE had brought out their very first EV1 or whatever it was called that they then famously crushed and took off the market. But that had given the officials enough of an inkling that this was possible, that they brought in some regulations, right, that ultimately led to Tesla.

Yeah, well, so the ZEV mandate, actually, that we have now is kind of inspired, I think, by California's ZEV mandate, which they had much earlier. And they were kind of almost like regulatory vehicles that came out that were kind of clean vehicles. I think there's two sides to this story. So this is the kind of American side of the story. And then maybe we'll revisit the Chinese side of the story in a minute. But certainly in the US and kind of high profile Western kind of economies, certainly California really did lead the way. And it wasn't just this policy that they had around the ZEV mandate. But there were also things like the multi-occupancy roads, parts of the motorway, where basically if you want to go in that lane, then you have to have more people in the car.

High occupancy vehicle lane, HOV lanes. Yes, I use them all the time. Yeah.

Yeah. But actually, they made them available for EV drivers. So it meant that people that were going out to Silicon Valley, I understand, could save half an hour on their drive both ways. And so actually, for time-poor people, an extra half an hour both ways is quite significant. So it was very compelling to take an EV early there too for other reasons other than kind of cost or just the fact they were great cars. So certainly, yeah, it really did provide a much greater kind of customer base for Teslas in the early stages, I think.

Yeah, that's right. And of course, Tesla's sort of early adopter of Elon Musk. Tesla existed before Elon, but Elon quickly saw this had potential. And he had all of his pals in Silicon Valley who had invested in his previous company. And so PayPal had been successful. They got a lot of money out of it. So when he said the next big thing is EVs, he kind of gathered together all the great and the good of Silicon Valley to invest into Tesla. And I think that his key skill in the early days was just normalising it as an investable proposition. And then, of course, the regulations famously gave him a huge amount of money that he could build this very first global EV company, which we have to sort of pay credit where it's due. That did change the nature of the debate, right?

I think whatever you think about Elon Musk, I think he accelerated EV uptake in the West by 10 years. He brought it forward by a decade. And I think what was really interesting there – and he made this quite clear that his strategy was, I'm going to make very expensive cars, and I'm going to use that to scale the technology to then make more affordable cars and more affordable cars, which he has done. And so first of all, it was the Roadster. And then he brought out the Model S and the X, which were kind of the £90,000, £100,000 mark in the UK. And then slowly they came down in price, but also they brought out the Model 3 and the Model Y, which also have come down in price as they've got better around the technology and the manufacturing and getting scaled, just a scaled platform. So, it really has been a fantastic story of, do you know what? Sometimes new technology is more expensive, but those drivers, those consumers are the people that help pave the way for people that come later. And it's the same with our mobile phones and computers. In the early days, they were more expensive too. And then over time, they got lower cost, classic model stuff.

And again, that's also an interesting – I mean, I don't want this to be the Silicon Valley show, but that, you know, it was the advent of the laptop and the personal computer and then the mobile phone, which led to the bringing down of the costs of production for lithium-ion batteries, which when J.P. Struble at Tesla was thinking, how do I get my batteries? He had this supply chain that he could go to in China and say, hey, you're already building lithium-ion batteries. You know, what do we do to modify it, put it in a vehicle? So, there's this kind of contagion, this positive domino effect. We hear all these doom and gloom scenarios about tipping points in climate, but there are sort of technology tipping points, aren't there? And I think, like, batteries are so key to that. Yeah, absolutely.

And that's a nice segue into China as well because, you know, BYD, which is also an enormous manufacturer of EVs now, you know, well over 4 million, they started as a mobile phone battery company. So, they used to make mobile phone batteries for Nokia and for Motorola and for other manufacturers. And they actually then bought a car company and started putting batteries into cars. And they've built on their battery technology over the years, which has given them an absolute kind of advantage in the market compared to some of the competitors. And there are other Chinese manufacturers now that are also doing similar, but really that kind of heritage of mobile phone manufacturing has put them kind of leagues ahead of others.

Just to conceptualise this, how much have batteries reduced in cost? Because it's kind of transformed the affordability of electric vehicles, right? Hasn't it? And it's been pretty precipitous. Have you got the numbers? I mean, it's huge, right?

So, we used to talk about $1,000 per kilowatt hour about 10 years ago. And now it's down to about $100 per kilowatt hour. So, it's this enormous shift. And the kind of change in terms of cost per typical car battery is a reduction in cost by like $20,000. I mean, it's just a huge saving over the last 10 years to be able to then reduce the cost of the car. So, that has like two options then, two opportunities. One is you can either get lower cost vehicles with the same range, or you can get much longer range cars, but at the same price, or even still cheaper. So, we've got the BMW Neue Klasse that's coming out now, the iX3. And that's due in the UK in the next couple of months. And that's getting up to 500 miles in a single charge. I mean, it just goes so far. Like I could drive London to Edinburgh without stopping, which I couldn't do anyway. And also, I have two kids, so I definitely couldn't do. But in theory, if you were able to just keep driving, you could do that without having to charge up. On the other hand, you also have cars like the Dacia Spring, which although it has a lower range, you can get it for £189 a month, which is really a very affordable cost. In fact, people are saying that they paid that for renting a car for three days, whereas you can release that for a month. So, actually, it just makes it much more affordable on both sides.

So, let's go back to your journey then, because clearly, you're an expert. You're tracking this wonderful kind of growing and diversifying market from the position of Octopus. But most people will know Octopus as being a kind of a utility, right, a provider of electricity and gas to customers. But tell us how you came to join Octopus and about that arrangement. Yeah, sure. I mean, really, the story goes back a bit further.

So, after I decided to go and learn some business skills to help commercialise the tech when it was ready, I was at Bain. And then also, I went to the government on secondment to the Department of Energy and Climate Change, as it was, DEC, now DESNZ, and learning about the electricity markets. And we were looking at all these graphs on, like, renewable energy hitting the grid, you know, hitting the energy system.

