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Anyone in marketing who looks at how countries deal with renewable energy releases will be horrified.
First, companies popped up in beautiful rural areas to build wind farms. Then, people were told that fees would be added to their energy bills to help cover the cost of the farms, which had to be built because of a distant climate problem that some did not believe was real.
This is a shortened version of what Greg Jackson, founder of one of the UK's most interesting companies, Octopus Energy, said at a Financial Times climate conference a few days ago. He added that the situation is particularly absurd today, because renewable energy is much cheaper, but is still sold in a system that is “not designed to give consumers that benefit.”
As I listened to Jackson's speech, I thought how refreshing it was to hear a green energy leader touting the potential of renewables to ordinary bill payers. And Jackson is not just a green energy leader.
Since its launch in 2016, Octopus has become the UK's second largest retail energy supplier and a global player investing in wind farms, installing domestic heat pumps, supplying electric vehicles and supporting green subsea energy cables.
They also provide cheaper electricity to people living near wind farms and do a great deal to ensure that green energy is available at affordable prices.
There's a crucial point about this: Jackson may have joined Greenpeace as a teenager, but at heart he's a technical person. He left school at sixteen to write computer games. Octopus' hidden success is Kraken, a utility software platform that is the backbone of its operations and which it licenses to other energy companies.
The company is repeatedly cited as an example of something the UK is surprisingly good at: climate technology, or technologies that help reduce emissions.
I was reminded of this a few days ago when I went to visit someone who turned out to be working in a busy green-tech workspace on the fifth floor of London County Hall, just across the Thames from Westminster.
The place opened less than a year ago and is already about to explode, with 115 groups working on everything from “smart air bricks” that cut energy use to clean tires for electric cars.
This makes it the largest climate technology hub in Europe according to Andrew Wordsworth, one of the minds behind it. He is a co-founder of Sustainable Enterprises, a green start-up consultancy and investment firm, and is already planning more work centers in Manchester, Glasgow, Birmingham and beyond to meet the needs of a sector that has, he says, “really, really exploded.”
In the years since he started his company in 2011, investment in climate technology in London has soared, from $177 million in 2014 to $3.5 billion in 2023. The city ranked second in investment in climate technology globally last year, it shows Delrom data, narrowly beaten by Stockholm. . Nationally, climate startups last year raised a record $6.2 billion, or 29 percent of total venture capital investment in the UK.
This, of course, represents a small fraction of global investment in established clean energy technologies, such as solar and wind. The problem with startups is that they can go out of business. But successful companies are able to stimulate the impact of old green technologies, creating a lot of jobs.
Octopus employs 6,000 people in the UK and a further 1,000 overseas. Sustainable Enterprises has created or maintained approximately 5,500 jobs since inception.
In a country like the UK, the first major economy to put a net-zero emissions target into law, you might think this climate technology story would be better known. But I suspect more people have heard about the speech Prime Minister Rishi Sunak gave in September in which he announced that he was working to weaken a series of net zero policies.
This is unfortunate in a country with a history of partisan support for climate action, especially when the United States and the European Union are promoting green industrial policies.
The person I went to see at County Hall was Rachel Solomon-Williams, chair of the Green Business Alliance for the Aldersgate Group. She told me that “fantastic” work on climate policy was still being done in the UK, despite headlines about Sunak’s green retreat. The problem is that many people only read the headlines, including some investors.
So far though, climate technology has worked in the UK. But imagine what he would do with a government that wholeheartedly supports net zero measures, rather than reluctantly agreeing to them.
pilita.clark@ft.com
