#149 - Kathryn Porter - ⁠⁠Energy is Civilisation: Why Power Matters

Summary

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Podcast Summary

Podcast: The Peter McCormack Show
Episode #149: Kathryn Porter – Energy is Civilisation: Why Power Matters
Date: February 19, 2026
Host: Peter McCormack
Guest: Kathryn Porter (Energy Analyst)

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Episode Overview

This episode features energy analyst Kathryn Porter, who discusses the critical state of the UK energy grid, the risks of blackouts and rationing, failures in governance and planning, and the broader implications for Western economies. Porter passionately argues that secure, affordable energy is fundamental to civilizational prosperity, and warns that complacency, overregulation, and misplaced green ideology could have catastrophic consequences if not addressed with urgency and realism.

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Key Discussion Points & Insights

“Scaremongering”—or Sounding a Necessary Alarm?

• Peter directly asks Kathryn if she is “scaremongering the public with the state of our grid?”
  Kathryn: “Definitely. I am literally trying to scare people, but not for the sake of it, but because it is actually quite scary. And if we don't do something about it, then we have a very realistic chance of rationing and potentially blackouts.” (00:03)
• She warns of a 65–85% probability of electricity rationing by 2030 due to a “cliff edge” in gas power station retirements.
  She explains: Rolling blackouts would mean 4-hour electrical outages by region. (00:23, 39:11)

Complacency and Mismanagement in Energy Policy

• Kathryn blames “complacency and wishful thinking” among policymakers, naming Ed Miliband as an example:

  “He just doesn't listen…we're ending up with policy that's really based on ideology and wishful thinking and not what the system…the grid…can deliver.” (02:09)

• Discusses structural issues: underqualification and lack of accountability among political leaders and civil servants.

  “Most of them are [unqualified]. Hardly any of them have a degree in any sort of a science subject. …This is a problem across Whitehall.” (03:06)

• Cites field trips for DEFRA staff to “learn how farms work”—a symptom of disconnect between policymakers and the sectors they regulate. (03:42)

The Grid's “Cliff Edge” & Risks of Blackouts

• Porter has identified 12 GW (a third) of the UK’s gas-powered fleet at risk of closure within 5–7 years due to age and lack of maintenance.

  “Combined cycle gas turbines…do not run very well on low utilization. …It’s pretty naïve to think all those assets will just remain in the market when a chunk are end-of-life and run reliably in a way they were never designed to operate.” (06:06)

• The government’s clean power plan assumes these aging assets will remain available and only run 5% of the time—an unrealistic scenario that sets the stage for blackouts.

Official Narratives vs. Reality

• Kathryn alleges that supposedly “independent” advice on energy security is politically manipulated:

  “Freedom of Information requests have uncovered that it was far from independent advice...so it means it wasn't independent. And…Ed Miliband…is giving this advice. Well, it's not independent and it's not true.” (08:56)

Catastrophic Consequences of Failure

• Risks include massive price increases, unheated homes and businesses, and preventable deaths.

  “You'd really be relying on a shift team…making those decisions under extreme time pressure. …the whole system will blackout...Next time, they’ll do rolling blackouts. But I think the first time it comes up, they won’t be prepared.” (11:24)

An Example from Spain: Systemic Risks of Renewable-Dominated Grids

• Porter recounts a near-total blackout in Spain caused by a technical fault and the inability of renewables and conventional plants to maintain stability, exacerbated by negative prices.

  “The cause was lack of grid code compliance by renewables. Under weak grid conditions, this is a high risk.” (12:51)

Underinvestment & Lack of Foresight

• Proposes an in-depth analysis project to evaluate reliability of aging gas assets.

  “I’m trying to get funding to do a follow up piece of work because…you can start building a picture of their reliability…£20,000–£25,000.”
  Peter agrees to fund this analysis. (16:59-18:37)

• Highlights critical supply chain delays:
  “A new gas turbine is 7–8 years. A rotor is about five years. Even components for maintenance is now about a year and a half. …You need to be really looking forwards with this.” (18:41)

Data Centers, AI, and Grid Demand

• Discusses the wave of demand from data centers (AI), particularly in the US—but the UK is falling behind.

  “There's huge demand from North America for AI. …People are repurposing aeroplane engines to power data centers. At this rate, we're going to start repurposing lawn mowers.” (18:41–21:14)

Governance and Political Dysfunction

• Argues for constitutional and legislative reform so ministers are qualified, accountable, and properly incentivized:

  “I think we need a constitutional reform...a recognition that you’re voting for the party as well as the individual. …If you pay peanuts, you get monkeys.” (23:40–28:25)

• Critiques “revenge fantasy” populism targeting utility executives while ignoring deeper regulatory and investment failures. Warns that nationalization would worsen matters by putting the worst actors in charge. (28:47–30:55)

A Recent Near Blackout in the UK (Jan 8, 2025)

• Describes the confluence of failures: errors in demand forecasts, costly “blank check” imports of emergency electricity, and a mismanaged reserve system:

  “On paper you can say, okay, well you had X number of megawatts in reserve, but in real life you don’t.” (31:05–35:59)

Lessons from Bitcoin Mining’s Role in Texas Grid Stabilization

• Discusses how Bitcoin miners provide valuable “demand side response” in Texas, something not embraced in the UK due to regulatory and ideological barriers.

  “In our country here, we don’t even look at that. We don’t look at innovative ways of balancing our grid.” (36:05–37:00)

Nobody Is Truly in Charge of Security of Supply

• Fragmentation of responsibility means supply security falls through the cracks.

  “Actually, nobody in Britain has responsibility for security of supply. When the market was designed in 2001, it did. But…the market’s changed and the rules haven’t.” (37:14)

Hard Numbers: What Rationing and Grid Failure Would Mean

• Rolling four-hour blackouts by region, as outlined in government emergency planning. Ireland would also be affected.

  “Ireland is treated as a zone of GB when it comes to rationing...so Ireland then will be turned off on rotation.” (39:22)

The Path Forward: Recommendations for Reform

• Governance must come first—“because right now the government doesn’t run the country.”
  Repeal or rewrite laws and regulations that prevent sensible energy and infrastructure investment. (42:09–43:22)
• Massive Buildout Required: Borrow to build 5–6 Korean-design nuclear stations, rebuild steelmaking, cancel expensive green subsidies and contracts, and radically reduce regulation.

  “I would borrow money to do this...I would issue specific nuclear gilts...ring fenced for building nuclear power stations.” (43:31)

• End Misguided Wind Subsidies:

  “No, it's a really big waste of both capital and natural resources.” (45:35)

Widening the Lens: Economic Crisis and Civilizational Risk

• Kathryn ties the energy crisis to broader financial and social collapse:

  “The reality is Western economies are in bad shape. …I’ve seen credible economists talking about half a dozen Western economies experiencing sovereign debt crises in the coming years. That doesn’t seem farfetched to me.” (58:17)

• Debt and inflation will force brutal austerity measures, slashing benefits and pensions, with increased mortality among the vulnerable.