And as you know, you can't – you know, how do you store that intermittent energy to use it when you need it most? And then on other graphs, we were looking at all these EVs hitting our driveways. And we're like, we're going to have batteries in every one of these driveways. We literally have distributed energy storage everywhere. Why can we not use our car batteries to then store that energy? And I was like, oh, that's so clever. And then also, you start to think about pricing and having dynamic pricing in the energy market so that you can actually fill up your car in the middle of the night when it's a lot cheaper rather than doing it at peak time. Actually, when you get home, you don't want to plug in at the end of a workday when you get home. Or you want to plug in, but you don't want to start charging, actually, so that you're charging when it's cheaper in the middle of the night.

So, that got me thinking about smart tariffs and remote controlling, you know, tech to sync up with the energy system. And that's when I came across the tech behind Hive by British Gas. There was a company called Alert Me. And so, I joined that tech company, and we started being able to control thermostats. And people could control them through their mobile phone. They could set their thermostat. And people could save energy and money. So, save 18% of your home energy costs just by heating it when you weren't there. And so, we launched that with the Hive brand, and the app, and the thermostat.

We redesigned the thermostat, actually, with a designer from California, back on the California theme, Yves Béhar. And that's now in 2 million homes across the UK, which is fantastic. And at the time when Octopus Energy's group CEO, Greg Jackson, was setting up Octopus, one of my old team members was working with him and was like, Greg, you should hire Fiona. If you're going to start a new energy company, you should hire Fiona. And we met, and he offered me a job. And he was going to start up a green energy company with great tech and a great culture.And I'd just come from a different one, which hadn't been quite what it said on the tin. I was like, nah. So, I said no. And then I went and had a child. And then when I was on maternity leave, I got talking to a mutual friend about their Tesla. And I was like, how far does it go? But where do you charge up? All those classic questions when you're starting to discover electric cars. And then, obviously, the nerd that I am, I was like, and how big is your battery?

And it was at the time when Tesla used to have like, you know, it was a 65D or whatever. So, it was a 65 kilowatt hour battery. And I got home, and I was like looking it up. I was like, that battery can store enough power for the average UK home for five days, which is pretty cool. I think that's a great start, right? You can just take your house off grid using your car battery for five days. Anyway, this obviously got back to Greg, and he's like, Fiona, do you want to do stuff with EVs? I was like, yeah, maybe I do. So, we had a conversation.

And by that point, he actually had started building a green energy company with great tech and a great culture. All these things that I was looking for, but I hadn't quite had the confidence, but then he'd really started to establish that. And that was 2017. And so, I joined Octopus in 2017 to do EVs. And that was basically all the kind of guidance I had.

So, your dream job, really. But just going back to the Hive period, because I think this is really interesting and important as well. So, I mean, I'm sure people have experienced these devices, right? They're sort of plug-in devices in your home, which are providing multiple services, but they're importantly interfacing through your mobile phone, right? So, you've got all of your controls there, and you are in control. It's not something being done to you. It's your home. You're setting the parameters. But how does that relate to the sort of smart metre rollout? Because there was a period where, when I was knocking around the civil service, where there's all this stuff around, we've got to roll out smart metres. And they had these display devices, which always seemed a bit ludicrous to me. They were sort of kind of fixed and static, and they sat on your windows still gathering dust. So, what was going on during that period? How was Hive relating to smart metres? And did we take a bit of a wrong step with smart metres?

So, smart meters are really interesting. In itself, people associate smart metres with the in-home display, which is that kind of display that you used to get that you used to end up in the drawer within a year. And it was also not very expensive, and it didn't really have a very upgradable interface. So, it became dated pretty quickly, and people got bored of looking at the information. And it wasn't very actionable either, because they're like, OK, well, I've learned what consumes some energy. I'm kind of done now.

But the thing that smart metres actually really unlocked was time of use data on what your energy was being consumed at home. So, prior to that, you used to have a metre that would tick up, and somebody would come and look at you once every six months. Whereas, this now gave us an opportunity to get real-time data almost. In fact, you could get real-time data by communicating with it directly at home, or the energy company would get half-hourly data. And then they could start to do pricing based on that. So, actually, for us, for EV drivers, we can say it's 7p per kilowatt hour in the middle of the night between, say, our first EV tariff, it was Octopus Go, and that was half-past 12 to half-past 4. And it was literally 5p per kilowatt hour. And it was so simple to understand, but without smart metres, we couldn't have done that. So, this then created demand for anyone that didn't have a smart metre. They really wanted it, because then they wanted to be able to have time of use pricing.

But separately to that, the other thing with Hive was there's two things. One is you said that people were in control. So, this is really interesting, because Hive's big competitor really is Nest. So, Nest is, again, back to California, Nest is very popular in the US. It came from the US, and it kind of started to learn when you wanted things warmer or colder, and then it would kind of take control of it for you and be like, oh, you like it hot right now, so I'm going to make it hot, or I'm going to make it colder because you prefer it colder. Whereas you don't really get a lot of visibility around what the temperature actually is. And what we found with Brits is Brits quite like to know what's actually happening. So, in the thermostat for the Hive, you can set specific temperatures at specific times, and you feel like you are a bit more in control.

But what we also found is when you started to trust it, then it could take a bit more control for you. So, it's like, oh, I see you've left the house right now. Would you like to turn off the heating? Yes. Next thing. Would you see you left the house right now? Would you like us to turn off the heating? Yes. And then it's like, would you like us to turn off the heating every day when you leave the house? Yeah. And then you start to trust it, and then it can start to do things on your behalf. So, it's similar with the charging up of the car now, which is we say, OK, well, what time do you want your car charged up? You know, you want 80% by 7 a.m. so that you can drive to work. OK, well, we'll do that for you. And now we choose when to charge up the car based on when it's low cost and green. And then we can guarantee a price point, and we just get it to 70% or whatever you've selected by the time you select it. So, you're still in control of the outcome, but we're just doing the charging at the time that's best for you and the car.

