Can Britain Afford to Slow Down on Net Zero? - The CCC

I'm your host, Ed Porter. Welcome back to transmission. This summer, Britain has logged highs of over thirty five degree heat for four straight months, a record. The climate change committee say that by twenty fifty, up to ninety two percent of UK homes could overheat. But heat's not the whole story here. Great Britain has a system trying to do three things at once. Cut emissions fast enough to matter, keep the lights on when, say, wind or nuclear dropouts, and stop electricity being four times more expensive than gas, which is slowing down the economics of every heat pump and EV in the country. Emma Pinchbeck is the CEO of the Climate Change Committee, the independent public body that advises government on emissions targets and reports to parliament on progress in tackling climate change. We cover all of it. The pace of transition, the cost of gas as a backup, and why demand might matter more than supply. If you're curious how extreme weather is already showing up in UK power market data, ask Coe, Motor Energy's AI analyst. Link in the description. Let's jump in. Hello, Emma. Welcome back to transmission. Thank you very much. And let's get straight into it. And so I would like to start off with, what is the one thing that everyone gets wrong about what the CCC actually does? Everyone thinks that we are a big scary organization that gets to tell government what to do on policy decisions when actually we just advise them on the overall level of the carbon budgets And everything that we do in terms of our analysis on how you might get there, like the number of heat pumps we assume, the number of electric vehicles, what the power system looks like, all of that is just to demonstrate to policymakers that there is a feasible pathway to get into that target. But once they've legislated the target, it's parliament's target and government is tasked with designing their own pathway for how they deliver it, and we get not very involved at all in policy. The only thing that we do do is we audit the government's plans then for parliament and say whether or not we think they add up too much. But I think everyone always assumes that we're the people that tell government what to do about the target and we are able to kind of control that in some way when really we don't. So, yeah. So you pass over the advice, the government decides on what they want to do and then you audit that process. Yeah. But the actions of the government aren't necessarily actions of the CCC. Right. And they are free to disagree with us. So a recent example would be that the Scottish government have accepted the committee's advice on the level of their carbon budgets, and they have said to us already that they're planning on doing something different with their agricultural sector than was in our central pathway, and they're going to make that up by doing something else elsewhere in the economy. And and, like, that's fine. So long as it all adds up and we can tell parliament that their plans add up, that's not enough decision. That's for democratically elected representatives of the public to do. Okay. Great. And I I want to get into, I think one of the sort of hot topics in Britain at the moment. So you've just released a piece called Progress in Reducing Emissions, which says that the pace of emissions cuts now has to almost double. The government's plan is missing a sort of two thousand and thirty target. And at the same time, there's this political argument going on within Britain that maybe we should ease off from net zero. Someone hearing this, like, how would you make the case to them whether we're going too fast or are we going nowhere near fast enough? I think there are two cases to make. One is the climate one, and we have to stop recording this podcast when there's a heat wave on, by the way, because I think it was last time we did it. It was very hot. There's a drought. This sort of summer, now the hottest summer on record, following the previous hottest summer on record that was last summer, following eighteen months of wet weather, which was the wettest winter on record, following a summer in twenty twenty two with a forty degree temperature in the UK for the first time. This is what climate change looks like at this level of global warming, and it will be worse by two degrees of warming by two thousand and fifty. The only way you stop it getting unmanageably bad, unadaptable, difficult to kind of sustain the British way of life is if we're also reducing emissions at the same time as adapting the country to the weather we have now. And I think we might have stopped making that argument to the public for the last ten years or so about why the science is what it is and why it matters that we continue to reduce emissions. The other thing I'd say is regardless of how you feel about climate change, something like sixty percent of emissions reduction in our pathway from now until two thousand and forty is electrification and clean electric technologies. If you look at technologies like the electric vehicle and you happen to own one right now in the middle of the Iran crisis, you are saving money on your driving relative to someone with an internal combustion engine vehicle. We did some maths, is in the back of that