The Future Of The Gas Network - Cadent

I'm your host, Ed Porter. Welcome back to Transmission. A gas pipe laid today is built to last for up to 100 years. But the demand for the gas running through it is meant to fall long before that. So what actually happens to the gas distribution network as how we use that network changes? This isn't a cost comparison between electrification and gas for heat, and it isn't an emissions assessment. It's an engineering view of how the gas network actually works, why it's built that way, and how it changes as its purpose shifts. Sam Wilson, director of energy system operations, works on Cadent Gas Distribution Network. In this conversation, he takes us from the gas molecule's origin to the boiler at the end of the street. And what happens to the pipe afterwards? Want to know how heat electrification could reshape power demand in GB? Ask Ko, Modo Energy's AI analyst. Sign up is free and link is in the description. Let's jump in. Hello, Sam. Welcome to transmission. Good to be here. Thank you. And as ever, let's get straight into the detail. So what does everyone get wrong about what Cadent does. I say there's a couple. There's one for the gas industry which is the smell of gas. It doesn't actually smell like that. Most people know that. But when the smell is added, it's probably a question that geeks of the audience will probably ask the question of, okay, so essentially that it's not, uh, it's not odourised as it comes into the country. So LNG or off the North Sea, whatever that source may be, and that mercaptan, which is the thing you can smell is the is the chemical that's added as it gets depressurized and gets into the distribution network. Oh, so from the transmission to the distribution network, that's the point where the smell gets added. But if you just smell gas at the transmission, it's not odourised. So, uh, you wouldn't smell. So how would you find. It? You have monitors and various safety precautions around that. The smell is added for the purpose of the general public, for the safety precaution that you can. Yeah. Smell it in properties on the street and all those precautions. But in the processing element, if you think about it that way, they'll have controls as monitoring sensors to identify any leaks. Interesting. Well, that is something I would have got wrong immediately. Um, and then you said there were two things. Yeah. I suppose with Cadent, who I obviously worked for and not just Cadent, all the distribution companies, is that people think we sell gas. This is probably a hangover from the good old days of British Gas, and where they used to do everything. Come and fit your fire and sell the gas and all the rest of it. That's now changed and that's divided up more cadent, our distribution company. So we own the infrastructure that transports the gas. We don't sell the gas that's within the pipelines. That's a shipper activity, which is a separate market altogether. Okay. And a shipper is someone that people would know. A shipper is who you pay your bill to. Okay. So that might be like a British Gas. Yes Chris. Yeah obviously it's loads on loads on the market, but there'll be the people that will take the money. Clearly we contribute to the bill, but it's a fixed number which is for the maintenance and the transportation. It's not done on the, you know how much gas you consume directly. So that's a common misconception. Let's say. Okay. And I sort of taking this one step further, I would like to do that journey from uh, like gas molecule to like home home boiler. So if we start at either and I can give you two options here. An LNG tanker, uh, coming in and sort of providing gas that way, or from one of our gas fields, like, like where does that molecule go? How does it get to the home? It goes in a journey, that's for sure. So it depends on the source, clearly. But we have a number of different sources where we get gas from. One is the North Sea. That can be the traditional form, if you like. That's been historic for G.B., which has been directly from our fields. Or it can be um, via the Norway and through the pipeline. And you will also get it from LNG in various places, which is diversified more recently due to various economic pressures that are well known. So they'll come in there for interconnectors or LNG tanker in. We have a number of places around the country where that can happen, and that that'll go into what's called the transmission system. That's a high pressure system which transports the gas around the country. And think of that like the motorway. That's the big trunk sections. Transports lots, lots of high speed that will then go into off takes, which then linked to our network and the other networks around the country where there's there's four companies that do that, and we have 49 off-takes and we'll reduce the pressure and then we continue to move it around the country. Some of that we'll drive to that point to our previous conversation. So there's. So there's 49 points of the country where gas goes from this high pressure system to the pressure, the pressure that you run the distribution network. On Cadent Network. There's more than that, wider than that. So for context, Cadent are the largest. It's often talked about as there's eight networks in the UK that distribution networks Cadent has four. And we have essentially from um north London. So the Thames is roughly the dividing line up to the north of England. Um, and then SGN have Scotland and southern England, whereas Wales & West cover the west, as the name suggests, and there is Northern Gas, which have essentially the north of England. Okay. So their distribution networks and we take gas from the transmission system that is owned by National Gas. That's a separate company. So we're into a distribution network. What sort of pressure is this working at? It would depend on the offtake and where you're at. Normally at the high pressure systems this is the transmission of the spike about you're around 90 bar. I'd say it's an average a very high pressure. 