  “There will be huge cuts to benefits, probably massive cuts to pensions…you'll see a lot of people dying prematurely, which will be, dare I say it, on purpose, because it will lower the cost burden on the States.” (59:41)

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Notable Quotes & Memorable Moments

• On the urgency of energy security:
  “Energy is civilization. If we don’t get a grip of that and help people understand, we do face civilizational risk in this country.”
  — Peter McCormack (58:06)

• On political dysfunction:
  “Most of them are [unqualified]. Hardly any of them have a degree in any sort of a science subject. …This is a problem across Whitehall.”
  — Kathryn Porter (03:06)

• On grid failure risk:
  “There’s a 65–85% probability of rationing by 2030. …That’s based on losing some of these 12 gigawatts of aging gas plant.”
  — Kathryn Porter (15:44)

• On system operator games:
  “It was far from independent advice...so it’s not independent. And…Ed Miliband…is giving this advice. Well, it’s not independent and it’s not true.”
  — Kathryn Porter (08:56)

• On Britain’s economic path:
  “I've seen credible economists talking about half a dozen Western economies experiencing sovereign debt crises in the coming years. That doesn't seem far-fetched to me.”
  — Kathryn Porter (58:17)

• On the consequences of crisis:
  “You’ll end up losing stuff you don’t want to lose just because of desperation. …People who genuinely need support won’t get it.”
  — Kathryn Porter (59:41)

• On policy priorities:
  “We have to focus on the things that really matter...What matters is having the power stations, having cheap energy, lowering taxes on businesses...In the short term, you'll have to fund it with borrowing. There will be no other alternative.”
  — Kathryn Porter (49:17–50:39)

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Timestamps for Key Segments

| Time | Topic | |----------|----------------------------------------------------------------------| | 00:03 | Kathryn on "scaremongering" and grid failure risk | | 06:06 | The 12 GW gas power cliff edge | | 08:56 | Political manipulation of "independent" energy advice | | 12:51 | Case study: Spanish grid blackout scenario | | 15:44 | Probability of rationing by 2030 & methodology | | 18:41 | Supply chain delays for energy infrastructure | | 23:40 | Why experts aren't ministers; governance and pay reform | | 28:47 | Water sector, misplaced anger at executives, and nationalization | | 31:05 | January 8, 2025—Near-miss UK blackout explained | | 36:05 | Bitcoin miners in Texas as grid balancers; UK's rigid approach | | 39:11 | Practicalities of four-hour rolling blackouts | | 42:09 | What an energy minister should do; legislative and regulatory reform | | 43:31 | Nuclear buildout, ending green subsidies, and repealing bad policy | | 45:35 | The failings of wind energy and contracts for difference | | 49:17 | AI/data centers, industrial opportunity, manufacturing constraints | | 58:17 | Link to sovereign debt crises in Western economies | | 59:41 | Social consequences: austerity, deaths, and political breakdown | | 65:41 | North Sea gas, pipeline infrastructure, and imminent supply shocks | | 70:59 | Kathryn: “I don’t have to be in government to help.” |

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Conclusion

Kathryn Porter offers a sober, unsparing assessment of Britain’s energy and political landscape, warning that only honesty and radical reform will avert rationing, blackouts, and broader civilizational decline. The episode is packed with insights on policy failures, technical risks, and strategic priorities—delivered in a candid, accessible way that underscores the fundamental truth: Energy is civilization, and without realistic, accountable leadership, modern prosperity is at risk.

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Transcript

[Interviewer]

Are you scaremongering the public with the state of our grid?

[Catherine]

Definitely. I am literally trying to scare people, but not for the sake of it, but because it is actually quite scary. And if we don't do something about it, then we have a very realistic chance of rationing and potentially blackouts.

[Interviewer]

What would rationing look like to me as just a homeowner?

[Catherine]

Oh, so it would be four hours of rolling blackouts by region.

[Interviewer]

Well, I think of it as civilizational, like energy is civilization.

[Catherine]

It is. If you look across Western economies, lots of countries are now coming to the same point. The reality is that Western economies are in bad shape. Yes, we are running out of money. We've had this huge debt funded expansion of the state where the focus since the Cold War ended has been on doing things nicely. So we've had this massive increase in regulation, huge increases in welfare, and massive reductions in productivity and value for money. You know, I've seen credible economists talking about half a dozen Western economies experiencing sovereign debt crises in the coming years. That doesn't seem far fetched to me. And so what will that look like?

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[Catherine]

Pleasure to be here.

[Interviewer]

Are you scaremongering the public with the state of our grid?

[Catherine]

Definitely. I am literally trying to scale people, but not for the sake of it, but because it is actually quite scary. And if we don't do something about it, then we have a very realistic chance of rationing and potentially blackouts.

[Interviewer]

How did we end up in this position?

[Catherine]

Well, I think there's an awful lot of complacency going on and an awful lot of wishful thinking. So if you look at policymakers and I mean I think Ed Miliband and not wanting to get sort of personal about stuff, but he just doesn't listen. I mean you hear this time and again from people like Jim Ratcliffe. A couple of months ago was saying that he wanted to talk about the North Sea. He's warning you might shut the 40s pipeline, which is a really important liquids pipeline in the North Sea. He cannot get Miliband to listen. He gets shut down whenever he's trying to talk about it he just gets shut down. And so we're ending up with policy that's really based on ideology and wishful thinking and not what the system, the grid, the assets that we have can deliver. And it seems that nobody's able to get through to him that this is the situation.

[Interviewer]

So is he unqualified to be doing what he's doing?

[Catherine]

Oh, yeah, I mean, he's completely unqualified. Most of them are. I mean, hardly any of them have a degree in any sort of a science subject. And unfortunately, that's true within the civil service. I mean, I don't know if you saw in the last couple of weeks, but there were some reports about staff in DEFRA going on field trips to the countryside, because it turns out that they don't know anything at all about the countryside, which they're responsible for developing policy about. And so literally there's money now being spent to take them to the countryside so that they can be educated. And this is. This is a problem that comes across Whitehall.

[Interviewer]

Oh, here it is. Labor to spend £650,000 of taxpayers money for civil servants to go on a countryside field trip and learn how farms work.

[Catherine]

Yeah, but this is. This is defra. So these people, like, how do you get a job in the ministry that's responsible for rural matters if you don't know anything about how rural life works and how the rural economy works? I mean, it's sort of mind blowing to me that they just now clocked onto the idea that it might be good if they had some sort of knowledge about this.

[Interviewer]

Isn't it quite scary, though, that the most important decisions for our country are being made by people who are far from being qualified?

[Catherine]

Well, they're not just not qualified, they're also not accountable. Okay, so in 2010, in the dying days of the last Labour government, Gordon Brown post something very boring called the Constitutional Governance and Reform Act 2010. And this particular little poison pill, for want of a better word, removed the ability of ministers to hire and fire civil servants. So civil servants are not accountable to anybody that's actually been elected. And so it's extraordinarily difficult to get them to do something they don't want to do. And over the last 15 years, we've seen the civil service become increasingly politicized. Just yesterday I saw on X a tweet from the Cabinet Office, which was a little poem, Valentine's poem, about resetting the relationship with the EU and presenting this as a romantic thing almost, but highly desirable. That is not impartial commentary. In fact, they shouldn't be making commentary full stop. And so it's very clear that the Civil Service is, is following its own agenda. It is a left leaning agenda and it does coincide to a certain extent with what Labour wants to do, but not entirely, but it's completely inappropriate. The Civil Service is supposed to be impartial. They definitely shouldn't be writing Valentine's poems to the eu. And this is kind of indicative of where it's going wrong.

[Interviewer]

Well, let's focus on the grid and energy for now. Maybe we'll get into that, because I have a suggestion for you. But in your report you talk about a cliff edge.

[Catherine]

Yes.

[Interviewer]

Of energy. 12 gigawatts of power that's going to be possibly going offline.

[Catherine]

Yes. So I looked at our fleet of gas power stations and I've identified about 12 gigawatts worth. So it's slightly over a third of the existing fleet. And think these are at risk of closure in a five to seven year horizon. And this is because of their age and the fact that based on public information, they don't seem to have undergone the type of upgrades that would be required to extend their lives meaningfully. Now, the National Energy System Operator has said that as part of the Clean Power 2030 plan, all of those power stations are expected to remain available, but only run 5% of the time. Now these power stations were designed to run all of the time. They were built to run baseload and actually combined cycle gas turbines, which is the vast bulk of these assets, do not run very well on low utilization. Well, yeah, I mean if you don't run them every sort of seven to 10 days, you get issues with boiler chemistry, you get issues with rotor warping, you have to go through a whole load of stuff to try and then maintain the reliability of the plants. Now if you're plant is already really old and it wasn't designed to operate in that way, that becomes quite a big challenge. So I think it's pretty naive actually to think that all of those assets will just remain in the market when a chunk of them or end of life and run reliably in a way that they were never designed to operate. I just don't think that's realistic.