And that's just purely been enabled by the fact that we've now almost completed that smart metre rollout. As you say, it's given us this much more fine-grained understanding of demand curves, and it's given you then the sort of raw materials to offer exciting new products, including last year. Was it last year? I'm losing track of my years, but you announced a really exciting team up with BYD, with the Chinese Build Your Dreams car manufacturer. Do you want to just talk us through, like, well, firstly, what that offer is, but then also, I'd love to hear how that came about.

Yeah, sure. So, as you say, with BYD, we've announced a vehicle-to-grid partnership. And so, what we've historically been able to do is use those car batteries as one-directional charging, so that we can charge the car when it's cheapest and greenest, so that you get low-cost energy for your car. However, there's no reason that we shouldn't be able to take the energy from that battery and put it back into the grid, back into your house, so that you can use it at other times. So, that's called bi-directional charging, or vehicle-to-grid. And we actually did a large-scale trial with government support a few years ago, and those cars were able to participate in what's called the National Grids Balancing Mechanism, so that we could use that as aggregated load. But this is the first time that we were able to do a commercially viable partnership with a BYD Dolphin and a Zaptech charger and an energy tariff from Octopus Energy, packaged all up in a lease from Octopus Electric Vehicles, £299 a month for the car, the charger, and then free energy for your car. And because we can use the car battery to be able to store that energy and give it back, so we're basically using it as a battery asset, we can then offer you free electricity for your driving. So, it just means that people can have free energy to drive.

So, for the length of time you're on that lease, so this is one price then that gets you the vehicle arriving on your forecourt, gets you the installed charger, and then gets you the tariff that means essentially you're paying nothing for the charging of that vehicle.

Yeah, exactly that. So, you can have free electricity for that car for the life of your lease.

And how's it got, firstly, how did this come about then?

So, I think with all of these things, there's never one specific moment. We were lucky that we knew and were excited for BYD arriving. So, when I got a LinkedIn message from one of the BYD team saying, we're going to do a tour of the UK, would you like to meet? I was like, definitely. And apparently, a number of the dealers that they'd sent the same message to didn't pick up on it. And I was like, this is one of the most exciting car companies, we definitely want to host you. And so, they did a tour and they connected with us then, and they were very excited to meet. And they were like, we're going to make the hardware, your great software, we can work together. And then we had a really good launch with them.

And then their chairman came to the UK. And because we'd had this good start with them, we went for dinner. And I had the pleasure of chatting with the chairman over dinner and some others. And I said, can you do vehicle-to-grid? And actually, he said, well, we did have it in the cars before, but we didn't have a use case for it. I was like, well, if you put it back, we'd love to give you a use case. We have a use case, and we can do that here in the UK. And so, they did. And Greg also went out to China, and he had further meetings with the BYD team and recommitted out there and encouraged them to move forward.

And then they brought it to the UK. So, actually, that partnership with BYD is the first commercially viable vehicle to grid partnership globally, we think. And so, it's been really exciting to launch that here in the UK last year. And off the back of that as well, we've seen that it's moved the market. So, BMW and Mercedes and others at the IAA, the kind of big German auto show last year in Munich, announced that they're also bringing out vehicle to grid products this year. So, we're very excited to see the whole market move now.

And to what extent is this then changing, you know, going back to that conversation you had about when you were placed into DESNZ, into the Department for Energy, you know, trying to get this balance of supply and demand in a world where we've got much more variable supply, right? We're moving into – we've got now massive amounts of offshore wind, we've got solar, you know, we've got a system that's much more variable than it was. And it was always – the thinking was, well, we'll need hydro and batteries, you know, static batteries to back this up. We need some, you know, flexible plants that can come on and off to catch the peaks. But to what extent is this vehicle to grid segment now part of that planning? Do you think that the sort of machinery of government is keeping pace with the speed with which the sector is moving?

I think we've got two sides there. One is, I think the vision is understood. I know in Ofgem planning and reports, even for a few years, they've had, say, vehicle to grid as a large part of that puzzle, you know, out in 2040, 2050 for a number of years, even as many as 40% of the UK's vehicles being able to do vehicle to grid and to provide that energy services. So, I think people understand the vision of where we're going. But there's a heavy lift now between here and there to be able to have a kind of decentralised flexible energy system. And the reality is our energy system has been set up with a kind of centralised, much bigger central generation and transmission and distribution networks.

And now we're moving into this, as you describe, a much more decentralised, flexible world where we both are producing energy locally and people might have solar on their roofs and, you know, they might have other ways of producing energy, but also they're being able to store it either in car batteries or residential batteries or other things behind the metre. So, there's other ways of storing that and there's a big change now to be able to reflect that and also to be able to reflect pricing appropriately because, as you'll be aware, you know, there's wind turbines that we're currently paying to turn off because we haven't got the grid to be able to support it. So, actually, the kind of energy generation is moving at a pace that the energy system hasn't quite connected with or the energy market design hasn't quite kept up with. So, interestingly, there's a couple of other businesses that we'll maybe come on to that I'm working as a non-exec for a not-for-profit doing solar forecasting. And actually, when you're looking at solar hitting the grid and being able to forecast that is really important. And there are other markets that are leapfrogging the UK's energy system because they've never had the legacy incumbent energy system in the first place. So, actually, they can put in decentralised systems because they don't have some of the legacy market design issues to start with. So, I think there's a risk we almost get left behind because we aren't innovating quick enough.