90 times atmospheric pressure. Yeah. Very very significant. Yeah. And then you'll get it reduced down. It'll go on scales probably from about 5040. And then it'll gradually go down or pressure to its system as you distribute it out to where it's needed. So what. Sorry. What does that mean. So so you bring it in at like 50 to 40 at these locations where you're transferring over, and then it kind of just finds its way out through the network and gradually the pressure drops. No, we'll manage that through pressure control. So sometimes we'll be transporting that over significant distances still. So you'll you'll have a network which is fed from multiple different angles if you like, which builds a resilience into the supply. And we'll move gas around the network, or we'll pressurize network to have temporary storage or longer term storage. So we control how that happens. It's not sort of a natural, um, consumption LED that does happen further down the system, which I can talk about. But at that stage it's us controlling the pressure. Where do we think we need it? Where's the demand and controlling that for our sites? When you say you control the pressure, what does that does that mean? Like you have like a, almost like a big gas tanker where you can inject or withdraw or is it something more complicated? No, I think if you think of it, don't think of it as a tank. I think as the pipelines, as a tanker, almost. So you can do something called line packing. Line packing is where you increase or reduce the pressure in a pipeline to meet a temporary demand. There's a form of storage that can be for a very long period of time, or it can be in today. So to to meet sort of the breakfast demand or the the evening demand, however that plays out. So we control the pressures in that way. And our um, above ground installations. AGI is one of those nice acronyms for the gas industry. That is an area where you will have pressure reduction facility, where you will reduce the pressure gradually. You deal with the changes in temperature and all those sorts of things. You meet with the gas to make sure it's controlled odor ies and all those things to make sure it's ready to distribute out around our network. Essentially, when I think about the power network, I think about sort of frequency and voltage and things like reactive power, like from the gas network. Is it it's kind of it must be more complicated than just the pressure. You're looking at things like temperature. Yeah. Temperature change as you release, compress or release pressure. There's temperature if you have to worry about. We do preheating and things of the gas network to make sure we don't have excessive temperatures, which can obviously fatigue assets. So there's lots of things. There's probably a whole podcast there to are there, but there's because they're quite complex sites, but there's quite a few of them around the country and that are there I suppose is the is the exit ramp from the motorway. You're then going to go on to the A roads and the B roads and the, you know, getting down to your, to your boiler to use your reference, your question. And that is sort of that's the distribution world. That's what Cadent do. That's what the other gas distribution networks do. And we'll move the gas around. On higher pressure areas. And then we'll gradually reduce it as it gets to the of the end user. Some of those end users are industrial and commercial, so they'll perhaps take it at higher pressure because they use a lot of it. And we have about 40,000 industrial and commercial connections in our network. So that's quite varied. Some are PowerGen for example. Some are sugar factories, brick factories, all those big ticket industrial um items. And obviously some will be end user domestic boiler at the end of the street and the pressure reduce write down. So typically in a distribution. So at the end of that cycle you'll get to around 30 millibars of pressure, which is obviously a fraction of what we receive it at. And that's done through various pressure reduction processes and what we call governors that are positioned around the network. These are the little sort of green buildings people will see when they drive down the street. That's a pressure reduction location where. It's called a. Governor. A governor is what we would call it. So governing the pressure of the network and that will reduce it down. and that's where you get into more. To your question earlier, really, that's pressurizing network to meet the demand. And as the as the pressure is drawn off for a consumption, we'll make sure it's topped up if you like to, to ensure security of supply. Okay. And one of the big differences right, is that in the electricity system it gives you ignore