[Interviewer]

Is the expected use of 5% based on the belief that this is intermittent usage for when we don't have enough renewal energy?

[Catherine]

Exactly. Nobody actually believes that's what's going to happen. But that's the official position. And the official position will result in energy insecurity because it relies on all of those assets remaining available, and I think the chances of all of them remaining available is close to zero. We don't have the ability to lose too many of those assets before we get into really big difficulties just meeting demand that we have today. And then you've got all these massive ambitions for electrification and AI now, right now the trend is in the other direction. Deindustrialization is the dominant narrative in electricity demand. But if the government's plans come to fruition, then we'll see demand growth and there's not really any credible plan for meeting it.

[Interviewer]

So there's no credible plan for growth and there's not really a credible plan for maintenance.

[Catherine]

No, that's correct.

[Interviewer]

So is NISO being complacent or do you think they maybe understand the scale, But.

[Catherine]

So I think niso's being complacent, but I also think NISO is playing political games. So if you look at the Clean Power 2030 advice, both Fenton Sly, who's the chief executive of Niso, and Ed Miliband have described that advice as being independent. But Freedom of Information requests have uncovered that it was far from independence advice, that drafts of that advice were circulated both to desness and to OFGEM prior to publication. Both organizations weighed in and effectively desness signed off on the so called independent advice before it was published. So it means it wasn't independent. And Finton goes around saying, yeah, we wrote this advice and we showed that it's possible to get to Clean Power 2030. Well, yes, that's technically true, but there were a massive amount of caveats on that. Oh yes, we can do clean power 2030 if we build twice as much grid infrastructure in the next five years that we built in the last 10 years. Well, okay, that's technically possible, but really, really unlikely. And so it's a fundamentally dishonest representation of the situation. And it allows Ed Miliband to say, oh yes, our system operator, which is independent, despite the fact he's the sole shareholder as Secretary of State, is giving this advice. Well, it's not independent and it's not true. And he's ignoring the highly unlikely caveats that have been placed into the report just for his own political narratives.

[Interviewer]

It looked like you were about to say he's lying.

[Catherine]

So I don't. To lie, you have to be conscious that the thing you're saying is not true. So it's not clear to me whether he's lying, whether he's just deluded. The end result is the same, but I don't think it's necessarily helpful to try and drill into that. He is saying a whole bunch of things about the energy market that aren't true and can't be true based on reality, physics, prices, all of those things. So what his motivation for saying that is kind of irrelevant. What we need to do is try and make him change his mind.

[Interviewer]

Well, the implications are potentially catastrophic. Anything from a massive rise in the prices of energy, which is. Which means people sometimes can't even afford to heat their homes or run their business. Yeah. And people die and they can't run their businesses. But to the point where we may have blackouts.

[Catherine]

Yes.

[Interviewer]

What should be a rich, prosperous western country.

[Catherine]

So this is where I think the complacency will really bite. Because I think that the first time we end up in a situation where rationing is required, it won't be done and therefore there'll be a blackout. And the reason I think it won't be done is because it's been decades since we did any rationing. And so you'd really be relying on a shift team that might be uncertain about whether it even has the authority to do it. Making those decisions under extreme time pressure. When they don't simulate this stuff, they don't train for it. Nobody does real time training on, well, what if this, this and this happens and we end up with a deficiency in supply? And so I think that will just come together to mean that they don't act and therefore the whole system will blackout. Now, the next time it happens, they will be less complacent and then they'll do rolling blackouts instead of having a full countrywide blackout. But I think the first time the situation comes up, I don't think they'll be prepared.

[Interviewer]

But with blackouts, I think of Venezuela or Lebanon, places where I've been and seen blackouts.

[Catherine]

Okay, so it will be like Iberia in April. The first time there will just be a full countrywide lights out.

[Interviewer]

What happened there?

[Catherine]

Okay, the truth, right? The truth is you had a grid that was dominated by renewables and the distribution of renewables in the Spanish grid and the distribution of conventional generation, which is important for grid strengths, is very uneven. Most of the conventional generation is in the north and the east and not in the south. So what happened that day was there was a fault on the grid. Now, the fault happened to have been caused by a faulty solar inverter, but honestly, that's not really that relevant. Faults happen all the time. They can be caused by anything. This happened to be caused by a Faulty solar inverter, but it could have been any number of things that set it off. Anyway, you got this fault and it caused both a voltage disturbance and a frequency disturbance. Now, the system operator expected both renewables and conventional generation to respond with voltage control and very few of them did that correctly. But the system operator had some other tools and kind of stabilised stuff. But the fault recurred and at the same time, because it was in the middle of the day and prices went negative, a lot of solar connected to the low voltage networks just simply turned itself off because it didn't want to pay to give away its electricity. And so when that solar turned off, it pushed the grid frequency down. And in the weakened state of the grid, a lot of renewables, then primarily solar, but also some wind, failed to ride through that fault. And so they also disconnected. And that additional disconnection caused an even bigger frequency drop and it pushed the frequency outside of the limits on the grid that any generator is expected to withstand. So then you started to see conventional generation and interconnectors also disconnecting because their protection measures kicked in. And that very quickly then led to a full system blackout. So the cause was lack of grid code compliance by renewables. That was what tipped the grid into failure. And the reason was that under weak grid conditions, this is a high risk that you're going to have. And the Spanish grid, particularly in the south, is fundamentally weak.

[Interviewer]

I don't think the general public probably understands the risks that we may be facing here. I've got it here that you think you've calculated there's a risk. It's 65 to 85% probability of rationing by 2030. What is the math behind it? How real is that?

[Catherine]

So that's based on losing some of these 12 gigawatts of aging gas plant,

[Interviewer]

and you think we're almost certainly going to be losing some of them.

[Catherine]

I don't see any way around it. And so slight pitch here. I'm trying to get funding to do a follow up piece of work because under European regulations, all power stations or energy assets of any particular size have to report all of their outages, whether that's planned or unplanned. And so you can, if you dig into those data, and I did a little bit for a couple of the assets in this report, you can start building a picture of their reliability now. So what I'd like to do is go back over time, maybe five or seven years for those 12 gigawatts worth of assets that I think are at Risk and try and build a more detailed picture of how their reliability has evolved over that time. I chose two for this report. Peterhead, which was built in 2000 and Langage, which was built in 2010, both of which have had some pretty serious reliability issues in the last couple of years. And so I'd like to do a more rigorous and in depth analysis on that.

[Interviewer]

How much would that cost?

[Catherine]

I know like 20, 25,000 pounds.

[Interviewer]

I mean how much money did they spend on the Europe that gay porn built?

[Sponsor/Announcer]

No, I'm like, I'm serious.

[Interviewer]

That, that was. I think it was about 10 times that. Yeah, Charlotte Gill, you know Charlotte, she was covering all the stupid money the government spends. Yeah, she talked about that. And I would have thought as a rational actor in a world where we don't want our grid to fail, well,

[Catherine]

they could get their own officials to, to do the same. And I mean the information that is

[Interviewer]

because you'll uncover things that they won't like.

[Catherine]

Well, I mean the data underpinning it is all public. So the remit reporting, this is the regulatory rule, you can just go and look it up online. And it's actually reported in more than one place now. It's pretty cumbersome to do it. The way it's reported isn't particularly user friendly, which is why I haven't done it because it's going to be very time consuming. But nevertheless, I think it's an important piece of work to do because then you'll build up a much truer picture. So we know for a fact when these assets were built. You can get a decent idea of what upgrades they may or may not have had from public information and just from industry gossip. But to actually look at the reliability data and turn anecdote into proper analysis requires some more work to.