Interesting. There is a big debate, isn't there? I mean, just to talk perhaps, I don't know how political you want to get, but it does strike me that when we were kicking off the kind of let's do climate change seriously, let's do an energy transition, which speaks to UK strengths, we kind of decided to take a leadership position and bring the cost down for other countries. So, famously, for offshore wind, there wouldn't be an offshore wind sector if the UK kind of over-investing in the early years to kind of bring those technologies on. And I guess with the electric vehicles, with electrification, we now got this abundant, we did that, we did that push. And now we really want to reap the benefits of that now very clean electricity that we have. But there hasn't been a sort of, I think there's a feeling politically now that we don't want to be leaders. We want to be sort of fast followers at best. But on electric vehicles, we still do seem to have a bit of courage there in the sense that we've got this policy that's pushing the incumbents to move, but it's getting a little bit of political resistance. And I'm wondering, to what extent is this now kind of inevitable, do you think? Or are those policies that the UK has stuck its neck out and said, no, we are going to do this because it's going to be beneficial all around in terms of air quality, affordability, energy security. But to what degree does this transition need those policies, do you think?

Well, if we take the EV one first then, I think the reality is that the car manufacturers used to say they couldn't sell electric cars because there wasn't public charging. And one of the key things with the ZEV mandate, which has been a key policy in the UK to encourage car manufacturers to sell a certain percentage of their cars as electric, that has given confidence to the private investors to invest in public charging. And off the back of that policy being put in place, private investors committed over 6 billion to be able to invest in public charging. And that is rolling out at pace. In fact, it has been for the last few years. And there's really a lot of public charging everywhere. If anyone wants to have a look, they can pull up the Electroverse app and they can just find out what public charging is near them. It's not just in the UK, actually. That goes across many other countries.

But it really brings to life how much public charging availability there is. And of course, there's a lot of people that can charge at home as well. So now that's really running ahead of the rollout of the cars themselves, which is fantastic. And there's a lot in key, like, motorway service stations, key arteries where people, if they're going on longer journeys, can charge up at pace. So that has been really good for public charging. The other thing is that it really encouraged the legacy manufacturers to make those investments, to make that switch.

Both the bans, both in the UK and in Europe, to ban petrol and diesel cars said to those manufacturers that you guys need to invest in this if you want to be able to sell cars in the UK beyond 2030. If you want to sell cars in Europe beyond 2035, you need to go electric. And so those car manufacturers started to make those investments.

Part of the challenge has come because the Chinese manufacturers started investing quite a bit earlier. And they had that legacy kind of benefit of having been making batteries for so long. They've really come so far with battery technology that they are now bringing cars to Europe, which are not just low cost and affordable, but are also really very good cars. They look good, they drive well, and they're affordable. And people really like them. So now some of the legacy car manufacturers are saying, whoa, can we just hold back on this policy a bit because we're not ready. But actually, consumers really like good cars and they like affordability. And so the ones that are kind of ahead of the pack are really stealing a march there. And it's not just the Chinese manufacturers. Tesla remains in our top five best-selling cars, but so does Mercedes. And BMW have been doing really well at kind of hitting their targets too. So there are a number of legacy manufacturers that have stayed at the front of the pack.

But some of the more noisy ones that are kind of lobbying against the policy are struggling a bit to keep up. And I think this is a huge transition, a huge sector transition, which with any sector transition, you expect some winners and some of them don't win if they don't invest early enough. And it's similar to things like transitions like in the camera sector with Kodak, having a Kodak moment, or even BlackBerry, for example. And I think the important thing is that we don't want to invest in the kind of BlackBerrys. We want to make sure that we are, as a country, investing in the future of the sector too and getting behind those that are making the iPhones and the kind of cars, you know, cars of the future too.

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So Fiona, just thinking about the UK context, and actually more globally, one of the things that people are struggling with at the moment is, yes, once you've got your electric car and you're charging it, you should in theory save money. But people's perception of electricity prices is that they're very high and that electricity is, you know, it's not cheap in the UK. It's specifically not cheap. You know, we've had to reinvest in an old system. We've put a lot of clean on the system that's required some support. So what, you know, is that a threat? Is the fact that electricity is perceived to be expensive, one of the issues that's holding this back? So I guess there's a couple of parts in that.

One is, if you can charge at home, then you can save 80 or 90% of your fuel costs versus petrol. So actually you can save a lot of money if you can charge at home. The on street charging is, or the public charging is more expensive. So you've got then a combination of kind of lamppost charging and on street charging through to public charging, which is much faster and rapid. The rapid charging is about the same price as petrol today, maybe even marginally more expensive. It's just much more expensive. So really we want to open up that low cost charging for as many people as possible. So there are things like curbside charging that you can do, and people can now put gullies into their pavements outside their house so that they can run a cable in the gully safely and then charge up the car outside when they're parked on the street. So that's quite exciting. And then also people are opening up new innovations around the Airbnb for home charging. So actually you can rent out your driveway to somebody else so they can come and charge and take advantage of the low cost charging too. So actually there is a perception that it's more expensive, but actually as people are discovering, then you can save a lot of money on your fuel by going electric.

Separately to that, you're right that the UK has higher energy costs than pretty much any other European country and definitely across the world it's one of the most expensive. And that is challenging. That is very challenging for manufacturers as well as for the perception of electrification and just making it attractive for EVs, heat pumps or other technology. And so at this point in time, we've got this almost 80% renewable generation. We've done so well. We've really been a market leader. And now we've kind of got this ambition to kind of decarbonise the last 20% and a really short period of time, putting a lot of pressure onto the energy system and raising costs. So I think there's a debate around how quickly we want to push that when the market and the energy system itself isn't quite keeping up with the overall transition. So we're containing wind, we're spending a lot of money doing that. We need to build out our grid more quickly. We need to unlock some of the regulation to make the flexibility and demand response more attractive. Anyway, so we can slow down some of that to make it more attractive.

