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 using hydrogen for heating: “It’s like flushing our toilets with champagne. It might work, but it’s inordinately expensive and impractical.”
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.
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.
Al Gore’s movie, An Inconvenient Sequel.
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.