[Interviewer]

This seems like a really important thing for our country to.

[Catherine]

Yeah, I think so. I think 2020 or £25,000, something like that.

[Interviewer]

Yeah, I'll pay for it.

[Catherine]

Okay. Okay, let's do it.

[Interviewer]

Let's get it. No, because otherwise like this, this.

[Catherine]

Because the other important thing is that the lead time for new kit is really long. So it's not a case that you can get to 2027 and go, oh yeah, my power station's starting to degrade. Really could do with XYZ new replacement rotor 17 whatever. So a new gas turbine is seven to eight years. Yeah, a rotor is about five years. Even components for major maintenance is now about a year and a half. That's normal regular maintenance. So you can't you need to be really looking forwards with this. And also keep in mind why are these lead times so big Is because everybody's trying to buy gas turbines right now, apart from us. You've got a huge demand coming from North America for AI. And what's actually fascinating about this, I was at the Power Gen conference in San Antonio last month and you've gone from a situation where a year ago everyone was talking about big combined cycle turbines for data centers and there's still a little bit of that. I'm aware of data centers trying to sniff around middle aged CCGTs on the UK grid to try and take them off the grid just to power their data center. But it's not an ideal solution because you get quite big load variation with data centers. And big gas turbines just don't flex that fast and to that extent. So you probably need some sort of a mixture of different sizes. Identify what your minimum sight load is likely to be, then try and meet that with your most efficient type of generation. Maybe a small open cycle turbine, but then you fill in the lower part with smaller reciprocating engines. But I heard of people talking about football fields full of 3 megawatt recips to power a 1 gigawatt load. I mean that's hundreds of them and they're very inefficient when it comes to fuel consumption now. So it might give you a good efficiency when it matches your load variation from the data center. And you would need less redundancy if you're going to build up your power solution with smaller units. But it takes up an awful lot of space. You'll get absolutely killed in Europe on emissions rules for generators that size. But people are repurposing aeroplane engines to power data centers. Elon Musk took a large turbine from Europe to the US and put a frequency converter on it. You know we're going to start repurposing lawn mowers at this rate.

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[Sponsor/Announcer]

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[Interviewer]

Catherine, why are you not our energy Minister?

[Catherine]

Well, I haven't been asked, but.

[Interviewer]

But I think it's more of a philosophical question. Why is it that people like you aren't in government making these important decisions because everything in our country is breaking.

[Catherine]

All right, So I have been approached about running for parliament and I don't want to because. So if you're. So the way our parliamentary system works is that when you go and vote in an election, although a lot of people think, oh, I'm going to vote Conservative or I'm going to vote labor, you actually constitutionally don't do that. You vote for the person, you vote for the individual. And so that individual is therefore supposed to be working for that constituency. And being constituency MP is a full time job. But then if you progress inside the party, whatever, either because you have ambitions or because you have some skills that somebody wants to utilize and you become a minister, well, now you have two jobs. I don't see how you can do both of those jobs. Well, don't see how you can devote yourself to being a good minister without neglecting your constituency. And you can't be a good constituency MP without neglecting your ministerial duties. So I think we need a constitutional reform where there's an explicit recognition that you're voting for the party as well as the individual. And I think that would make things like maternity leave easier. Because right now when an MP goes on maternity leave and it's maternity rather than parental leave, I think because women do tend to take longer, I don't think anybody particularly cares if their MP disappears for two or three weeks. But if they disappear for nine months, then the people get. They're like, well, who's representing us? Yeah, I mean, that's like 20% of a parliamentary term, potentially, if they take a year. And that's not the deal. So I think there should be some explicit recognition that you're voting for both the individual and the party. And so then if the MP needs to take leave for whatever reason or becomes a minister, a portion of those constituency duties are taken over by a central team that the party administers. And so the MP remains like the chief executive, if you like, of the constituency and can't completely delegate it, but they're not expected to be the ones doing all of the work the way they are at the moment.

[Interviewer]

Well, it's ludicrous. That would put in MPs who've won a popularity contest in charge of the most important decisions for our country. You wouldn't run a company like this?

[Catherine]

Well, like. Well, yes and no, because there has to be accountability.

[Interviewer]

Sure. But I think you could do it in an entirely different way that would work better. Say I was Prime Minister, I don't want any of my MPs to become ministers. As you said, they should be looking after their constituents. I want to have my. I don't know, is it 15 ministers we have for their department. I want to go out into the public sector and all the private sector and find the best people. I want to go. Catherine, I'm recruiting you. Here's your salary.

[Catherine]

So if you can do that now. You can do that now, but you can only do it by giving them a peerage.

[Interviewer]

Yeah, well, I just want to be. Build my board of.

[Catherine]

Yeah.

[Interviewer]

I want the best person on energy, in charge of energy in our country. I want the best person for defense, in charge of defense and health.

[Catherine]

Yeah, no, I, I agree with that. And I think what comes with that, and you sort of touched on it, is a lot more money. We have to pay ministers and the Prime Minister a lot more money.

[Interviewer]

Yes.

[Catherine]

Now, part of the reason we get all of this corruption or shadiness, it might not be technical. Technical correction, it's corruption. Well, I mean, so Kierstar apparently didn't break any rules, but he's the biggest recipient of gifts and entertainment in Parliament.

[Sponsor/Announcer]

Yeah.

[Catherine]

Now, that's not a good look. If he was just simply paid more money, then the temptation for that wouldn't exist. Like, he doesn't. I mean, actually, I still think it's ridiculous that somebody else is paying for his clothes. Like, just pay for your own clothes is not hard. But. And I do have some sympathy with the whole football thing because there is a security issue there. But in general, we need to pay these people more money. The thing about if you pay peanuts, you get monkeys is true. And if you don't pay MPs more, you end up with basically three types of people becoming MPs, either ideologues, and that can go both ways. It can be good, but it can also be really bad. People who are rich already, which is fine, but a lot of people think they're not representative or people who are just not good enough to get jobs. In the private sector.

[Interviewer]

Yeah. In the private sector, you don't get the best people in the country at £90,000 a year.

[Catherine]

No, not even close.

[Interviewer]

No, it's. It's got to be quarter to half a million pound a year.

[Catherine]

Yeah.

[Interviewer]

And somebody like yourself in charge of energy will likely save the country hundreds of millions, if not billions of pounds is worth paying a proper salary for it.

[Catherine]

Now, I think when we look at. So I've got a bit of a bee in my bonnet about the water sector, because there's a huge amount of sort of revenge fantasy going on with the public at the moment, and it's very misplaced. So I, I do the surveys, you know, YouGov and stuff, because I'm kind of quite interested in what it is they're asking. And a week or so ago there was one about the water sector, and honestly, it was pretty much medieval. It was like a modern equivalent of, shall we put water company executives in the stocks and throw rotten veg at them should they have to write in the annual report about all their failures? It was actually quite extraordinary. Um, but anyway, it, it's, it's really misplaced because the people who presided over the extraction of capital from the sector have long gone.

[Interviewer]

Yes.

[Catherine]

And really none of them did anything illegal. It was offwart that completely misunderstood its own price control and made extremely poor decisions. And they could have prevented it fairly simply, but by putting in place rules around the circumstances under which dividends and bonuses can be paid. But they still haven't done it. So now what's happening? The assets have completely degraded, which is why we're getting all these leaks. And so what does ofwat do? It finds the companies, so it removes money that they need to fix the leaks. And there's all this controversy about how much you pay the executives. But you need to get some really smart people who know a lot about the water sector to come and fix these issues. And you actually probably need to pay them even more than you would have done otherwise because of all of the negativity that they're getting, shall we say. But this whole idea of revenge and punishment, it's a real distraction and actually it's going to be counterproductive at the end of the day. And nationalizing it is actually the worst thing you could do, because then what are you going to do? Put the idiots from Offwatch in charge of the people who caused the problem in the first place?