And then that also enables us to keep rolling out and doing electrification with heating, with EVs and transport and other things as well. So I do think that there's a challenge of being pushed that too quickly, too hard. So I think, you know, there is kind of ambition there to slow down. However, I would say that it's definitely not as bad as people think in terms of the cost of net zero. So there was some research from FGS Global recently, and the Climate Change Committee estimates that it's going to cost the UK about 0.02% of GDP to hit net zero, whereas actually the average Brit thinks it's going to be 14,000% more expensive than that. And so there's just this massive disconnect around perception and the reality of what net zero is going to cost. And actually, the politics, the political parties, some of them are using this to their advantage to say, do you know what, this is coming, you can't afford it, because the reality is actually Brits want to take – in fact, not just Brits, just grown-ups across the world – recognise that climate change is an issue, and they want to do something about it. But the reality is that living costs are high, and they've got other things to do in the immediate term, like pay their bills, feed their kids, make sure everyone's well looked after. And that's their immediate, you know, task at hand, and so they don't want to kind of impact their living costs in the short term.

But the reality is that it's not as expensive as they think. And actually, if we don't kind of push that energy system change too quickly, then we can still make it really affordable for them to make the switch to other things.

I hear you. I think you're being quite polite there. I actually think the push to fully decarbonise power is just the wrong priority right now. I mean, I don't really understand it. I can see why. Maybe it polls well, maybe people think it sounds good, therefore, we're going to pursue it.

But the reality is that once you get down below around 700 grams of carbon per kilowatt hour, and you know, just put that in context, a coal station is around 900 grams. So, you know, clearly over that limit. But once you're getting down, you know, even if you just clean it up a little bit to the 700 to 600 range, it's already then from a carbon perspective, more efficient to use that electricity to displace fossil in the transport sector. So you don't need to get to zero grams per kilowatt hour of carbon in the electricity system for electricity and electrification to make sense. So why are we seeing this very narrowly as a power market problem, when it really isn't? You know, there doesn't seem to be much rationale beyond it sounds okay to people and they sort of vaguely understand it.

And that's not a great basis for making policy. Sorry, this is probably angering people in dozens if they're listening. But, you know, it is time to take stock and affordability is at the heart of what's making this transition vulnerable, because it is being weaponised, as you said, by opposition. And the way out of this is to say, pragmatically, we're now going to focus on where people can save the most money. And that actually is in transport, even if it's DFTs bag, it doesn't matter. DESNZ’s role is for the whole of climate. They should be thinking strategically across all the government, where do we have this win, win, win of, you know, cleaner, cleaner, climate and affordability, and it's transport. So you know, lean into that, and don't obsess about the last 100 grams per kilowatt hour of carbon in the power system.

I mean, I completely agree with you, Briony, I think we have this challenge, right, which is when some when a political figure Bryony made a commitment to a target, and they want to be seen to be able to hit that target, versus actually then saying, do you know what, now that we've got close to it, we realise that we've made massive progress. And actually, what's good for you, and for net zero, which is what our overall target and ambition is for you is to actually tweak that and change it, when again, that would be weaponised. So I can see there's a challenge on their hands. But I think it's quite a courageous move to do.

You know, if they take that route, there seems to be two things that make me slightly worried at the moment. One is that the EU has slightly started watering down its ambitious targets and policies on electric vehicles and clean vehicles in the EU. Is that going to come across the water and affect the UK's ambitions? And secondly is, I mean, talking about a ban makes everyone think, oh, God, the government's coming to take my cars. And you know, maybe we should be starting to think just about this is a market. It's a market incentive to reward early movers rather than being described as a ban. There seems to be some things we've got to be careful of that we could lose ground.

Again, there's a couple of points in there. One is in the UK, we've got this 2030 ban. And we've got steps up to that in terms of targets for the car manufacturers to sell EVs. And then actually, it's actually only 80% electric by 2030 as the UK kind of policy through to a full ban by 2035. They're still allowed to sell some hybrids until 2035. And in Europe, as you say, it's 2035, but they started to make some kind of allowances within that 2035 ban as well around what they still sell beyond that time.

The reality is that there's a lot of employers within Europe that are not keeping up with this transition, which we already talked about. And some of the employers in the UK are in that camp as well, where again, they haven't kind of kept up with some of the technology. And so, there's pressure on the government to be able to water down these targets to be able to support those. I think there's a couple of things there at play. One is we want to make it investable. We want to make EVs and EV charging investable in the UK.

If we start to water down those targets, people become less interested in funding our public charger rollout, which is currently super successful, and it makes it much harder for those public charging companies to continue to fund that rollout. And that would be detrimental to the transition much more so than anything that would be beneficial by changing that policy. The second thing is how do we make it really attractive for those manufacturers to keep manufacturing here?

Because any tweaks to the policy isn't actually going to help them in the longer term and secure those jobs for the longer term. So, actually, from a UK government perspective, we want to secure jobs in the UK for the longer term, which includes, again, looking at energy pricing to make it attractive, looking at skills, and looking at potential subsidies there rather than changing the ZEV policy, which also saves customers money. So, instead of making it more expensive for drivers, let's make sure that we're making it more affordable for people to invest in the manufacturing. And I think overall, that would tackle it rather than watering down the ZEV mandate, which really is a very short-term relief for some of those manufacturers.

Yeah. And it is worth just keeping on stressing that this is an incentive to stop selling new ICE vehicles. The total park, the total amount of vehicles on the road will still be dominated by ICE vehicles. The second-hand ICE, the combustion engine market will continue. The second-hand market combustion engine will still be there. I think there's just this perception that, you know, come 2030, something draconian is going to happen and the overreaching of the government is going to start interfering with public people's choices. And I guess that's where it runs the risk of just falling on the wrong side of the politics if it's weaponised in that way.