batteries and pumped hydro. Like there's no storage of it. So if it if it sort of from one second to another, there's not that sort of ability to have that storage. But the line pack is different in gas. Right. So you have you have energy that's kind of stored in the system. So to give people kind of a concept of like how much energy there is in the pipes, the load across GB, like if you were able to withdraw energy from it without getting to pressures that were too low, how long could you kind of service the demand in GB from just Linpack? This is going down a real rabbit hole. And geeky question. I think the short, short answer is that one of the benefits of the gas industry, and I think one of the things that is a challenge, It's obviously a known challenge about decarbonizing heat is how peaky the demand can be and how different it is seasonally. So obviously for the summer we've just had we've got very low demand apart from where and I'm talking about a distribution level. So where it comes into um, power generation, that's a different thing. That's a different type of demand. But when you get into a domestic and more smaller industrial commercial, we have a very low demand on the network, just. Like hot water pretty much. Yeah, hot water. And you'll have small industrial premises, you know, a chippy, for example. It's always going to use gas to a point. Um, but that's a very low demand. We'll have a very small usage of our network in the peak winters. It can be ten, 12, 15 times fold what that consumption could be. So our network is designed to to match all of those things. Some of that will be Linpack. But we don't tend to do that because we don't really need to at this time. So we'll do um, forecasting of usage and then we'll book that gas from the transmission system. Um, and then that'll be brought on to network as we need it. We'll always have capacity there that we've got headroom, that if there's any spikes of demand, then we can cover it. But we'll manage that progress. So it's not like it's permanently charged. It's one way of thinking about it. It's not like that. Um, we can do that. And we do do that in certain, um, certain locations. We have certain assets which are strategically placed where we know we can store gas there and that, um, can reach large parts of the network or that asset suited to that type of capability. But typically we will manage pressures at a point where it doesn't stress the asset. There's no risk of leakage unnecessarily because of high pressures, for example. So you're not trying to use Linpack as a sort of daily storage. It's just it's an option of the system. I'd say we would do it for daily storage. We wouldn't do it for let's store gas for the next month. Okay. So think about it more as an intraday type of way of managing demand. Um, not so much a longer term. It can be done that way. And it has been done historically that way. It's just the market condition right now. It doesn't lend itself to us doing that one day to do that. And then if we go to the thing that people will know, uh, sadly, the thing that people will know most from gas networks. Outside of the kind of engineering reality of the distribution and transmission network is, people digging up pipes like like what is what is going on there? Why are we having to do so much work on the gas network? Yeah. Good question. We're the sort of silent service, like all utilities where we supply gas, and people really realize how it gets there and all the processes that go into it, um, apart from when they're stuck in traffic lights and, you know, they're cursing, cursing the name. So a lot of the time when you see a cadent working or any gas distribution network, it's normally proactive maintenance. So if you're seeing yellow sticks of pipe you've curled up on a trailer or on the street, that is proactive replacement of an aging asset. So unlike other sectors, uh, which are in the media quite a lot at the moment, we've had quite a extensive proactive intervention program where we we have a risk profile that we replace assets at periodic basis. And that would be with typically it would be old cast iron assets, which are perhaps 70, 80, 100 years old. I was going to ask when, when, when do those this cast iron pipes go in? Varies, but a lot of them will be of that range. Yeah. And some of the ticket in London where we are today, some of the infrastructure will be over 150 years old and fantastic engineering of its time because it's lasting well today. But clearly that needs to be um, we need we assess that regularly and if it needs to be replaced we will do so. So typically what you'll see for a sustained period of time anywhere. If this traffic lights up for a period and it's periodically moving down the street and you know it wasn't there yesterday, but it's there now guys out there, that's because we're doing, um, proactive replacement of our assets. So that'll be will replace the pipe a new one goes in. That's the main. And the service to the property. Right. That's with polyethylene pipe, uh, form of plastic. And that's good for 80 to 100 years. Okay. So we're there, we'll do it at once and we leave again. Hopefully you won't see us again. There's obviously some times where we respond to leakage as well. That's few and far between. I think predominantly what people will see is proactive replacement activity. Okay. And I think I think