[Interviewer]

God. I want to understand a bit more about rationing and blackouts. Can you talk about the near miss? It's January 8th, 2025. What happened?

[Catherine]

Okay, so we had a confluence of different things happen coming into the day. We knew it was going to be tight. And unfortunately, NISO overestimated the amount of wind generation, underestimated the amount of demand, and wrongly predicted when the peak of demand would happen. And so we go into the day and they're like, oh, this is looking a bit tight. And it was costing a huge amount of money to balance the market that day. Normally you spend about two and a half million pounds to balance the market in one day. They spent about 23 million that day and that caused them to make some really bad choices. So you had. Well, first of all, I asked the Dutch, sorry, the Danish system operator, to bring back part of the Viking interconnector early and they essentially wrote them a blank check. They didn't settle the price of that for about six weeks after it happened. Now, it turned out the price was fine, but they essentially it was a blank check when they wrote it, which very much undermines their official narrative that they had plenty of spare capacity, because you don't write people blank checks when you have plenty of spare capacity. So they started getting really nervous about cost as they were coming into the evening peak. So normally the way you organize your reserves is that you want to have a lot of or a chunk of fast acting generation available in case you lose something. So they're supposed to hold enough reserve to cover the single largest in feed into the grid, which is currently the interconnect on that day was interconnected with Norway. And so we've got actually the largest Punt hydro power station in Europe, in North Wales, and that can go from zero to full load in 16 seconds. So this is a really good way of covering if something trips off suddenly you have some batteries that can provide immediate response. That kicks in very quickly and then it buys you time to ramp up some gas fired power stations. But half of that pumped hydro facility was unavailable. It was offline for maintenance. The other three units were running full load already because they were cheaper than some of the gas power stations. So you had Rye House, which had been getting two and a half thousand pounds of megawatt hour. So normally £100 in the winter would be expensive. They were getting 200, 2,500. So actually, no, I think it might have been five, I don't remember. They were getting a lot of money anyway, so they. So they basically turned off Rye House and then you had two other gas power stations, Connors Quay and Suttonbridge, that were running at half load. And I think this was just because of internal reasons. So at 5:15 they'd brought Ryehouse down to zero completely. The peak of demand happened at 521, it takes. And so you had these two power stations at halfload, Connors Quay and Sutton Bridge. They would have taken 15 minutes to get to full load. Ryehouse would have needed 25 to get back to full load. That's if they were willing to do it, because some power stations will have warranty things that say once you've gone down to zero, you've got to be there for a certain amount of time before you can ramp again. So on paper you can say, okay, well you had X number of megawatts in reserve, but in real life you don't. Now another big problem that day is they have this thing called short term operating reserve. And a big proportion of those assets in the short term operating reserve ran anyway because of high prices. So then they were no longer available to active reserve. And I discussed this with somebody senior in NISO after the fact and he's like, no, no, we had the reserve. And I'm like, no you didn't, because they were running anyway. And he's like no, no, no, they were there. And I went, no, you can see from the public data they ran anyway. If your substitute is already on the field, then the substitute cannot come on again. If another player gets injured, that substitute is out of the substitution game at that point. And I was like, how can you not understand that? And they do have fines for reserve units running and then leaving the reserve without telling anyone. But the fines are really small and they were getting two and a half thousand pounds a megawatt hour in the balancing mech mechanism. So why the hell would they stay in reserve and earn a fraction of that?

[Interviewer]

When we spoke last time, did I talk to you about how the bitcoin miners integrate with the grid, the ERCOT grid in Texas?

[Catherine]

I don't remember.

[Interviewer]

So it's a really interesting thing they do. The bitcoin miners, they just need energy to run their Asics and they want cheap power. And so what happens in ercot, they overproduce energy and the bitcoin miners sit there taking, using the energy and then if there's a sudden demand, they pay the miners to switch off. So they still. So those miners still earning money, but the power can be switched in like a split second. And it's stabilized the grid in Texas. In our country here, we don't even look at that. We don't look at innovative ways of balancing our grid.

[Catherine]

Well, we do have markets for demand side response and you can enter the balancing mechanism to provide that. So quite why people aren't doing it, I don't know. And it might be to do with other costs on the system, making it uneconomic.

[Interviewer]

No, I think it's more ideological. They figured it out in Texas, they actually did a study and the best demand side response is bitcoin mining. I can't remember the report. I should dig out and Find a few.

[Sponsor/Announcer]

So in terms of blackout, I think

[Catherine]

also it's to do with the fragmentation of responsibility, because actually nobody in Britain has responsibility for security of supply. No one entity is responsible for security of supply. And actually, if you put all of the roles and responsibilities together, you do not have a system now that delivers security of supply. When the market was designed in 2001, it did. But the market's changed so much, and the industry rules governing it haven't. I mean, this is why a year ago I wrote about Nisei's demand forecasting being poor. And a couple of weeks later, they actually announced an audit of their demand forecasting. And the engineer that had made the announcement said this had been, quote, 10 to 20 years since anybody had looked at the methodology. Now, I'm sure you got into trouble for that because I've been quoting it left, right and center. And you can go and listen to the transcript and see that. It's, you know, listen to the recording and see that is what he said. But that's kind of shocking. But it's because of the way that industry governance works, that just nobody, you know, so you have these industry codes that, when they were written, would have ensured a secure system, but the market's changed an awful lot. Code modifications only happen if a market participant requests one, and they only go to the trouble of doing that if they benefit from it personally. And that's not nefarious, it's just realistic. Right. Because it's a lot of effort to go and launch that kind of a process. So why would you do it unless it was going to help you?

[Interviewer]

I bet NISO has a file on you that you're a thorn in their side.

[Catherine]

Yeah, I think they got my picture on all their dartboards.

[Interviewer]

What would rationing look like to me as just a homeowner?

[Catherine]

Oh, so it would be four hours of rolling blackouts by region. And there's documentation available online that talks about exactly how that works.

[Interviewer]

Is that the government documentation planning for it?

[Catherine]

Yeah, I mean, there's like an emergency rationing plan, and interestingly, few people know, but Ireland is treated as a zone of GB when it comes to rationing because Ireland depends on Britain for its gas and electricity, for that matter. And so Ireland then will be turned off on rotation with Southwest, the Midlands, the Southeast, whatever.

[Interviewer]

But that will mean some people start investing their own redundancy. Yeah, we saw that in Lebanon.

[Catherine]

Generator at home.

[Interviewer]

Yeah, we saw that. When me and Kurt went out to Lebanon, we were going to these houses and they would have a Diesel generator, yeah.

[Catherine]

South Africa is quite common. But that's, I mean, my diesel jets say, I say mine isn't because I'm expecting or trying to mitigate system wide blackouts. My house is literally the last house on the grid.

[Interviewer]

Okay.

[Catherine]

Just because of the way the grid topography works and we're not on the sewage system at all and we require pumps to pump our sewage. So if we don't have electricity, things get unpleasant quickly. And so we have a generator that will power our pumps in the event of an extended power cut or a blackout.

[Interviewer]

This is all quite a damning indictment of the government that we can be in this position where we would have rolling blackouts in a developed nation.

[Catherine]

It is.

[Interviewer]

And I don't think, I think anyone out there is expecting this. I think people just so used to, you turn on the kettle and you can boil it, you turn on the TV and you can watch the football.