Yeah. No, I absolutely see that point. I think part of the challenge that lots of people don't realise, and I didn't really understand it until I worked in cars myself, is how much our market is driven by the cars that are being supplied into the market. So, to some extent, we're being influenced to buy the cars that the car manufacturers want to sell us at the profitability, you know, maximising their profitability and their shareholder value. And so, actually, what are the affordable electric vehicles and we've got this path to get there. So, you should invest now. And actually, we're seeing such good cars and such good competition there that, as you say, I think if they pulled away some of the policy from a demand perspective, the cars are brilliant. And, you know, you're not going to go back to your BlackBerry or your Nokia when you can have an iPhone, which is essentially the difference between these vehicles now. But it still provides consistency and confidence for the investors in the charging space. So, you almost don't want to lose the policy, even though from a competitive perspective, EVs are going to win out, you know, for the cars too.

Yeah. And that signals to the sector to make the cars that we need rather than the cars you want to sell us. In China now, from January of this year, they've just introduced a new regulation that's not focused on, you know, carbon efficiency of the fleet. It's actually on how efficient can you make your electric vehicles? So, they've kind of introduced a kind of cafe standard or like a forcing factor to make the vehicles that are electric as efficient as possible so they can get the most out of their battery supply chains and their material supply chains. So, they're like, they're not just, you know, they're just one step ahead of us. They're like three or four steps ahead. And if we think, you know, rolling back to some glorious era where, you know, markets will deliver, will work, we're just not reading the tea leaves correctly, right? No, exactly.

I mean, in the UK, we're around, you know, 25%, 30%, up to 33% a month EV of new car sales. Whereas in China, they're like, you know, over 50%. And I went out there just over a year ago and you just stumbled into a shopping centre and there'd be another Chinese EV brand that you haven't heard of. And there's so much innovation in the space. It's so exciting. And I think it's just a different mentality of kind of both the innovation that's happening and the rate of new patents they're registering, the amount of people that are employed in that space, you know, just how much they're kind of getting a hold of this new, you know, economy that's coming so quickly now and how quickly they're scaling it.

And, you know, rapidly. So I remember speaking to BYD and they'd gone from 1.5 million vehicles to 3 million a year, or Cherry, 1.2 million to 2 million vehicles production a year. We only buy 2 million cars a year in the UK in totality. So like, it's like they could just make, one company could just make all the cars that the UK would buy in a year. It's just huge. It's just a massive scale and they're just developing and iterating so quickly.

It strikes me that there've been these kind of transitions in the automobile sector before where, I mean, the rise of Japan, Japan's such an interesting player in this market that, you know, it was sort of their manufacturing processes, which was so much more efficient than the sort of line assembly factories of old, the Ford model, that kind of, the automation of that, that kind of brought their costs down and they were able to dominate. And there was this sort of period where everyone was trying to resist the Japanese cars. And then now, you know, in America, one in every third car, I'm sure, is built and, you know, manufactured or designed in Japan. But so there's this, there's this kind of lag where everyone's like fearful of this new thing that's coming. And then basically the law of economics basically wins, doesn't it? That the cheaper, better system will find a market, even if you do try and do a lot of protectionism in the meantime, you're really just trying to buy time, aren't you?

Yeah, I mean, there is even a bigger risk, I think, for some of these legacy manufacturers where they're trying to buy themselves a bit more time, but actually it's even distracting for them at a time when they need to be moving to, you know, putting all of their energy, all of their best talent onto catching up in this transition. Actually, what's happening in places like China and some of the more innovative companies in the West, they're focused on building the next best thing, not trying to slow down the market, but they're building even better cars, even more range, even cheaper battery technology, for example. So yeah, the economics win out, but it's not just the economics, it's quality. It's quality and, you know, better range vehicles and their tech on wheels. We make a lot of analogies with the mobile phone industry. This is like having more data, faster connection and better camera quality. You know, like everything is just going to get left in the dust that's not keeping us. They just need to stop being distracted and prioritise catching up.

But yeah, China, but when you talked about the fact that they've realised that these are sort of computers on wheels. Last time I was there, I mean, I was just blown away by the sheer, that they sort of, they kind of understood that people kind of love their vehicles and they see their vehicles like it's an experience when you're in the car. And so now they've added, you know, like, because you've got all this electricity, surplus electricity to use, they've got like entertainment systems in the back for the kids. One car I saw has now got a drone that while it can detach itself, you know, you can run it with your car so you can video yourself whilst driving along the road, because it's another feature that you can talk about and get excited about. I mean, it just seems like, as you say, they've got all their sharpest minds on how do we get an edge here in this market. I mean, it's so fascinating.

Even the Teslas as well that came out and they had their whoopee cushion features or they had, you know, the photo booth features, the things that the kids love. But now, you know, these Chinese manufacturers with their karaoke. So, you know, I was with my team at one of the BYD launches and they absolutely love the karaoke. We were all sitting in the car having a good sing, but it's, you know, it's just good fun, isn't it? And so you're right, there's so much they can do. And my team, we take EVs out to businesses and to events to help people discover electric vehicles. And so they would go to festivals. And my team would always love being the people that had to charge phones, because at the point when everyone else has run out of charge on their phone, the team can pop off to the car, charge up, listen to some music, come back, you know, they're sorted. And so it can do so much.

And I think that's part of the vehicle to grid, vehicle to load piece as well, that people can take it camping with them, can power their coffee machine or, you know, even keep them warm overnight. If it gets cold, they can, you know, put the seats down and still keep warm in the car. And it's really simple things like during the winter when it's frosty outside, you can defrost your car just from the app, just click it to defrost and it'll be ready by the time you get out there. So there's just so many nice things about having, you know, electric power car that you didn't even realise until you kind of get it.

Just before we get all too glowing about all of this, the other thing that people talk about in terms of EVs is the supply chain. And the fact that, you know, there are of course, minerals and metals that are needed to make the batteries, make the cars. Have you, with your engineering brain, have you seen any kind of red, amber lights flashing on the dashboard that might say, you know, this is going to hit some kind of constraints or is it just now a question of it rolling out? I mean, how big an issue are those supply chain issues?