there's a really interesting question sort of to come, I'd like to get onto at some point, which is around that's a 70, 80, 90 year asset, let's say. We don't necessarily in lots of these streets go for that long. But let's, let's let's hold on to that question, because I think we'll come on to it in a little bit. But first I want to start just slightly higher up the network. So you are transporting gas, but the network is also thinking about injecting other things into the network. So the distribution network is not just a purely exporting process. You are having people who are injecting gas in. So what are you trying to inject into the network? How do you think about it? Yeah, that's a good point. And it's a it's a different usage of the infrastructure but a good one. So we can a lot of the infrastructure that we've got in place is good for, as we've just said, many, many years to come. That applies to all tiers of our infrastructure, but particularly the distribution, lower pressure tier stuff. And what's traditionally happened is it's coming in from the North Sea and those those sort of pressure reduction processes we spoke about a moment ago and it gets to the end user. So it's a one way flow if you think about it that way. What we are seeing now is a real advantage of that infrastructure, and where it's positioned is that we can incorporate in new production forms of gas that are very economical and green, and that is in many cases biogas and biomethane is production of gas from waste. And that can be different forms of waste. It can be food waste, agricultural waste, sewage and various other forms, which you can then ultimately produce biogas from. There's a great podcast on your show. Philipp Lukas is on. He does a great explanation of it, so I'll probably leave my part there, but reference that one for more information on biogas. Well, maybe maybe let's put a percentage on it. So like do you have a rough idea of like what percentage of the gas going into your network is coming from biogas? At the moment it's quite a small percentage, around 2 to 3%. Okay. Again it's one of those. What's the usage at the time. So in the summer it would be a higher percentage. In the winter it would be very small proportion. And in like 20 years time if there's more biogas in the system but perhaps lower demand, it could be a bigger percentage as well. Absolutely. Yeah. So if you think of today we've in GB we use about 700 terawatt hours of gas. We believe that the capacity for 2050 is to have over 120 produced by biogas. And if you believe the projections that gas consumption will drop generally obviously they'll they'll meet somewhere. And that become quite a big percentage of our usage in the UK. So it's a real opportunity to utilize waste which ultimately will be creating methane and harmful gases. And it's it's current disposal methods and create gas from it that can be used. And there's some real nice advantages about a nice circular economy from farmland being used for rotational crop which is then produced. Yeah, gas gets produced and then yeah, the first orders can be used in the farm. So again Philipp's covered this really well. So I'll leave it there. But what that presents for networking corporation perspective is it's a different way of treating where the gas comes from. So these plants want to produce they want to inject it into the network. Um these would normally be on agricultural settings. Not always, but typically they're quite rural. And the gas consumption isn't typically in those locations. And we need to get it to a place where it needs to be used. Yeah. So we need to think about how we move the gas around our network. And that needs some adaption fairly minor. So it's about compression and how we put gas back the other way. Push it back up the line if you like a different pressure. Um, and we're adapting network to suit that sort of modern use of it. So you can't just sort of like pump it into one place and it'll work itself out. Sometimes, and that's the ideal solution. But a lot of the time that, you know, the network isn't always perfect in that location, you just need to push it to where it's needed. Um, okay. So use a crude crude. Obviously, I think we, uh, that's one of the things we need to do to facilitate bio plants coming onto our network and then being available to, to to to consumers. Um, so that's a big one. Yeah. Um, hydrogen's another one. So hydrogen's been talked about a lot in a lot of the future energy scenarios that necessarily will put it out. And it's talked about regularly in government. Mhm. This has been on a bit of a journey. It's fair to say I think at one point it was this was the answer to gas. The gas network would be all hydrogen before you know it. I think the reality is that's probably not true in the short term, but it's a really nice way of two things, really decarbonizing the industry. So it's a nice way of offsetting large demands in sort of industrial hubs. Yeah. Using hydrogen instead of natural gas. And there's also a way where you can utilize our existing infrastructure to blend it into natural gas. And what we see and what's done in Europe typically, and is growing elsewhere, is you can inject about up to 20% of that gaseous mix of what's held in the pipe can be hydrogen. And if you do that, there's no adaption to anyone's boilers or anything. No one will notice a difference, basically. So