[Catherine]

I know. And what was really disappointing was so my report went out under embargo to journalists a couple of days before it was published and desnas did not request an advanced copy when they were approached for comment. They just told people that they didn't recognize the findings and that it was scam mongering nonsense. Well, you haven't read it, so how can you say you don't recognize the findings and it's scaremongering when you don't know what it says? I think that's pretty irresponsible, to be honest. Like, why not read it and find out before offering an opinion Then if you disagree, then absolutely we can discuss it. But to just like knee jerk reaction or it's scaremongering. Well, how the hell do you know you didn't read it?

[Interviewer]

Well, you're exposing their incompetence, complacency, ignorance.

[Catherine]

But they make that point for me by commenting without having read it.

[Interviewer]

I just, I'm lost. So what kind of additional power do we need to be planning for?

[Catherine]

What do you mean by, like, if

[Interviewer]

you, if you were our energy minister, what would you be doing right now?

[Catherine]

I.

[Interviewer]

That's quite a broad question really.

[Catherine]

Okay. The first steps have really not that much to do with energy.

[Interviewer]

Okay.

[Catherine]

We need governance reform because right now the government doesn't run the country. And until that changes, you can, you can sit and devise all the nice policies you like, but you might not be able to implement them.

[Interviewer]

This is what you were talking about with Gordon Brown earlier. It's with the civil service in there.

[Catherine]

And it's not just, it's not Just C rag. There's all sorts of other bits and pieces of legislation that have got to go.

[Interviewer]

Such as?

[Catherine]

Well, there's bits of the planning act, environmental regulations. There's all sorts of bits and pieces. So I think really what the conservatives and reform should be doing and any think tanks that want to see a right wing government back in office in the next election is to start actually putting together draft legislation that would do this stuff because it will require primary legislation and you don't want to be coming into office on day one and then just starting that process.

[Interviewer]

Start now then.

[Catherine]

You need to start now.

[Interviewer]

Yeah, okay. And if you deal with the governance, nuclear power stations.

[Catherine]

Okay, but I would just get career. I'd be like, please Korea, come and rewrite all our nuclear regulations for us and build some nuclear power stations. And I would borrow money to do it. I would ask the government, I would borrow money to do this. I would issue specific nuclear gilts and they would be refinanced after construction and they would be ring fenced for building nuclear power stations.

[Interviewer]

What, how many, how many power stations do we need? Nuclear ones?

[Catherine]

I would probably build five or six.

[Interviewer]

Okay. And how much capacity would that add?

[Catherine]

So the Korean design is 1400 megawatts each.

[Interviewer]

And they can build them how quick?

[Catherine]

So they have been building them on average eight and a half years. It will probably take longer here because we don't have things like steel making capability anymore. Yeah, so that's, you know, you have to put that in place as well. We really need to rebuild our steel making. We need to build.

[Interviewer]

But we need low cost energy for that.

[Catherine]

Yeah, exactly. Well, okay, but you can, there is stuff you can do. So cancel the carbon market. Get rid of the renewables obligations, both of which I think the conservatives have committed to doing. Cancel all contracts for difference from AR7 onwards because that's been signaled to the market already. So just do that. Restructure the existing contracts for difference and if any cost more to continue than they would to buy out, then buy out, buy them out and then just close them. Whatever's the cheapest thing to do to lower costs.

[Sponsor/Announcer]

Sorry, what are these CFDs? Is this, these contracts with the wind company?

[Interviewer]

Subsidy for the.

[Catherine]

Yeah, so it's the current subsidy scheme and they get paid a guaranteed amount of money which is pretty much always higher than the cost of generating electricity.

[Interviewer]

With gas, is there any scenario where wind is worth it? No, none at all. So we should just.

[Catherine]

No, because I mean even if you look at the height of the gas crisis for a few Months, they paid a little bit back to consumers, but that was only in relation to the subsidy. All the other costs, the balancing, the backup, the grid costs, they all still continued. So, no, it's a really big waste of both capital and natural resources. There's just simply better use for the metals that go into building these things.

[Interviewer]

It kills a lot of birds.

[Catherine]

But that's the least of it. If you look at the pollution from the extraction and processing is really significant,

[Interviewer]

which for a ideologically green agenda is inconsistent. Inconsistent.

[Catherine]

Well, I mean, look at Canada. This is incredibly funny. So the, the speculation is that Mark Carney's about to come. Well, I mean, it's not speculation. He is about to publish a new energy policy. The speculation is that it's going to involve lots of offshore wind and lots of investments in grid infrastructure and potentially a, a trans Canadian transmission system. So all of that would require very large amounts of copper. But Canada's only copper smelter has said it's probably going to close in the next couple of years because of environmental regulations and cost. We're so stupid. But it's also just exposes the hypocrisy of this, right, because they're like, oh, well, yeah, copper smelting is really dirty, so we're going to restrict that and let that copper smelter close. But we're going to do all this stuff that requires lots of copper, but we'll get our copy from somewhere else. So all that dirty stuff just happens somewhere we can't see and we'll just pretend it's not happening and we'll have this green utopia and we'll ignore the harm that's happening somewhere else because it's not happening here.

[Interviewer]

It's like environmental NIMBYism.

[Catherine]

Well, it's just massive hypocrisy.

[Interviewer]

We've been spending a lot of time looking at AI. Very interesting. It's obviously a massive growth sector. You talked about it earlier with the data centers and I feel like we are missing an opportunity here in this country. We're seeing data centers pop up everywhere. I was watching one being built, I think it was in the UAE recently. In the speed of change. It seems to me that the things you're talking about are really just the minimum required to keep the lights on so the country can keep going. But if we were ambitious, we would actually be looking to expand our grid capacity to actually be an environment where AI companies would want to come and host data centers. Are we missing out on a huge opportunity here?

[Catherine]

Well, we are. It's not straightforward because there are huge constraints around securing generation equipment. Really what you need to do is look at the supply chain. So again, in the US you've recently had, I can't remember which state it was, but they've basically just opened a factory for building transformers. They got Hitachi to come build this factory because transformers are another grid constraint. And so they're like, well, we just need to start building them ourselves instead of being in the queue for someone else. So we need to look at that as well and take a similar approach. So we do need to rebuild some of our manufacturing capability. We need to get deals with some of these companies like Hitachi and Siemens and ge and incentivize them to come and build factories in Britain to produce the equipment needed to do these things.

[Interviewer]

How are we going to do that?

[Catherine]

Well, huge cuts in regulation, huge cuts in tax, tax breaks for that sort of investment. It will be in the short term, it'll be expensive. But this is true across the economy as a whole. We are not going to get economic growth unless we radically change our approach. It's just not possible. We have to slash regulation. We've got to the point where we're strangling any hope of economic growth with red tape. It's just not possible to build anything or do anything because of regulation. We, we just have to get rid of it. I mean, recently someone put out this thing that nuclear developers are supposed to sign up to. Having 50% female participation in the supply chain. Garbage. Right. Don't care. I would rather have zero women in the supply chain and build some nuclear power stations rather than loads of women in the supply chain and no nuclear power stations. This is nonsense. Right. We have to focus on the things that really matter. How many women are working on building power stations is not what really matters. What matters is having the power stations, having cheap energy, lowering taxes on businesses. And of course you've got to cut the size of the state, you've got to cut spending, you've got to cut the welfare bill and that is going to be difficult. And in the short term you'll have to fund it with borrowing. There will be no other alternative.

[Interviewer]

It seems like doing all of this energy work has been a great lens for you for understanding the failings of the state.

[Catherine]

Yeah, I mean, it's sort of just one example, but it's, I think, representative of a lot of different areas. The reality is that Western economies are in bad shape. Yes, we are running out of money. We've had this huge debt funded expansion of the States where the focus since the Cold War ended has been on doing things nicely. So we've had this massive increase in regulation, huge increases in welfare and massive reductions in productivity and value for money. If you look at employment statistics in Britain, the only sector where we're seeing any growth is in the public sector. Private sector employment is declining rapidly. Youth unemployment is growing significantly. Because this government does not have any clue how all of these pieces fit together.