Yeah. So there's a couple of sides of this. One is absolutely the technology that we're using today includes things like lithium, cobalt, for example, and copper, which are in limited supply globally, but we always keep on finding more of it. And history has shown that when we need more of it, we find more of it. So a great example is lithium in Cornwall. We've now found that actually Cornwall has lots of lithium and tin. And now we're setting up mining for the first time again in Cornwall, which, you know, in very different ways maybe than we were doing it before, but we're able to find more minerals and materials than we thought. So we're quite innovative as a species in terms of finding these minerals and materials that we need. Having said that as well, though, we also innovate so we don't need to use them or don't need to use as much of them.

So over the years, we've been reducing the amount of lithium we need in the batteries, same with cobalt, but we've also found other technologies like sodium ion batteries, where I believe there's actually one now going into a car this year. And so that offers low cost, even more affordable technology than we had before, but also doesn't have the same reliance on lithium, for example. So we keep innovating in terms of finding more minerals, but also being able to use alternative minerals. A few years ago, in fact, we were both at the same event, I think, at COP26 in Glasgow, where we were looking at the EV sector and what things might slow down the rollout of EVs. And we did look at minerals as part of that discussion. And I took a photo of one of the slides that basically said we're going to run out of these minerals during the energy transition.

I took it around to various events, and I shared it with experts. And I was like, do you believe this? And they're like, well, we're going to innovate for that one so we don't need it anymore, et cetera. And then they get to copper. And copper was the biggest challenge that people got stuck on. Because it's not just EVs. We need it for the grid. We need it for everything in the energy system, in the power system, data centres, heat pumps, you name it, we need copper. And so, actually, the challenge isn't necessarily around finding copper resources, but it's the time that it takes to get copper mining online. So, it can take 10 to 15 years to get a mine up and running. And so, actually, the real challenge there now is around kind of finding and getting the copper mines up and running in a sustainable way as well. That's the other challenge, is making sure that these minerals and materials are extracted in a sustainable way. So, that was a bit of a long answer for you.

No, no, that's exactly right. And I thought, actually, what you're going to talk about also, which I've heard many people comment on, which I think is very compelling, is that once you've got copper out of the ground, it's recyclable, right? And in fact, all of these resources that go into this part of the transition have this feature of being recoverable and recyclable. So, whereas with fossil fuels, you're spending a lot of time finding, digging, refining, getting it out, getting it to market, and then it's poof, gone. These mining operations result in a kind of almost closed loop, right?

Yeah. And we had a great roundtable on this recently with the Ellen MacArthur Foundation that does a lot of circularity and CATL and others. The reality is though with some of these, it's not even like you're not just burning it like fossil fuels and it's one use. You're going to get probably a decade to 15 years, 10 to 15 years in a car. And then even then, you probably can still use it for other kinds of energy storage in residential or aggregating it for some kind of large-scale battery storage, which is being done already. So, these batteries might actually get 20, 30, 40 years use before they even have the opportunity to be recycled. So, really, it's kind of like you mine it once and you're going to keep using that for so many years, which is also fantastic than just the kind of one-off use that you're going to get with fossil fuels today.

Yeah. I actually heard about a battery recycle company that was getting batteries that were of such good quality. They were like, hang on, why would we strip this down?

Let's just repurpose it and send it back out for a static battery use. So, yes, the reusability is part of the story, right, of why this is ultimately going to be, it will have its challenges. But in terms of the unsustainability of the fossil system, there's just kind of almost no comparison, I would say. And it does interest me that I think cobalt is used in lots of fossil processes. It's a commodity that's been used in the fossil industry for years. It's only when it gets applied to electric vehicles that suddenly everyone's scandalised by the sourcing of this material.

And to what extent, I'm just going to sound conspiracy theorist about this, but it does feel like there's a kind of a lot of headwinds that electric vehicles have faced. And some of which perhaps just come from people who are, you know, argumentative contrarians, but there seems to be also quite a high correlation of, you know, this is going to threaten the existing world order, right? Oil is, oil demand is being ultimately got rid of, right?

Yeah, I mean, ultimately, the incumbent companies operate in a capitalist society where the leaders are rewarded for making more money. And so ultimately, they can find ways to lobby or to share information that causes fear and uncertainty that then slows down a transition away from what makes them profitable. That helps them be more profitable, and it's probably worth them spending money on. So to some extent, they find ways to do that without it being above the radar. Although actually, I seem to remember your fabulous co-host Michael Leibreich finding ways, identifying some misinformation that could be traced back to cons companies that were funded by car manufacturers. There was literally quite obviously, you know, lobbying against EVs in a kind of very misinformation spreading way. So even when they're trying to do it under the radar, they're not even succeeding. So I mean, yeah, there's definitely a kind of old world. There's an amazing scene in Moneyball. You know Moneyball with Brad Pitt?

Yeah, yeah. How they revolutionised baseball.

Yeah, it was. And so he's using data to revolutionise how you choose players and how you select them and how you put a team together. And he goes on to win huge numbers of matches, really successful baseball team on much less money than some of the competitors. And so there's a scene where he goes to meet the manager at the Red Sox. And he's like, you know, the first player through the wall always gets a bloody nose. And it's like, they don't want you to be successful because you're disrupting their way of life.

You're disrupting the way that they've been living and the way that they, you know, are used to living. And this is a reality. We are disrupting things. And at the point where they're trying to slow us down, you know, we've got something right because they're worried. So we just need to carry on. We need to be the Brad Pitts of this world, really.

Very good. Well, or the female equivalent. I don't know who that would be.

Sure, yeah. Yeah, exactly.