progress report to look at household energy costs. And we worked out that a household with access to renewables technologies and an EV saving sixteen hundred pounds a year relative to a household dependent on fossil fuels. If you happen to be on oil, it's nineteen hundred pounds a year saving. There is a really challenging environment out there for people on their bills, on the cost of living. We should be cracking on with electrifying the economy because that is ultimately how we get cheap, efficient energy into people's hands. Yeah. And although the analysis is is in the back of that report, the chart is actually, think one of the first charts It is. Yeah. Yeah. Which is essentially saying that if you can have say PV and an EV, Yeah. You can save money on your home. I thought one thing that was quite interesting on that was that the EV is not to go down too much rabbit hole, but if you had an EV but didn't have home charging Yes. Then you could end up paying more. Yes. And so I I imagine that's the type of thing that you're probably giving advice to the government on to say, hey, look, let's fix this because we can't just take let let's say the housing stock is fifty fifty. We can't just take fifty percent of the housing stock with us. We kind need to take everyone on this journey. Yeah. It's actually sixty forty. Okay. We have In favor of In favor of off street. So sixty percent of households have access to off street parking. But the point is that a lot of households don't. And just in terms of the kind of fairness of the rollout and looking at that cost difference, you can see that we need to do something on public charging. And so you're right, we are allowed to give recommendations to government and policy, which they take or leave, but that we think will help drive the transition. That is absolutely one. That's one of the reasons we were keen to do that analysis is to show that difference. So your your sort of two core points are, one, from a climate perspective, we need to do this to have a livable environment or to have Yeah. The the environment that lots of us will have grown up with. And your second point is if you do this right, you can have a sort of lower cost system Yes. Both of which I think are very good arguments. Going back to the question is are we going too fast or nowhere near fast enough? Not fast enough. And so the technical analysis that we do is against the carbon budgets. Those are set in line with the science to stay well below two degrees of warming. When we look at our adaptation work and our climate risk work, which is the other half of our job, you can see that beyond two degrees of warming, the cost of keeping this country safe from the impacts of heat, drought, flooding, wildfire, and and other kind of risks across the economy just get wildly expensive or we can't do it. Just to give you one example A lot of our native tree species, beech, for example, shallow rooted tree species, our natural environment in the UK has adapted to a particular climate. We are not sure that those things survive past about two degrees of warming and the kind of weather conditions we would have here, the number of hot summers, the high temperatures. So the only way you commit again against that risk is to try and keep global temperatures to two degrees, which means carrying on reducing emissions. That's the science. On the costs, I just think there is a separate wholly outside of climate argument reason to do this, which is about being in the middle of another wild energy transition, like the move from coal to oil and gas, and we're now in the age of electricity. But that is a me Yeah. View from having spent a long time in the energy sector. Well, I spend a huge amount of time looking at things like battery costs and and and what has changed and I can certainly say that in sort of twenty two, twenty three, we saw this big swing towards sort of batteries being cheaper and more flexible, which means that options like EVs or batteries on your home, all of a sudden become much more doable for sort of the person on the street who's thinking about this. And if I'm allowed to make a slightly on the nose point then about how we think about policy or how government thinks policy towards electrification. If you think about something like the ZEV mandate, so the zero emissions vehicle mandate, people often frame that as a policy to do with meeting our carbon budgets. Actually, if you look at the cost of new electric vehicles coming into the market, particularly from China, you sort of have to back the electric vehicle transition will happen anyway because people are just gonna buy cheaper cars. Yeah. That policy exists to protect and drive a change in the manufacturing sector in this country so that we are still manufacturing cars in this country and we have that industry here. It's industrial policy for me. And I think sometimes we forget how big the energy transition is because it gets caught up as being something which is about doing our carbon budgets. When if you look at what's happening in energy markets, the price of technologies like batteries, the price of electric vehicles, a lot of this is gonna kind of just happen anyway. And it's a question of whether we're stopping people having access to cheap electricity or those