what you could do if you want, if you had hydrogen available to do so was blend that into the network. It would just be part of the way the system works and you decarbonize, you know, crudely, 20% would be produced off of the gas network. Now we need to face into that. Hydrogen isn't readily available right now, and it's quite costly depending on how it's produced and all noise variables. Um, we see that one opportunity would be to grow that market to meet those other demands are industrial and all those things that we could produce a market here using our existing infrastructure to get it into the gas sector. Conversations are ongoing on that. So that's still emerging, as is it the solution. There's there's regulatory hurdles there. There's the health and safety directive to to bring on the journey with us. And they've been really engaged in this and we work with them really closely. But that's one opportunity as well to sort of mix another, bring another gas into the mix, so to speak. So, um, what we want to do, though, really, is make sure that the world class infrastructure we've got is utilized and doesn't need to be ripped out and replaced for something that's very similar. The value of the gas network is that it's been invested in for a very long time. If you look at the safety performance, the reliability statistics, it's second to none really, which is a world class infrastructure. How can we utilize that in the energy transition. And I think biogas and then hydrogen are a nice way of going on that journey with minimal adoption. Um, this is I think it's where it gets quite interesting. And listeners will be, um, wanting me to say certain things, and I will I will just make sure we kind of go through them. So, uh, you're right on the hydrogen side that the cost is, is bigger, potentially hydrogen versus gas, depending on what your gas price is. Obviously it's an important part, but something like 5 to 10 times more expensive. The where industry thinks hydrogen can be used well today feels like it's in it's in that industrial use that that feels where to kind of try and read the room of where industry wants to see that hydrogen being used. It feels like it's much more let's use it first in the industries where we can start to sort of decarbonize those directly with hydrogen. That feels like it's much more the go to solution rather than injecting it into into the pipes. Uh, even though like that is possible, one thing that people will have heard and because with this is much more an engineering, uh, episode rather than a cost episode. People will talk about like hydrogen molecules being smaller than natural gas and therefore like the potential for um, to to lose the molecule is higher. Like, how do you think about that from a leakage. You mean when you say lose? Yeah, exactly. Sorry. Yeah. No. There is there's different considerations about how we would treat it as a product. We're transporting our network. And that comes down to how it reacts in our in our assets. So how we produce pressure and all those things I was talking about a moment ago. And also if it leaks, how do we respond? Because ultimately kind of providing the emergency service that if there's a leak from gas on our network, we will respond. So it just acts differently to your very point. And we have gone through, um, a full review of all of our processes and procedures and our asset base to see what the impact would be and how we would address that. And that's what the HSE involvement is I just referenced. We're going through that with them and talking through it, and that can be mitigated certainly at the 20% blend that we've seen today. I think to the industrial piece, you're right. And we've got big projects looking at how we can use infrastructure to get hydrogen to the industrial users. And that definitely is sort of the short term. I think reality is that on our network we've got 40,000 industrial users. They're not, you know, strategically placed in a nice little hub. Unfortunately, they're all over our network. And how do you address all of those? Is the bigger question. So I think we can take the the big ticket ones. You can pop up the blast furnaces and the, you know, the gas producers, sugar factories, that sort of stuff. You can tie them together in a network and that's a good solution. Yeah. How do we get to the rest? It's the bigger question, isn't it? And the gas network is already connected to that. So how can that be utilized? Well, and how do we try and take some of those significant loads and process loads off electricity grid to help that transition and reduce that burden? So there's a journey to be had there, and I think my personal view would be that we need to make sure it's a holistic view of all the options on the table. And I think hydrogen is one that should be considered. Yeah, but like any emerging solution or technology, there's a cost gap and we need to address that. So economies of scale I think are a way of doing. I think that's the thing that I'm I'm excited about. So um, if you can use something like hydrogen to work with a very high heat industrial process and it can be successful. That's something that you can kind of see and get excited about. I. There's a there's a, there's a you reference Niso to the National Energy System operator. Earlier they talk about these pathways of how the world might look in the future. And