[Interviewer]

Sound like a far right fascist. Have you been called that yet?

[Catherine]

Probably. I don't know. I mean, so this government's response to criticism throws around language like far right, it's canceling elections, it's trying to control speech, it's apparently smearing journalists. Yes, we have an environment where Jews are being massively scapegoated. Now, this all sounds pretty reminiscent of things that have happened elsewhere in history and that did not end well. So we really, I think, need to be having a look at ourselves as to conduct across public life and rein it in. Like we can't be canceling elections, we can't be escaping people and we can't be throwing around this sort of inflammatory language around people being fascists and far right just because they don't agree with

[Interviewer]

you or because they're thinking critically, well,

[Catherine]

whatever the reason is right. Look at how labor is conducting its campaign for this current by election. It's basically saying if you vote for reform or the Green Party will have war. That's really irresponsible.

[Interviewer]

I do think across the country people are kind of sick of this. I think people are looking for something that is more anti establishment. We've seen a massive increase in taxes and we've seen massive attack on our civil liberties and I think people are looking for something different. But that's seen a massive fracturing of the political landscape, left and right.

[Catherine]

Yeah. I wonder to what extent that really translates into change at a general election. Because you'd at least hope people recognize that deliverability is important. And some of these emerging political groups, I think, have a long way to go to demonstrate that they can deliver on what they promise. They don't have the infrastructure. And so, I mean, and this is why I think the Conservatives will win the next election. Interesting, because I think. I don't know that necessarily it would be with any enthusiasm. I think it'd be a bit like when John Major won. People would potentially be holding their noses when they put that cross in the box. But it's going to come down to the economy and then I think the choice is who is going to screw this up the least.

[Interviewer]

It's very interesting you say that because at the moment there's like a strong belief reform will win. I'm not sure, I'm unsure, but it's

[Catherine]

too remote at the moment. Like the next election is not thought to be proximate. And then people don't necessarily tell the truth to pollsters either because they don't want to tell the truth or they want to give a message or they themselves think that they'll do one thing, but when it comes down to it, they'll do something else. That election, that major one, it was reported afterwards that people changed their minds in the polling booth. So I don't think it's a slam dunk by any stretch. I think being able to deliver is going to be really important, which is why you need all of that legislation I was talking about in draft form ready to go. That's just the energy system they need. Also, people need to explain. Well, no, because it will cover everything and you need to explain to the public why it's necessary, that it's not just some technocratic preoccupation but actually without doing, will be impossible to deliver. Manifesto promises. You can't say we're going to have growth when you have a planning system that doesn't let you build anything.

[Interviewer]

But you are up against a left wing potential coalition of people who are anti growth.

[Catherine]

Well, I mean, then the only solution is emigrate and go live somewhere else.

[Interviewer]

Well, a lot of people are thinking about that. I bet it's as well, actually.

[Catherine]

Yeah, yeah. No, I want to move.

[Interviewer]

Not yet.

[Catherine]

Well, no, my husband doesn't want to.

[Interviewer]

You might be required in the next election.

[Catherine]

Well, then, you know, incentives need to be put in place to. I don't mean that in any kind of corrupt way. I'm not talking about anything below the table.

[Interviewer]

No, come, come, come get me.

[Catherine]

Exactly.

[Interviewer]

Yeah, I. I absolutely think I'm kind of sick and I think a lot of people are kind of sick of incompetent morons making these decisions for our country and we've seen every. Everything's broken.

[Catherine]

Yeah.

[Sponsor/Announcer]

One.

[Interviewer]

Name me one thing that's got better.

[Catherine]

No, it's. But you see this in everyday life. I. I really dislike coming into London now because it just feels angry and aggressive and dirty and depressing and you have to deal with cyclists who just run you down as soon as look at you whilst shouting abuse at you. I was sexually assaulted on the tube towards the end of last year for the first time in decades. What? Yeah, I mean When I first moved to London in the 90s, it was a, so it was a common occurrence but you know, people being a bit handsy was just what happened on public transport. And it's come back.

[Interviewer]

Did you report it?

[Catherine]

Doesn't really see the point. I mean, I mean, I told the person to stop. No, because that would have been disproportionate and I didn't want to get arrested for assaulting somebody myself.

[Interviewer]

I don't think punching somebody in the face is disproportionate from being sexually assaulted. Right.

[Catherine]

But no, I wouldn't think so either. But look at what the way laws are being enforced at the moment. And honestly I didn't need the headache.

[Interviewer]

Yeah, fair. This is reversible, this is fixable.

[Sponsor/Announcer]

Like that's the language is like we

[Interviewer]

are, we are in grave danger of losing our energy system. But it can be fixed.

[Catherine]

Yeah, I mean I'm fundamentally an optimist and I can see routes through this, but it's not going to be easy. And anyone thinking that we can press a few buttons and get cheap energy or growth or better standard of living just like that is just not, is not being realistic. And anyone that promises that is, is being very, very disingenuous.

[Interviewer]

Well, I think think of it as civilizational, like energy is civilization.

[Catherine]

It is.

[Interviewer]

And if we don't get a grip of that and help people understand, then we do face civilizational risk in this country.

[Catherine]

We do. And if you look across Western economies and this is work that I'm, I'm going to do a bit of work around this in the coming weeks. Lots of countries are now coming to the same point where our levels of borrowing are starting to become unsustainable. I think the French are in worse shape than we are and we're in better shape than Germany. So we're in worse shape than Germany. But. I've seen credible economists talking about half a dozen Western economies experiencing sovereign debt crises in the coming years. That doesn't seem far fetched to me. And so what will that look like? What would it look like if we had a sovereign debt crisis so we wouldn't get an IMF bailout? The IMF doesn't have the money to bail out one large Western economy and France will go over the edge before we do. Plus we can devalue sterling, which the French can't devalue the euro, so our route out will be to devalue our currency and then you would have to take an absolute hatchet to anything that got in the way. Of making money.

[Interviewer]

Well, we should be doing that anyway.

[Catherine]

Well, no, but under that scenario, there will be very little discretion.

[Interviewer]

Yeah.

[Catherine]

Like, people will just be like, fire pregnant women, knock yourself out. You know, so you'll end up losing stuff that you don't want to lose just because of desperation. There'll be huge cuts to benefits, probably massive cuts to pensions, Big, big cuts to spending on old people. So you'll see a lot of people dying prematurely, which will be, dare I say it on purpose, because it will lower the cost burden on the States. It won't be explicit. Nobody's going to be around killing people. But policies will emerge that have that effect. And there will be. In some countries, there'll be civil unrest. I'm not sure that necessarily it will be here, but in some countries I could definitely see it being in France. And it will be a really dangerous and unstable time. It will be very difficult to come through it unscathed. You will see increases in mortality rates for vulnerable people in the same way, now that we have large numbers of people dying prematurely from fuel poverty. The ONS stopped collecting or stopped publishing those data a few years ago, but it on average was between 6 and 8,000 people a year. Those sorts of numbers will go up and you'll throw the baby out of the bathwater because people who genuinely need support won't get it. And it will be a really, really difficult time.

[Interviewer]

It's maddening that there aren't enough people who are willing to be realistic about the prospect of this country, understand what the debt levels are and what they mean, how to service this debt, the inflation environment we live in, how everything's breaking.

[Sponsor/Announcer]

It's maddening.