technologies more than it is about how do we push the market to deliver net zero. One one more sort of question on this theme, which is, okay, there's really good opportunity for electric vehicles. In terms of recommendations for consumers to see the opportunity of electrification, like what would you say is kind of the one thing you'd like to see government do immediately? Oh, we had two things, can I cheat? You can cheat. So the the big cross cutting one for years now has been we have to do something to make electricity cheap and specifically to bring down the ratio of gas and electricity prices. Now, if that sounds really geeky and technical, just know that if you do a review of what's happened in other countries which have electrified heating in particular Successfully, they have a gap between their electricity and gas prices of around two to one, sometimes three to one. In the UK, it's four to one or higher. Electricity is four times more expensive than Yeah, so electricity is typically higher than gas because let's not get into marginal pricing, but because gas often sets the price in a lot of markets and then drives up the cost of electricity even as renewables are coming on, that will change over time or with market reform. But fundamentally, what we have also done is put some policy costs on top of electricity in the UK and that has driven that ratio bigger than in other countries. And then what that does is it kills the efficiency gap between something like a heat pump, which is more efficient at making heat than a gas boiler or an EV, which is more efficient for driving Than an internal combustion engine vehicle. So you don't get the savings of that technology. And so you it it just kind of flattens what should be a really good investment. Make electricity cheap. And we said remove the levies as but you could do other things including market reform. The other thing we said though is you still need to get the technology and whilst the costs are coming down and the second hand market is starting to boom and we're confident over time, households will be able to get them and not everyone needs to get the technologies at once. You still will need help on the capital cost of investment for some households. And again, who and how is government's choice, but there needs to be a combination of capital investment Yeah. And then doing something about the electricity price. Just lastly, that's we say that because that's what the public told us. So when we do our social research, they say the upfront capital cost is a barrier even if the lifetime costs stack up better. I mean, it it is a barrier. There's some of these But for obvious reasons, like, you have to have the money. Yeah. Like, a gas boiler versus a heat pump, like, they're they're very different upfront costs. But you're you're talking about over the lifetime, you can have a lower cost with a heat pump, particularly if you can rebalance this gas and electricity price. And it might it might be grants in some cases, but it's also things like access to capital through loans and mortgages and other and other things, but you do need to think about both worlds because even when there's significant payback from having the thing, you've got to get the thing. And for the public, it was a was a bigger barrier than even the economics suggested, so that's in the advice as well. Okay. And then you mentioned we should stop recording this this podcast when it's too hot or we're in a heat wave. Yeah. And I have this this stat that came from the Met Office that I thought was particularly nice, which is that this twenty twenty six is the first year on record to have thirty five degree heat in May, June, and July. Yeah. And I was pleased when I found that stat because I thought it's a great stat. But now we're in August and it turns out that we're gonna be over thirty five degrees tomorrow as well. So we can update that stat live and say that we're gonna have four consecutive months of over thirty five degree heat. And so maybe moving away from sort of the politicians and the politics of today, your adaptation report, which as you said is kind of the second half of the CCC says up to ninety two percent of homes could overheat by two thousand and fifty. Do do you think that we're heading for a world where things like air conditioning become standard in homes? And is that something that we should be trying to sort of actively plan for? A a bit. So what we said in the advice is extreme heat of all the risks facing the country and we looked across kind of fourteen different systems in the economy, including stuff like nature and culture, but also infrastructure, health. Across all of those systems and across all of the risks, we identified extreme heat as probably the biggest one to draw out of that advice to government for two reasons. We are wildly unprepared for it because this is not a country that's been used to those temperatures. And that's in terms of the physical infrastructure we've built. But also, we're unprepared for it emotionally. So when we talk to the public, which we do when we're producing our advice and get their sentiment on some of our recommendations, Extreme heat was the hardest one to sell to them. That was the it was a risk, whereas flooding is something that in Britain everyone