Brilliant. So you mentioned that. So you're at Octopus. You look after the EV leasing bit of Octopus, which is now also offering these tariffs. But you're not just doing that, are you? You're doing another couple of initiatives that you're on boards of. Do you want to just talk to us a little bit about what else you're doing in this kind of space?

Yeah, sure. So on the Octopus side, I did in the early days do EV tariffs and some stuff in the public trailing space of vehicle to grid. A lot of that's gone into the energy business. The Octopus EV space makes it easy and affordable to make the switch to cars, so we lease cars, to your point. And we particularly help businesses with their employee schemes because people can save tax in the UK by making that switch through their company car or through salary sacrifice. And so that's scaled up. We've now helped 7,500 businesses.

We've raised £2 billion to be able to help fund those cars here in the UK, and that's kind of going really well. And last year, I took a sabbatical, and the CEO, Goji, stepped up to be CEO, and he was brilliant. And I'm like, fantastic, you can carry on. And so I'm back in a founder role doing some strategic work with the Octopus EV team. But that also gives me time to do other things, as you say. So as I think about how I can best use the kind of skills that I have, the things that I found most useful were when people were really helpful, helping me find great talent, helping me find great partners, maybe even investors or funders.

And then so basically, we're trying to use the network now to unlock that same kind of movement for other people in the climate space. So we have a group called Earth Set, and we meet on a monthly basis. And so we have founders, investors, policy makers, and leaders. We come along and talk. In fact, we now have a podcast. And actually, again, your co-host Michael Leibreich was one of our guests in December.

So my co-host Amy interviewed him, and I think that was her favourite interview of last year, for sure. So I highly recommend listening to Michael and Amy on the Earthset podcast. But anyway, so as well as the community, I'm doing a couple of non-exec roles. One is the chair of Transition Zero, which is using great tech and modelling and AI to help countries plan their energy transition and do scenario planning around what if they build nuclear now versus solar or wind. And then the second one that I'm on the board of, Open Climate Fix, is using AI in the solar forecasting space. So they take satellite imagery of solar panels, and they overlay it with weather forecasting from places like Google DeepMind. And they combine that to be able to have really clever solar forecasting. And that means that they can have better management of energy systems. We can install less fossil fuel backup systems if we can better forecast what energy we're going to get from solar wind. So both of them are making more energy efficient energy systems.

Yeah. I mean, and that's a good, it's a really good reminder that there's just the advent of AI, right? That's, I mean, there's a lot of hype in the system, let's be honest. But just the brute force of being able to run models more swiftly, the accessibility of data now, and the speed, means that you think things which were really complicated, like the Open Climate Fix insight that clouds are really, really important. Like, you know, cloud goes over a solar farm, you get a dip in output, but clouds are notoriously difficult to model. And the meteorology departments and the apparatus that we've created globally for meteorology doesn't really care about solar.

Like it's always cared about rain for agriculture, it cares about wind, it cares about storms, but the installation patterns have not really had a commercial value. So here long come tiny little NGOs or not for profits, with tiny capacity really relative to the system. And they're able to come quickly to market with really new insights and move really nimbly. And that's empowered by AI, but very also very smart people realising that, you know, the future is not going to look like the past, we're in transition.

I think smart people with great tech just create so many exciting possibilities. And I think that tech, you know, all of us can do so much more than we ever thought we could using things like vibe coding, even just as you and I, but then you give some of this tech to these amazing engineers, and what they can do is fantastic. And so it's even like a small, nimble teams that can really change the world. You know, it's really fun. It's such a fun time. And I think it's getting such a bad rep in some ways for AI, because it's obviously creating such demand on energy. But actually, then you can flip it and you can say, well, actually, it can really help us solve it and run it much more efficiently, too. So that's great.

Yeah, I think my main concern is that we could use it to solve all the world's problems, or we could use it to distract ourselves with ever more complex fake videos and putting cat's heads on people. It's going to probably power the distraction and attention economy at first. And that's where the rising demand, you do wonder, is this helpful or not helpful? But then you get, I just recently watched the documentary about Demis Hassabis, you know, the UK's kind of leading AI founder and innovator who now has teamed up with Google. And, you know, I can remember seeing him, well, maybe 10 years ago at a dinner and him saying, first we solve generalised intelligence, then we use it to solve all the world's problems. And then that's it.

You know, there's only two points on his plan, right? And the documentary talks about his engagement in the sort of alpha fold, you know, the kind of protein modelling. But I bet, you know, climate was on his PowerPoint 10 years ago. And I can see them now entering into the weather space. And I suspect that's the entry point for then a climate play, I hope, because, you know, it's a complex system, really complex system. And I suppose that's why you're going to need the smartest people with the smartest tools so that we can keep pace with tracking what's going on.

Well, yeah, and actually Open Climate Fix partnered with Google DeepMind, which was Demis's entity, you know, that was bought by Google. And so they have partnered, for example, they've recently announced a partnership in India, where they've been looking at forecasting of the energy system in India. So it is a partnership with Google DeepMind. So that's exactly that weather forecasting. So it's just fantastic. And as you say, I think that's just a snippet of what's to come.

Yes. Well, look, on that nice hopeful note, I'm going to say thank you so much for joining us and wish you well. And I wish this could have been done in person if I'd been in the UK. But if you're ever over in California, please, please say hello and see you very soon. I hope. Take care.

Thank you.

So that was Fiona Howarth, founder and director of Octopus Electric Vehicles. My thanks to her for joining us. As always, we'll put links in the show notes, the resources we discussed, including our past episodes with Greg Jackson, CEO of Octopus Energy. My thanks to Oscar Boyd, our producer, Jamie Oliver, our video editor, Kendall Smith, our head of operations and to the rest of the Cleaning Up team and to the wonderful Leadership Circle members who make this podcast possible. And thanks to you for listening. Please join us at the same time next week for another episode of Cleaning Up.