Latest news with #GreatBritishEnergy
Bloomberg
2 days ago
- Business
- Bloomberg
UK's New State Energy Company Will Spend £1 Billion on Grants
The UK's new state-owned energy company plans to spend about £1 billion ($1.4 billion) on grants, carving out a significant chunk of the taxpayer money it receives. The government announced it was setting up Great British Energy last year, saying the firm would own and run clean-energy assets. It's part of a bet that the state needs to play a bigger role to reach UK climate goals and help bring down energy bills. But there's been little clarity on how the company will actually operate and where it will allocate funds.
Bloomberg
2 days ago
- Business
- Bloomberg
Great British Energy CEO on UK's Clean Energy Mission
Dan McGrail, Interim CEO, Great British Energy discusses the UK's mission to be a 'clean energy superpower' with Bloomberg's Akshat Rathi at the Bloomberg Sustainable Business Summit 2025 in London. (Source: Bloomberg)
Daily Mail
5 days ago
- Business
- Daily Mail
Strategy without substance: Labour must do more to stop the City exodus, says ALEX BRUMMER
Now we have a full house: Labour's spending review, the infrastructure plan and the long-awaited industrial strategy. Anyone seeking to reconcile the bucketful of numbers, different timings of implementation and the exact sum of money involved will, to quote departing Institute of Fiscal Studies chief Paul Johnson, be baffled. This is not to say that there is not good stuff in the industrial strategy. The decision to relieve a bunch of manufacturing business, some 7,000 firms, of intrusive green levies represents a significant change of direction which should improve the competitiveness of the motor, aerospace and chemical industries. But it does not do much help for retail and hospitality, which face not just escalating fuel costs but the consequences of the employers' National Insurance increase and ramped-up business rates. Whitehall is a whizz at coming up with an alphabet soup of new names such as the 'British Industrial Competitiveness Scheme' and a 'Connections Accelerator Service'. Hot air: Whitehall is a whizz at coming with an alphabet soup of new names such as the British Industrial Competitiveness Scheme and a Connections Accelerator Service These will sit alongside the other good stuff already unveiled, such as Great British Energy and the National Wealth Fund. How this hangs together is confusing. The focus on eight sectors where the UK excels – advanced manufacturing, clean energy, creative industries, defence, digital tech, financial services, life sciences, and professional and business services – clearly has merit. Much of it is hot air. There is no recognition that great swathes of tech leave these shores daily. Only yesterday, precision instrument maker Spectris fell into the hands of private equity plunderer Advent. The creative industries are under threat from AI because Sir Keir Starmer favours American big tech over home-grown talent. The decision to refuse assistance to AstraZeneca vaccine production in the UK encouraged our biggest pharma concern to invest overseas. UK fintech creation Wise and Revolut plan New York listings. And the 2.5 per cent of GDP promised for defence spending is half the NATO target of 5 per cent. Practical steps such as judicious use of the National Security & Investment Act, to end the madness of foreign and private equity bids, would be a good start to a refreshed approach. Health boost In the end, after a revolt from UK long investors, the ridiculous board of NHS and medical property landlord Assura opted for an effective merger with PHP. That may require fewer goodies for executives and the jobs grief which comes with mergers. It must, however, be in the best interest of stakeholders. Those at Assura who felt a cash deal with KKR was the better option were delusional. A search of the British Medical Journal archive provides clear guidance on the impact of private equity ownership in this space. It results in extra cost to patients and payers, secondary effects on health outcomes and 'mixed to harmful impacts on quality'. A KKR deal would also have meant signing away the benefits of a 3 per cent rise in Labour's investment in the NHS to grasping financiers. All the indications are that many reforms to the NHS would focus on community and primary care, enhancing the value of companies investing in clinics and practices. KKR's last offer was 'final', precluding a return with a higher bid. One trusts KKR won't be back for the whole caboodle in six months. Cherry picking Spectris is the latest advanced UK engineer to take the private equity shilling, choosing private equity giant Advent ahead of KKR. The price of £4.4billion paid may look generous but not when one considers the discount to the New York stock market for the best of British engineering. No one in the Government should be complacent. It weakens the London markets. Advent's purchase of Cobham in 2019 and the dismantling of an aviation pioneer was a disgrace. Its key flight refuelling technology was sold to a US rival. The enormous value of Cobham's innovative tech was demonstrated in the epic 18-hour flight of B2 stealth bombers to Iran and back at the weekend. What happened to 'securonomics'?