goes, oh, yeah, rains all the time. Yeah. Big problem. Yeah. Extreme heat sounds nice. Extreme yeah. Like, what do you mean why is this a problem? So you have to kind of spell out the risk a bit more, which means when we were thinking about extreme heat and the advice, the other thing is it's both the hazard, the temperature, but also how that risk manifests. Extreme heat, for people like you and I, not a huge problem in our day to day lives so long as we are taking measures to look after ourselves. If you're elderly, if you have an underlying illness, if you've young children, if you're pregnant, extreme heat is a much bigger issue for health. So we said we should be doing air conditioning, mechanical cooling immediately in places where those people are likely to be, schools, hospitals, care homes And in and giving people who have vulnerable access to that technology too. Generally, for buildings, particularly for new build, you can do a lot with passive measures. I mean, we're sitting here with a big glass building. But things like external shutter shading, trees, green spaces, you can do a lot passively before you get to active cooling. Your question was, have we planned for it? And I think you're asking me about energy demand. In the seventh carbon budget advice to government in our energy system model, we allowed for additional energy demand from cooling technology. One thing that I think we might do some more work on and have sort of suggested to government is in schemes for putting heat pumps in buildings. They might want to be thinking about cooling and heating at the same time. The great thing about heat pumps is they can do both. Yeah. But we have traditionally thought about them as a heating technology. Yeah. I think it's a huge opportunity there. When when I think about the air conditioning load, it's kinda helpful to look at other grids. So if you go to say Texas, which is a very hot place and regularly has sort of large heat domes, They're they have been able to get their grid to a point where they are setting national records of demand in summer because that's when their sort of system is most stressed because of the the sort of air conditioning load. By combining solar and battery storage, they've been able to have a more secure grid than almost ever before Yeah. In these kind of these periods. So for me as an energy or as as an NG person, I don't feel so worried about sort of peak summer demand. No. Exactly. Well, and actually as a nerd point, that's one of the reasons why we are less worried about it than we would be about kind of massive amounts of demand from somewhere else is because it sits so nicely with solar. So the and should we just do the idiot explanation for why Let's do it. Mainly for me, which is the it's very hot in the middle of the day. Your peak temperatures are in the middle of the day in the afternoon and conveniently that tends to be because the sun is shining most at that time of day, so you get your you get most from your solar at the same time as you need most cooling. And so that when you plot them as curves, they really do basically mirror each other. Maybe with a small battery There's bit of a tail as well because air conditioning tends to run until people Right. Kinda go to sleep and then that's kind of where the batteries can kick in and provide a little bit. But yeah, there's there's kind of there's a bit of a a national psyche about air conditioning that somehow like a like it's a it's wasteful use of energy. And the reality is actually we're gonna have a lot of solar Yeah. In the middle of summer. So you're just finding good uses of that light cooling buildings Yeah. Hey, that's a good idea. But it's also still a good idea to do other passive cooling Of course. Just like every other sensible hot country on Earth has always done, and we can learn from that too. Okay. So let's move from the sort of peak of summer. Let's talk about electricity emissions from last year. So last year in your report, we saw emissions not falling because gas generation rose to cover nuclear outages and constrained wind. Given that we've kind of got this variability going on and it's hard to kind of know exactly when we'll say lose nuclear for a period of time or lose interconnection for a period of time, what do you think about having things like gas as a strategic reserve? So the concept that we have a non normal year, we have large outages, could we have gas sat there as a strategic reserve to cover a sort of terawatt hour shortfall? I think strategic reserve takes us into of how would you fund it territory. So I'll stay away from that because again, not my job. Yeah. Definitely government's job. But the concept of having gas left on the system to do emergency system services is one that is factored in to how we've thought about our system model. For the seventh carbon budget, when we started commissioning that work, it was after the Ukraine crisis, and there was a lot of interest in system security. And one of the things that that particular run of our power system model does is that it looks at multi seasonal security. Therefore, we've got quite a bit of gas in that model right through the 2030s and then it's abated later. And I think there's some unabated in as well just for you turn it on from time to time