some are slightly, slightly more molecule based and some are slightly more electron based. And I know electrons don't, uh, travel travel down wires at the same speed, um, as electricity. Uh, but before someone comments that on YouTube, because it will uh, but but there is this kind of somewhat of a battle between the two, and I definitely see these some sort of high heat industries definitely needing it. I when I feel like, uh, the chippy example from earlier, I wonder whether that's something where we could actually rely more on the sort of electrification process. Yeah. Um, but but just so then some sort of move on from the other, other fuel area or other fuel options I'm really interested in, like how you in that electrification or electron versus molecule debate. As you said, you're putting in these. This network has been around for a very long time, has a good record, um, and potentially has like another 70 or 80 years. And yet we are trying to bring down the number of gas boilers in homes, um, by electrifying that heating. And for me, I have a heat pump. I very much like it. And it's kind of it begs the question, right. So if you have 100 homes in a village and you start to lose a couple to heat pumps, you go, oh, that's fine. Like it's kind of the same thing it always was. But as that carries on going, I imagine, okay, you lose 25, maybe it's still okay. But imagine a world where 90 go like, do you still think about servicing that village in the same way? How are you set up to deal with the the engineering logistics of changing demand on the. Yeah, it'll evolve owns it. And I think the way that the policy is set at the moment, that would be quite organic. To your point, that'd be on customer preference about how they want to transition. And there's obviously mechanisms to try and encourage people on that journey, which we fully support. And I think that will lead to probably a reduction of connections to the gas network. What we see in our statistics is that a lot of people want to keep their gas connection as well. So there's sort of like a crossover period here where you're going to have heat pumps and probably a gas connection, and then there's a journey to go on there. Do you mean a gas connection, as in, like they still have a gas meter or do you. Or do you mean like the pipe still goes into the house, but they don't have a gas meter? Well, it's probably the former because there is a requirement. I cannot get too geeky, but if the meter isn't there for a certain period time, we need to remove the service from the from the property. From a safety perspective, if it's not being used, it's just not necessary asset there. And that's that's where I am. So when's when's that going to happen to my house? All right. Um, I'll let you know. We'll talk about that afterwards. But the, uh. Yeah. So when the network is transitioning and you're getting sort of services and demand dropping off, if you like, as heat pumps are fitted, um, we will remove services along that journey. There is a customer perception that we're seeing that they it's not necessarily get a heat pump, remove gas. That's not quite the customer perception journey all the time, so we need to unpick that. But that'll probably be a temporary thing. Um, and you'll get to a situation where you'll have to pick a ten house street, you'll have two that are on, and there won't be next to each other. They'll be separated. And yeah, but essentially you need the same gas infrastructure for that as you would for if everyone had gas. Right. And ultimately the we don't need to adapt our network for that, apart from perhaps the service that goes to the property which needs to be cut and removed. So we don't see that as being a big change. I think one common misconception, which perhaps unless you're opening question, is that it's a linear thing. So 20% of the domestic customers come off the gas network. It must downscale by 20%. It just doesn't work like that. From an engineering perspective. The network is so intertwined intentionally and all, and back fed and all tied in together that you can't just cut a bit off and that's that street gone because it'll have knock on effects to three streets down there on that and that on that state perhaps, for example, and each one will have its own little, um, independent situation where you need to be considerate of. So we don't see that being a thing that's going to happen anytime soon. There will naturally be a point where there's only, you know, miss begins in a cul de sac that's got a gas service til she likes it and no one else has. Yeah, that's a different thing, isn't it? But I think that journey is that 80 to 90% of people have removed their gas connection. That demands completely gone. There's no industrial load on that area. Then we would look at how will we address that. Just because from an engineering perspective, it would feel like you have these the governors, which like I know as a technical term, but to me it sounds like a really fun thing. Um, you have the governors and you have all the system that kind of is almost upstream of that. And you think, well, uh, to service that for like a smaller portion of demand, that there comes a time when you go, okay, we probably want to move the last people up. Yeah, absolutely. And we will look at that. But the thing to think about when I spoke earlier about the yellow pipe, the curly stuff