Telegraph
6 days ago
- Business
- Telegraph
Ed Miliband's £8bn pet project is sliding into irrelevance
The chairman of Great British Energy appeared exasperated. Under tough questioning, Juergen Maier was desperately trying to explain the mission of the new taxpayer-owned company he had been hired to oversee. When would it actually start to bring people's bills down, the interviewer from Sky News asked. And how exactly would it do this? Maier, the former boss of Siemens UK, could only offer that 'more renewable energy is bringing people's energy bills down. It's a great thing for British people'. 'I know you're asking me for a date,' he added. '[But] Great British Energy has only just been brought into creation.' 'Can you see why people think this is a bit vague?' the journalist responded. Fast forward four months – almost a year after Labour's election victory – and the question of what Great British Energy (GBE) is for still troubles the energy industry. 'It's what we're all waiting to find out,' says one executive at a top wind farm developer. 'They've got £8bn. But what are they going to actually use it for?' The quango, which it set to be headquartered in Aberdeen, was promised a dowry of £8.3bn to 'drive forward investment in clean, home-grown energy production' in the Labour manifesto. Ed Miliband, the Energy Secretary, has since described it as Britain's answer to the European state-owned energy companies such as Orsted (Denmark), EnBW (Germany), Equinor (Norway) and EDF (France) – the likes of which currently own nearly half of the country's offshore wind farms. 'We have a simple proposition: if it is right for the Danes, the French, the Norwegians and the Swedes to own British energy assets, it is right for the British people to do so as well,' he told MPs in September. Great British Energy. Owned by the British people. For the British people. — Ed Miliband (@Ed_Miliband) May 15, 2025 It's an argument that more than two thirds of the public agrees with, according to polling by More in Common. 'The concept resonates with people,' says Luke Tryl, the group's executive director. Yet critics say that for all the soaring rhetoric, GBE is sorely lacking a clear purpose. Even the quango's own staff have appeared unsure about what it should be doing, some claim. One industry source recounts going to a GBE 'engagement' event last month at a French restaurant in central London, hosted by Paul Addison, the head of policy. 'I got the strong impression that they still haven't actually settled on what it should look like,' the source adds. Another person who attended a roundtable in Scotland described a similar experience. However, a person close to GBE disputed this characterisation. 'What we've been saying to people is, if you're unsure about what we're up to, reach out, because there is a team of us now,' the person adds. Ahead of the election, senior Labour figures stressed that the taxpayer-funded entity would not 'crowd out' the private sector and instead only focus on where its cash could help to unlock or 'de-risk' investment by others. This would rule out vast swathes of the conventional energy sector – including investment in solar and wind. Instead, it would focus on potentially more nascent and expensive technologies such as floating offshore wind farms, carbon capture and storage, hydrogen production and long-duration energy storage schemes – all of which experts say will be phenomenally hard to crack. Miliband has said GBE will also invest in community energy schemes. But he has also contradicted Labour's other statements at times, suggesting that GBE will indeed get involved in owning wind farms, for example. 'I often cite the fact that the mayor of Munich owns more of our offshore wind than the British state,' he told the New Statesman. 'We want GB Energy to show that public ownership can work.' The Energy Secretary is expected to set out GBE's strategic objectives formally in a letter in the coming months. This tension became clear last summer when the Government announced a partnership between GBE and the Crown Estate, which owns and leases seabed for wind farms, and appeared to suggest GBE would take stakes in developments. Behind the scenes, wind farm owners 'massively kicked off', says one person involved in talks between industry and the Government. Yet so far, the only projects GBE has committed to are a £180m investment to install solar panels on around 400 schools and hospitals and a £300m pot to invest in factories that will make parts for the country's offshore wind turbines. It's a far cry from the soaring ambitions previously described by Miliband. And hardly the type of work requiring an entirely new quango. Slow progress Dan McGrail, another Siemens veteran who was recently appointed GBE's interim chief executive, has also told trade publication Utility Week that he did not anticipate spending 'significant' sums until next year at the earliest. This slow progress is partly due to the slow grind of Parliament. A bill to formally establish GBE only became law a few weeks ago, with McGrail admitting last month that it did not even have a bank account yet. GBE is also still hunting for a permanent office in Aberdeen, where it expects to house up to 200 staff. Yet eyebrows were raised last week when, after months of speculation, the Treasury appeared to clip the quango's wings by stealth. About £2.5bn of the organisation's £8.3bn budget was handed to Great British Nuclear (GBN), a separate quango running the Government's mini nuclear reactor programme, documents published for the spending review showed. GBN has been renamed to 'Great British Energy – Nuclear', allowing ministers to claim that its budget remains unchanged. But while the organisations will be 'allied', they remain operationally independent – meaning Maier and McGrail have 30pc less money to play with. 'It was a sleight of hand,' one Whitehall insider says. Much of the rest of GBE's cash has also been allocated via loans and guarantees that will require tight oversight by the Treasury. 'Now the dust has settled on the spending review, it's clear the GBE budget has been slashed by Rachel Reeves with billions diverted into nuclear energy – a far cry from the £28bn green pledge that was once promised by the Labour Party,' says Graham Leadbitter, a Scottish National Party MP. Meaningful or 'vanity project'? Still, there remain high hopes for GBE in some quarters. Andy Willis, founder of battery developer Kobo Energy, says he believes the company can make a meaningful contribution to net zero if it successfully breaks down barriers across the green energy sector. 