for very, very rare events by that time, but it's there. On the gas point more generally, we need to go much faster at thinking about the technologies that can abate gas. And what I really wanted to say and answer this question is, there's something about comparing technologies going on at the moment, like is is an offshore wind farm cheaper than a gas plant, cheaper than a gas plant with carbon capture and storage on it? Cheaper than a battery and solar? Should we do big or small? You know, and there tends to be this desire to compare one type of power plant against another when actually what you're looking for is the whole system outcome. And the great thing about the UK and working here is that we have a something like a fifty fifty energy system, and I've always I think I said this last time, we've got some big kit. We've got nukes. We've got interconnectors. We've got offshore wind farms. Massive, great, big transmission connected generation doing big stuff. We've got people who are buying electric vehicles, batteries, companies doing innovation on the demand side, loads of whizzy demand that stuff. And then we also have a mixed power system. So we've got almost every kind of technology, you know. And if you think about hydro, for example, we've got everything from, like, big mountain sort of water through to, like, very very small other forms of storage, like, in someone's home. I I don't think we should be comparing technologies. It's like comparing apples and pears. We should have a resilient mixed energy system. From the climate change committee's point of view, the worry in the power system is flex is technologies that can provide flexible system services, different kinds of batteries, maybe hydro, maybe gas with CCS on it or gas with hydrogen. I think that's the bit of the power market where we haven't yet seen enough investment in that system service and we haven't answered all the questions there. And that's where we have said more work needed, please, and thank you. Yeah. I think it's a really interesting part. Right? Because you're you're sort of saying from an ideological point of view, we're not sort of just one solution is the only way forward. I think it might surprise people to hear that the CCC has gas sort of within their Shall we add that to the list of things that people get wrong about the climate change commission? We could bring that back into question one. But I think it would surprise some people. Some people would say, oh, I wouldn't expect gas to kind of be in their plans, but you're saying, actually from a resilience point of view, when you get these types of weather, this sorts of weather pattern coming through, you can run your gas for a period of time. And that's not about, you're not trying to run gas all the time, you're thinking about system resilience. And then when you're sort of counting the sort of tonnes of carbon emission at the end, if you run your gas for a short period of time to get you through this resilience period, that is carbon emissions which we're trying to avoid, but that's not the same as baseload gas running No. All year in twenty twenty six, twenty twenty And we should be clear that the ambition needs to be to decarbonize that gas. And in particular, if we've got it on doing lots of flex system services, then we do need more investment in carbon capture and storage. That is the bit, like I said, that we are concerned about. We do need to see whether we can abate with hydrogen. We do need battery technology that can kind of expand the number of days where we don't have high wind out past the famous sort of ten days, two weeks mark. Yeah. We need interconnection. We need all of these things and more investment in them. But I think we would rapidly lose the argument about decarbonizing the economy if we couldn't do the job of keeping the system secure as well. Absolutely. And you can have that bit of gas on whilst the economy is transitioning to kind of protect us from what technology can't yet do. Yeah. Okay. Well, let's let's move a little bit from technology then to bills because bills is kind of always a hot topic and is pretty much exactly what you're talking about with that answer, which is can we keep the economy going whilst making the transition. So we just had AR seven has been been done. We've got AR eight coming and these are the allocation rounds where effectively GB governments purchases renewables to come onto the system. Now much like with EVs and batteries on homes, sort of the upfront cost is is where all the money goes and it's not like running a gas boiler where there's a smaller upfront cost and then a sort of running cost of these things. Yeah. With with offshore wind or with onshore wind now and solar, we have to put a lot of that money in right at the start. When we make this transition, we have the system as it is today and yet we're trying to put in these big chunks of money to get this investment today. How can we do that but also protect consumers from a bills perspective? Because that that feels like a really hard challenge. Yes. Let's start with how we put together the analysis. There's something that gets missed quite a lot when people are asking about the costs of doing net zero that we have to do quite a lot of investment, including in the energy