that we put in the ground, that's a pretty much an installed and forget you don't need to do anything to that for next 80 years. We have a process where we drive all of our network regularly to detect leakage and advance very tiny molecules parts per million of leakage to see if there's any situation. The PE network is good — sorry, the polyethylene, yellow pipe network network is good. So it's not like we're carrying a load of opex here that we need to sort of service all this network just for that one person. Because once you're in, you're happy with that. Yeah, we're pretty much good. And, and um, and naturally as our network changes and the demand changes, our overheads will change, but that will all scale. So I think, um, we're quite away from that. I think your point is valid that we'll have to think about that if that does happen. But the proportion isn't linear and it'd be unique. One example just to bring that to life. Sorry I think yeah, sure. Help is if you have a high rise building in London, for example, and you, um, we have the same similar issue where perhaps they're only using it for cooking and lots of people have had it removed. They're on electric or they don't want the gas in the property. There's one left. But to put a high rise building riser up with a riser that goes up the side of the building, takes gas and is extremely expensive. So we would have what's called an Ng buy out scheme, where we would offer them to remove their appliance and we would pay for that adaption. Right. Because ultimately we're spending customers money. We're a regulated business and there's no value in spending tens of thousands putting a rise up for one property when you could probably adapt their stuff free of charge to the individual by spending a few thousand pounds on it. So we have processes that sort of sort of alludes to what you're talking about, but that's in quite a unique situation. But if you like that, it's almost like a case study, isn't it, about what could happen in the in the future? I think it's so fascinating that there's like this there is this network, there's this process that going on, and there's kind of these, these tipping points type thing that exist within the network maybe, maybe just got like one, one final question on this, you sort of mentioned that if you had, say three streets and you took one street out just from an engineering perspective, like does that does it? Like how does that have a knock on effect to the streets or like, does that have a knock on effect to the streets around it? You mentioned that it might do. It might do. Yeah. And sometimes we have different types of systems which are fed in different ways. So you could have a back fed system. So think of it as a simplicity a circle and the streets coming off of it. Okay. If the gas gets the main gets split here, it will just go around the other way and get to the end user. Sometimes there one way fed. So if you have particularly in smaller villages and rural locations, there'll be one pipe that will go from the governor. Your favorite. Yeah. And travel that way. If you cut it here, everyone else goes. And that's obviously not a good solution. So it could be that, um, you know, the one street no one's got gas, but two streets down, all of them have. Gas, but it has to exist because. There's no value in taking that gas out and you physically can't. So it's quite a complex piece of analysis to understand from a network perspective what adaptations would need to be made. Yeah. And it's not economical to do it very piecemeal. It needs to be on a network basis to decommission. So it's a quite a complex engineering challenge, which geeks like me like, but it does baffle the brain, I think, unless you understand how the networks construct. You, you also feel like you're talking to like an engineer from 1930 1920 who originally laid the lines. And you're trying to like sort of your you're trying to work with their plans, right? Because it's still the original piping. Yeah, I think I think you're right. And it's it's designed for resilience and it's designed to get the gas where it needs to go. And if you look at the gas networks, um, performance statistics on disruption, it's highly unlikely there have been an unplanned interruption in someone's lifetime. Mhm. That's quite an interesting statistic. Um, you may be we might be coming out and laying that yellow pipe. We might have to temporarily turn your gas off and put you back on again a couple of hours later. That's a planned intervention, okay. That happens very, very rarely, once every 80 years. But to actually be disrupted for an instance that's happened, it's extremely rare. It does happen. People damage our pipes and stuff happen, but it's extremely rare. Okay, but that's true. Network design. That's really strong. Integrated networks working well together to be resilient. But that presents a problem with what you're talking about because it's so integrated. Just because someone's come off doesn't mean you just, oh, would they take that bit off or take that bit off or take that bit off because it's all interdependent on each other. You can't be so piecemeal in terms of. Yeah, so that's the value of the network. But when you think of it from a decommissioning perspective, to my point earlier, it's not just a direct relationship. You know, 10% come off 10%. The network goes. It's not as simple as