Greg Jackson (17:15)
The irony is that while we're watching this happening on the news and look, there are so many levels of shit, right? Let's just be really clear. You basically got. I'm not going to be political, I mean, honestly. But the irony is that while this is happening, we're currently mailing millions of people largely saying energy costs are coming down, right? Because the government has started taking levies off electricity bills. A very good and important thing. And by the way, I cannot tell you the. Funnily enough, the customer satisfaction. Every time we send a price change email, it has a satisfaction rating like how do you rate the usefulness? How do you feel about this? And so on. Funnily enough, we're currently seeing the highest ever satisfaction ratings on price changes because costs are coming down because the government are finally taking Some of the structural costs out of electricity, there is so much more to go. To be absolutely clear, in France, electricity is twice the price of gas. In the UK it's four times. I mean, broadly speaking, in bits of Scandinavia, it's. By the way, there you go. That was your externality, wasn't it? That was actually. That was actually an electric one with this loudspeaker. But I've got to say, I've got an electric motorbike and the only thing I miss is not being able to rev in traffic to let people know you're there. But anyway, different. But yeah, back on this. In Scandinavia, electricity can be as little as 1.15 times more expensive than gas. And the UK it's four times. And the vast majority of that is policy cost and very bad market design. It's good that those things are being tackled in terms of what's going straight at Hormuz, because most energy is hedged in advance, is bought in advance. We will see the price rises as of July. For some people it's coming sooner, depending on what kind of tariffs on. But so far it is genuinely a fraction as bad as, as we saw when Russia invaded Ukraine. But it's a very, very different shape. So if it doesn't get oil and gas in ships moves at the same speed as a bicycle. So if the bicycle stopped leaving the Middle east about six weeks ago and some start now, it will still take six weeks for them to get here. In the meanwhile, there's an awful lot of kind of backend rewiring of where you get, where oil and gas are going to keep supply. But you are at a point where if it doesn't get resolved at some point, supply just stops coming, at which point you may see the uk, we're very well connected with a lot of sources, but some countries are already doing rationing and things like that, and it may affect different things like jet fuel and diesel, differently than petrol. The big, big picture, though, the big picture is I just sent a video to customers a couple of days ago saying, look, here we go again. Because it's only three years since the Russian invasion of Ukraine similarly caused this. And I think it is a shocking audacity of the fossil fuel industry to try and pretend that the answer is more fossil fuels, because the reality of fossil fuels is the great big oil and gas majors will not invest in production facilities unless they're going to get high utilization. There is never going to be spare capacity at any scale in the world of oil and gas. As soon as they get spare capacity, they start shutting stuff down, they restrict supply. And what that means is as long as you're dependent on oil and gas, you're always at risk of any part of the supply chain being strangled. And so the lie of oil and gas is that if we invest in more supply, then we'll stop these things happening in future. It's just not the case. We invest in more supply in the future, the prices will drop and then they'll stop producing and we'll be at their mercy again. I think one of the great discoveries of the world of electrification, you already heard it from Rory, is there are so many sources of electricity now, literally your rooftop, your neighbor's rooftop, a field outside your town or village, the North Sea, other bits of our coast interconnected to other countries. You've got so many layers. And gas, of course, as well, by the way, and biomass and hydro and French nuclear, because it comes through the interconnectors. We've got so much more resilience and electricity. So the biggest lesson has just got to be they only guess who. Like an abusive partner, they keep coming back saying, it's going to be different this time. It's never going to different. Right? I was born in 1971, and when I was 2 or 3, there's all these photos of our family with like candles, because fossil fuel crises never stop happening and we can now end them. And what you're really seeing, actually, and you mentioned the word bifurcation, there are some countries that are just not seeing this anymore. Norway, you know, its economy is so electric, I think. What was it? They sold 16 fossil fuel cars there last month. Was it like 97%? All cars being sold are electric. Right. Heat pumps are the majority heating source. Direct electric, another bunch. They're just not as affected by this stuff. Spain, huge investment in renewables. And by the way, not just wind, sorry, not just solar, tons of wind as a result, not seeing these cost increases that we do. So I think that of course, when the world's most powerful industry is threatened, they are seeing demand. You now have measurable demand reduction because of electric vehicles. And they are very threatened. And they're mobilizing an army that makes what the tobacco industry did look like child's play. This is an industry. It's so powerful, governments go to war. That's how powerful the fossil fuel industry is. And so when you talk earlier about the backlash, it's not necessarily people are cynically doing this, but if you look at every driver's group, where's the Funding ultimately coming from the people that try to somehow paint cyclists as the biggest problem on a road I cycled here today, I can tell you it was a lot quicker, easier and more pleasant. Anyway, point being, I think the big lesson is we have to electrify and you will hear more horseshit arguments against it, more horseshit promises and we have to be brutal now in responding to it.