system regardless. So we start with a baseline where we run forward today's world and work out the costs of it and what we'd need to do to invest in the economy. And I'm going to get the number wrong, but it's something like six point nine trillion pounds worth of investment that needs to go into the economy, capital investment from now to twenty fifty for just like business as usual. If we were keeping the world as it is to replace cars, to replace heating systems, what we then do is work out the additional costs and the savings of making that technology replacement clean. And that is what goes into our overall assessment of the cost of net zero. So it costs about four billion pounds additional a year from twenty twenty five to two thousand and fifty to do that economic investment in a way that is consistent with the carbon budgets. However, when you look at it over time, a lot of that capital investment is front loaded. And so really, we're talking about a decade of investment into the power sector and to buildings in particular. And once people have those technologies in their homes and in the economy, you get savings starting to roll through from about two thousand forty onwards. And if you include things like improved air quality and health outcomes, those savings start in like twenty in the twenty thirties. I think it's twenty thirty five. So really, it's about how can you drag forward those operational savings into a financing model or to make the case for investment upfront now to get people to to do that when they need to replace their technology. And that's what market design is about. At the moment, what we've done is finance all of that through a series of levies that come off the electricity bill. Our argument would be you need to move those levies into taxation or maybe onto gas. We've modelled it both ways, decision for government that gets the electricity price down. Because the electricity price is lower, you can start to finance the operational savings, you get business models coming forward in the private sector to help households and large businesses make those investments, so the private market can do more of that. Otherwise, you will start to need, like, state support for helping particular groups or particular businesses make that investment. That was a really long answer to your question, but I suppose in short, the economic long term case for this is very obvious. Yeah. It is about trying to maximise the operational savings by making electricity cheap so that you can then get financing models for the capital investment And you can more easily take that risk. And as government, the job is then to, I guess, do the stuff that the market won't do or prioritize whichever groups or businesses you think are right. And that is where that's the best use of kind of public money. Yeah. Does that make sense? Yeah. I think so. So it's kinda saying there's a lot of money that has to go in. Yeah. But when we're trying to not pay for it all at once. So we try and smooth it out over these sort of contractual schemes Yeah. Things like contracts for difference. I know asked about contracts for difference. I've just remembered. Yeah. I'll do But but yeah. So so you have like these these these schemes like contracts for difference where the the cost is not all in year one, but it's gonna spread on over to twenty years. And then you're saying, that's great but that also assumes that we're getting utilization, we're getting people, we're getting demand to increase, we're starting to electrify the the economy and some of those schemes could be quite bad if we don't find a way to get people to use electricity and to start being flexible in terms of how they use it. And so the sort of you're trying to say there's there's two things that we need to do. We both need to make sure all of that cost doesn't come in year one because that would scare everyone off using electricity but needs to be smoothed out over twenty years. But two, we also need to make sure that the high cost that exists today because of policy choices that have been taken also need to be thought about so that we can encourage people to get bring their demand to the electricity system. Yeah. If you think about a world where a lot of this is a higher, at least for now, and if you've ever tried to build a new gas fired power station in the current circumstances, that is probably at least as expensive as building a wind farm. But nevertheless, generally speaking, we've been talking about higher capital cost technologies with big savings attached to them. And so it's about smoothing that CapEx investment and and a world of then a much more fixed price world where you're not depending on a volatile fuel. So you can do that with fixed price mechanisms like the contract for difference auction, which pays a predictable return for this new asset that's going into an unpredictable for what it is old fashioned market that I guess hasn't caught up with the qualities of wind. And you're kind of smoothing that investment risk to get low risk, low cost investors to to put their money into that kind of infrastructure. I think it works the same at a household level, you know. Ideally, you want energy suppliers, mortgage company providers, private finance for households that are able to pay to