that. So what you'll see probably is a journey where there'll be probably no adaption at all to our network. Um, then all of a sudden you'll get that tipping point where actually it will be economical now and you'll start to see it tailed off. But we're a distance away from that. And that isn't something that was sort of in our plans or any of our sort of investment cycles at the moment. It's a fascinating, uh, it's a fascinating problem, genuinely, like one of those areas where the more you think about it, I'm sure that the harder it gets to to work out what the path forward looks like. And maybe let's then go to a close. So I'll ask you for a contrarian view. So what's something that you believe about energy markets that's contrarian to those around you? Contrarian I think. I think it alludes to what we just talked about, actually. So I believe that it's a it's a whole energy problem. It's not like an electricity winds or gas winds. What should we have? What should we remove. I think and I think that's emerged actually over time, even for the last five years, I think people have progressed in their thinking on that. Um, some of your previous guests — Chris Stark, for example, has talked about the the value gas brings to our infrastructure. I think it's thought about more at a power station level, which is. Right, so that there's there's power generation all over our network as well, localized power generation, which is important. There's industry all over our network, which is important as well. So I think that the intertwined nature of how how energy is consumed needs to be thought about more broadly, I think and I think that's happening, but perhaps in a more electricity biased mindset. And I think that's really understood very well. But to bring it together and I guess go back to our domestic point where we're just talking about, I think a really nice solution to this problem would be a hybrid heat pump. So if you've looked at this at all, we have a little bit. And this is essentially where you would have and it's done in someplace in Europe. You'd have an existing boiler and you'd have a heat pump as well. And they work in tandem together through smart control. So what you're basically seeing there is that the heat pump is all the heavy lifting. Really. It does all the normal the normal heating. When you get that really, really cold spike then the gas boiler would kick in and then that would take that would do like the the topping out if you like. And that would reduce the need for that really top level demand on the network. Because when you think about infrastructure, energy supply, the gas network is designed for the worst event. So we call it a 1 in 20 event. That's the worst winter in the last 20 years, essentially. Um, and that means that that usage could jump, you know, three fourfold overnight. And to build that capacity into electricity grid, which hasn't really been designed for that type of demand, it's costly and expensive. Yeah. And you could probably remove a lot of that need by just adding that or using the existing capability actually in a property of the gas boiler to, to, sort of, um, address that sort of peak and top demand. So I think a good solution would be to work together. Don't think about let's, let's I think let's remove the gas boiler. How do they work well together using existing infrastructure, using new technology and just be smarter about it. I think a definitely contrarian because I set out the, uh, electron versus molecule earlier and you were bringing them back together, but B, we did an episode with a company called Energy Nest recently that was a thermal electric, like a thermal electrical storage. And one of the kind of key selling points was you almost like, leave the boiler in. And so you have the boiler option if you need it. But you can essentially get rid of a lot of gas usage in, say, summer and put your, um, have higher electrical use in summer, which is great if you've got things like solar panel solar. Exactly. Um, yeah. So you can kind of get better usage out of your electrical, but then you don't need to design for such an aggressive peak, um, winter, because you can rely on some of the sort of 1 in 20 planning of the gas network. Yeah. Um, so, like, if you're, if you're interested in that, that sort of concept, then that's a great episode as well to to go and look for. Sounds good. And I think it's just to bring that together, hopefully with the rest of the conversation we've had. If you think about that load of the gas for domestic reducing significantly, then it really does bring in. You could green that with biomethane blending. So you really you're from a carbon perspective. You could really address it, but with a combined approach. And I think that's really valuable and a way of using existing infrastructure to get us on the journey and reduce that, that scale of investment need in electricity sector. So that would be perhaps I don't think it's a contrarian, but perhaps it's your your you and your audience. It is. But that's a really nice piece that's been tested in Europe. We should look at it more seriously. Sam, it's always a pleasure to get an engineer on. It's always a pleasure to uncover a part of the energy network that we haven't talked enough about. So thank you very much for coming on and giving us your tour on on gas networks. I've learned a lot. Thank you. Pleasure.