[Catherine]

I think that there is. So, you know, I was talking about nuclear bonds. There is still an investment story that you can sell to the bond markets. Now, to a certain extent, I think the bond markets are part of the problem because they subscribe to this, to the orthodoxy that's existed since the end of the Cold War. And we saw with the Trust budget, for example. Now, obviously, not all of the market reaction was because of the budget, because the bank of England decided to dump gilts on the same day. That piece of political sabotage really wants looking into a lot more, but nevertheless, it was a badly managed budget and partly because of the surprise factor, but partly because it's so radical, it's creating market hostility. Now, I do think we actually do need a radical response and it will be contrary to the orthodoxy and it'll be, we are going to cut taxes and they will be unfunded tax cuts. We will have to borrow money to plug that gap. But if you do that alongside a radical reduction in both public spending and regulation, and obviously it's very difficult to quantify the impact of cutting regulation. So this equation will not balance in the short term.

[Interviewer]

Do you know Shankar Singham? He's done this work. Yeah, he's actually done the work on. There was a certain amount of regulation, Connie. He said it would lead to a 5. It would give us 5% growth rate per year.

[Catherine]

Yeah, I mean, I can't say whether that exact number is credible. But what's happening now is that regulation is preventing growth from happening. And you look in a really simple context, the way that the government has increased employment regulations and that is leading now to a reduction in employment. It's increasing the minimum wage or removing the age discrimination on the minimum wage. Now that sounds like a nice kind of thing to do. It means that nobody wants to hire young people anymore. So youth unemployment goes up.

[Interviewer]

You don't want to pay 10 pounds an hour for a 16 year old or whatever it is.

[Catherine]

Exactly. So now this is locking young people out of the jobs market. You've got that 14 year old whose father runs a food truck and his local council is trying to stop him working in it for free because he likes it, because they're saying that it's child labor. So we need to get rid of all of that garbage and really get back to basics. And we need a return to principles based regulation. Get rid of all of these rules. You can get rid of a very large number of regulators which are not productive parts of the economy by going back to principles based regulation. And then you need to pay your regulators a lot more money because really they should be. So you do need some rules based regulation. Like you can't just have a free for all about what you have in your drinking water, but in general you should have a principles based approach. So for example, in financial services, one of the FCA principles is treating your customers fairly. Now, in financial services, since the 08 crash, we've gone to rules based regulations. So these principles still exist, but they're not the main focus anymore. But we need to get back to that being the main focus. I keep hearing people complaining about, oh, technology is changing faster than the rules can keep up when it comes to the use of AI in asset management. Like, well then you're just being dumb because the principles should be the length through which you see that both as a regulated firm and as a regulator. Then you don't need to worry about the detailed rules because you get the framework from the principles and then the regulator issues guidance in terms of how those principles be interpreted. And, you know, people know where they are.

[Interviewer]

Catherine, we need. We need you in government. Sorry, just. There's just. There's no argument anymore. We need you in government. Somehow you're too sensible. You understand it all still these morons like Ed Miliband. Is there any part of the report we've not discussed that you wish we had that people should know?

[Catherine]

So I think the stuff about the North Sea. I have another report coming out on Wednesday.

[Interviewer]

Okay.

[Catherine]

With the Institute of Economic affairs, and it's about whether we can just stop oil. And there's a slight overlap with this one. So in this report, I talk about the offshore pipeline infrastructure, which isn't something that we talk about very much. If you look at the forecast for North Sea production decline, they're all very smooth curves. But that's not what's going to happen, because how do you get that product to market? Almost all of it comes through pipes. Now, as your production declines, the throughput on those pipelines will fall, and it will fall to a point where the pipeline becomes not viable. And so then the pipeline will close, and anything that ties back to that pipeline will have to go into decommissioning or build a new pipeline. That's not realistic. So you'll actually get step drops in the production profile, not this lovely smooth curve. Now, NISO put out a report on the day of the budget in November, so it didn't really get any attention, saying that by 2030, this could mean we're short of gas on cold days. National Gas is saying similar, but they're warning that it'll be sooner than that. There are two realistic ways of mitigating this. One is don't have this artificially rapid reduction in North Sea production. You could just change the fiscal regime and reverse the ban on drilling, and we could carry on extracting oil and gas from the North Sea for decades to come. It wouldn't meet all our needs, but it would meet a decent chunk and we'd make a lot of tax receipts on it. Or we need to put in floating liquefied natural gas regasification terminals like they did in Germany in the last couple of years. But if we don't do either of those things, then, yeah, we'll start running out of gas.

[Interviewer]

This is all just madness. It's all insane, of course.

[Catherine]

And you have this overlap of risks, because when are you going to Be short. When does it matter? Cold still winter days. Cold still, winter days. Have no wind generation. No solar generation. Because it's nighttime by the time you get to the peak and it's cold. So demand is higher. And then you're going to say so on the very days you need your gas the most, you're not going to have it.

[Interviewer]

It sounds like a lot of British days are cold and still. That's what it feels like.

[Catherine]

Yeah.

[Interviewer]

Now, Elon Musk has been talking a lot about solar. Very pro solar.

[Catherine]

Yeah. I don't know what his game is with that, to be honest.

[Interviewer]

Well, he thinks you can put him in space.

[Catherine]

Well, you probably can, but. So if you can put solar in space, and I think technically it's possible, there are challenges.

[Interviewer]

How do you do transmission from space? I mean, space. With data centers in space.

[Catherine]

Yeah, but you can do. The technology exists and you get these. You have antenna arrays that are effectively a wire mesh that receives the energy and then injects it into the grid. So I think when most people think about antenna, they kind of think about big dishes. And then somebody says, yeah, the antenna will be like 15 miles in diameter. And then people picture this enormous dish that goes through and they're like, that's crazy. You could never have that. But that's not how it works. It's basically an array of wires in a kind of wide mesh. And so you can just put that over the top of fields because it's just wires. You got that much space or whatever in between. So it's actually not anywhere near as intrusive as you'd think. Now, I think the issues you have are really around. There's an awful lot of garbage in orbit. And you're going to start putting solar panels and data centers and you've got all the stuff that's up there already. Each time you do it, you're going to have to put it into higher orbit. So it's technically possible. And right now it's not economically viable. The costs of putting stuff up in space are falling. I think SpaceX is made some great strides in that area, but terrestrial solar doesn't.

[Interviewer]

Doesn't.

[Catherine]

Well, I mean, there's none at night.

[Interviewer]

No, true, true.

[Catherine]

And our peak demand happens at night.

[Interviewer]

So we can have batteries.

[Catherine]

Oh, my God, don't go. Don't even start with that.

[Interviewer]

No, I think you're brilliant. Keep doing this. It's amazing work. And that report you want to do will pay for and get on. Yes, and thank you. Just keep doing it. I really hope you end up in government. Because I am terrified about the future of this country. This is another thing to be terrified about. On top of the economy and the law and authoritarianism. But keep doing your thing, Catherine. It's amazing.

[Catherine]

I don't have to be in government to help. Right. I talk to people nuts. If they're willing to listen.

[Interviewer]

I think aligned early on to a party that will win an election would be very helpful because.

[Catherine]

Or talking to all of them and then one of them wins and.

[Interviewer]

Yeah.

[Catherine]

Yeah. Because the point is to get it right, not to be tribal about it.

[Interviewer]

Is there like an army of people similar to you around?

[Catherine]

I don't know about army, but there's definitely people similar to me.

[Interviewer]

There's a few of you. You talk and you.

[Catherine]

We do agree. We have little Networks.

[Interviewer]

Okay.

[Catherine]

Little WhatsApp groups and private chats on X and things like that.

[Interviewer]

Interesting.

[Catherine]

Right.

[Interviewer]

Well, look, keep doing it and let us know what you need from us. We'll help in any way we can and really appreciate you coming back.

[Catherine]

Great. No, my pleasure.

[Interviewer]

Thank you.

[Catherine]

Thanks.