be able to finance that heat pump or that EV because they can see a return on the investment. So that it's it's that sort of stuff that the government needs to think about market enabling for very different kinds of technology. Stepping way back from that, I think this is also something we said in the progress report. The focus for the last ten years has been on the power sector and on supply of clean electricity. Great, good, but what about demand? And if we if we had to prioritize anything, if we were forced to choose, I think we need a lot more focus on demand. Yep. If you match supply and demand, it's easier and cheaper to invest in supply as well because you're not overbuilding, there's not an excess in the market, this is like very basic economics. Yeah. And I think we are prioritizing those business models on the demand side. Yeah. If you look at like emissions by sectors, like power has done a very good job of falling quite quickly. If you look at sectors like transport, it hasn't fallen as fast but the emissions from transport are still huge. Yes. And so if you can sort of nudge people into electrifying demand from the transport side, that has both a lovely benefit of better utilisation of the power system, but also you can reduce emissions in the transport sector, which is the Yeah. But then again, your government and you look at the sectors for demand and you're thinking about where do I prioritise maybe public money as opposed to getting the private market right, I'm not sure you would pick EVs as where you go because the cost of an EV is plummeting so fast, it's about to be cheaper than an internal combustion engine vehicle. So that capital cost problem is is going away because the market is solving it. Yeah. We still need to crack on. We still need, I think, be making electric vehicles in this country, but, like, it's pretty clear in the global race what the winner's gonna be. It'll happen anyway. Yeah. Yeah. You know, what you might do as government is is choose to help people with the upfront cost of electrifying heat or help industries that are thinking about electrifying their industrial heat where there is still a more expensive technology to buy even with clear operational savings once you've got it. So like there's a There's a example of that, right, in Grangemouth Yes. At the moment. That's the five hundred million pounds support to help the plant move essentially to an electrified process. Yeah. And is that the type of investment you'd like to see government make? We said so in the seventh come budget advice. So, you know, our job is and this is something else people often get wrong or where where we have to go back and forth and why we said the things we said. We are responsible for the overall national economy, but within that, there are places, industries, technologies, will be more impacted or more benefited by the transition, just as in any economic transition. And in the carbon budget advice, we pointed to the refineries, to steelmaking, kind of places like Port Talbot, and actually to agriculture and places like where I live, rural communities, where the government's going to need to do some specific thinking about the industries and communities that are in those places and making sure they're supported through the change. Grangemouth is one example. We talked specifically about Port Talbot in that advice. Yeah. And that's maybe somewhere where people talk a lot about say offshoring of demand and how it's going to other countries and we were starting to lose industry from GB. It feels like there's a double sided benefit to this, which is one, if you can get people to electrify, it gets demand onto your system, which is what we need. But the same token, it's also a very local story, one about jobs, one about industry and GB, which is something that feels at the heart of this whole transition. We do try and talk about the stuff that isn't quite our job when we've got evidence for it. I think it's really important to know that it's not an abstract thing in a spreadsheet. There's a there's a real change for real people in, like, all over the country, including, like like I said, places where I live, rural, urban, we need we need to be thoughtful about that. So I think we always try to do that in the advice that we give. In terms of offshoring of emissions, it's a lively debate. We've looked at it because that's our job. Another thing people get wrong about the climate change committee is that is that we're sort of seen as this campaign group for net zero. And actually, job is to look at all of the independent evidence out there and give a genuinely independent expert view on what's possible according to what the government has said they want to do, which is the twenty fifteen net zero target. The reason that's important is we have looked at this question of whether or not net zero has in any way driven a manufacturing change. What we can see in the data is definitely there's something about energy prices there. You'd have to be mad not to know that high energy prices has a knock on for your industry Yeah. And for your economy. That's what I spent fifteen years of my life doing. That and grid connections, I'm just gonna get that one in there as well. You need the kind of infrastructure if you want factories and