'The big missing link at the moment in the UK is long-duration energy storage,' he says, which is the technology needed to protect the country against 'dunkelflaute' periods of low wind in the winter. Willis also suggests GBE could help to ease bottlenecks such as waiting times for power transformers, which currently take two to three years to arrive due to stretched manufacturing capacity in Europe. He says they could do so by encouraging companies to co-invest in UK factories. It is understood that GBE's bosses are currently focused on three areas: commercial investments, which will see the company take minority stakes in clean power projects; community energy schemes, likely to involve partnering with cooperatives; and supply chains, for example, helping to develop manufacturing of key parts for wind farms. The quango is understood to have around 100 potential projects in its pipeline already, most of them potential investments in floating offshore wind schemes. It is hoped that it will generate its own income in the long run, although there is no timescale for achieving break-even. But Daniel Slater, an analyst at Zeus Capital, says GBE is partly hamstrung by being forced to invest only in renewables. 'Historically, similar companies have been established on traditional energy sources, often using cash flows from oil and gas or power generation to pivot into renewables,' he says. 'GB Energy has to operate with no existing revenues and potentially in markets that are often already subject to government support. It means reaching an independent financial position will be very difficult. 'The option for GB Energy is probably to act as an alternative form of government subsidy programme, while maintaining stakes in projects which could then establish cash flows longer term.' He believes another area that could be worthy of GBE's attention is geothermal heat, potentially for public buildings such as hospitals and universities. But Ashley Kelty, an energy analyst at Panmure Liberum, dismisses GBE as a 'vanity project' that risks duplicating work already being done by other publicly-funded investment agencies. 'It's a waste of time and money – little more than a virtue-signalling gesture,' he says, pointing out that the sums involved are tiny. Its location is, he says, also a mistake. 'Being in Aberdeen is symbolic only. It would be better to be based in London where it is closer to the City and financial institutions. The jobs impact will be negligible.' For now, Miliband's pet project appears to have survived to fight another day after emerging from the spending review with a remaining budget of almost £6bn. But as scrutiny of the quango grows, the question of exactly how he will spend that money will only become more urgent.
Metro
18-06-2025
- Business
- Metro
Keir Starmer: Even in summer, I'm working to bring energy bills down
For too many families, a letter through the door means another bill they struggle to afford. I know what that's like. Growing up, our phone was regularly cut off because it was the easiest bill to skip when finances were too stretched. So easing the cost-of-living pressures on hardworking families is deeply personal for me. That's why, this winter, we are going further to protect working people, giving almost 3 million more households £150 off their energy bills compared to last year. Under outdated rules put in place by the last government, millions of people on means-tested benefits missed out on the support they needed. But in 2025, six million households will get help with their bills. That includes 900,000 families with children, and 1.8 million households in fuel poverty. But this isn't just about numbers on a page. It's about peace of mind. It's about knowing you can heat your home without fearing the next bill. And it's about fairness — making sure support reaches the people who need it most. This comes alongside a fall in energy prices in July, which will provide some much-needed extra breathing room. But in the long run, we need to do more to keep people's bills low. In this new era of instability, there are some obvious truths we simply can't ignore. We can't be dependent on foreign dictators like Putin for our energy. We can't ignore the urgent need to produce clean British energy here at home. And we cannot allow people to suffer in homes they can't afford to heat anymore. To view this video please enable JavaScript, and consider upgrading to a web browser that supports HTML5 video That's why this government has set up Great British Energy, which will produce cleaner, cheaper British energy across the country, and creating thousands of jobs in the process. From the £14 billion we announced last week for a new nuclear power station, Sizewell C, which will supply millions of homes, to £500 million in hydrogen investment, we are building the infrastructure this country needs to keep bills low for decades to come. That will provide the security and certainty people deserve. My government is rolling up its sleeves and bringing bills down for the long term, but I know families need support right now. That's why we are taking a range of actions, not just regarding energy, to put more money back in people's pockets. Free breakfast clubs in primary schools and free school meals for children whose families are on Universal Credit will save parents hundreds of pounds a year and set our young people up to succeed at school. We're limiting the number of branded items of school uniforms, saving parents even more of their hard earned cash. We're expanding childcare hours to help families with the costs of childcare. Because we took the tough decisions needed to wipe the slate clean in the budget last October, we've put the economy on a stable footing. That's paved the way for four consecutive cuts in interest rates, keeping people's mortgages low. It means we can raise the winter fuel allowance threshold for pensioners this year. And it means we can now move on to the next phase of my government – investing in Britain's future so that working people across the country have more money in their pockets and feel more secure. More Trending These are all things we promised in our manifesto before the election. Now, we're delivering. This isn't the summit of my government's ambition, we're just getting started. And we won't stop until those cost of living pressures are eased. But this winter, millions will feel the difference. And that's the kind of change my government is delivering for Britain. Do you have a story you'd like to share? Get in touch by emailing Share your views in the comments below. MORE: The UK is now 20 times more likely to see a 40°C summer MORE: Last night's abortion vote risks failing vulnerable women MORE: I was trolled on Tattle Life – I'm thrilled it has been exposed