jobs in manufacturing. But something that also seems to have happened alongside is just a general restructuring of the manufacturing sector in the UK. So we think that manufacturing GVA has gone up, but it's in high value, less energy intensive manufacturing. That isn't necessarily bad for manufacturing output in the economy, but it's got a very place based consequence if you're thinking about key industries, steel, refineries. So I I think, again, this is something to governments wider priorities. It's really not a decarbonization question. It's more what is your industrial strategy? Is there a reason to invest in these places and these industries because of, I don't know, like geopolitics, trades, jobs, some other priority? And if that was a decision government made, we think about how to accommodate that in in advising them on the targets. Does that make sense? I think so. Yeah. And for a for a non economist, a GVA? Oh, yeah. Gross value added, and it it it's a measure of a different way of measuring economic growth other than GDP Gross domestic product, which is how we kind of look at the macro economy in the UK. GVA can kind of tell you what the regional more local output is. From particular sites From particular sites or particular sectors. So you can see manufacturing growth. I think it's a it's ongoing work, I think, one to bottom out exactly what's going on there. Very good. Takes me to my final question, which is what is the contrarian view that you hold about energy? I think demand is as important or if not more important right now than supply, although that used to be contrarian and it's now just like where everyone is. Possibly more contrarian or unexpected given my job. There is a lot of debate at the moment that pitches affordability and that zero against one another. And my personal view is that, actually, we need to solve the costs of this for people if we want to stay on the road to net zero. They're not two different questions. They're often the same question we're asking, and a lot of the solutions can solve those two problems. The more I suppose even more controversially is I have never felt particularly strongly about feeling some sort of moral high ground about whether or not people agree with me that climate change is happening, and it's a really serious problem, and to worry to the same degree that I do in my job about, you know, the kids in the future, and and I I don't think that's necessary. I think most people, including me, some weeks are getting through the week wondering what's in the fridge and if they can feed their kids. Yeah. Or like and and trying to get on with their jobs. And I think it is okay for people to get technologies or want these technologies because they are cheaper and offering them a better service. And I think that actually should be more of a focus than what we're doing. Yeah. Don't get me wrong, it's very hot in there. Think we should also be making the science argument. But I just think we shouldn't In terms of politically rely on that. Yeah. Skating where the puck is going, I think your mindset is in absolutely the right place of this feels like, although people accept climate change science, that's a broad statement, maybe that should go in the contrarian view section, that that it feels like so much of the debate that's coming over the next five or ten years is gonna be all based around that cost element. I think it's it's hard out there for people and I saw that in my last job, you know, particularly in the middle of the Ukraine crisis when we heard what was coming in for from call centers where people are unable to pay their bills. What you know factually about polling on climate and the environment is that one of the great things about being in this country is people do understand that climate change is happening. They understand the science and broadly, they think climate change is something government should be doing more about. That's fairly consistent, seventy, eighty percent of the public. But it it kinda moves up and down the priority list in relation to how the economy is doing. If you cannot feed your kids that week or you're worried about cost or you're worried about your energy bill, then it is a very difficult thing to ask anyone to put in a more expensive technology. Yeah. Right? That's just It's happening. That and and I think we should be extremely careful never to do that and to understand that that is a really hard ask for a lot of people in this country. It's a fascinating it's a fascinating space. I hope people listening to this have both enjoyed that in terms of the things that people get wrong about the CCC. That list that list could now run to five Yeah. I think. But also these these these sort of the the interweaving of of politics, cost, economics, and just the fundamentals like climate science as well. It's a fascinating space to be in. Emma, thank you very much for coming in and sharing your your views and and essentially where where you see the country going. It's your second episode. We'll have to get you back on for a third soon enough. Thank you. I'm just proud that I think I've got a mention of beech trees into a transmission podcast unusual. That's perfect. We we love beech trees here. We can we can have much more of that in the future. Thank you.