The future of Britain's electricity networks - Energy and Climate Change Contents


Examination of Witnesses (Question Numbers 40-59)

DR MICHAEL POLLITT, PROFESSOR GORAN STRBAC AND DR JIM WATSON

1 APRIL 2009

  Q40  Colin Challen: It poses a question, in my mind, at least, that the cost has been put at £40 billion (or euros—I forget which) over ten years. Spread over the European Union, over that period of time, it is not a huge amount of money.

  Dr Watson: No.

  Q41  Colin Challen: However, should it be delivered in the current conditions—there are problems with liberalisation of the markets in Europe and we have heard a great deal this morning about the total dysfunctionality, in my opinion, of our own way of doing things—this does call for more of a socialisation, does it not? If you were to approach it on a Europe-wide scale, possibly backed up with directives, then you are going to sweep away some of this "Cannot see the wood for the trees" approach.

  Dr Watson: If you wanted something like a solar array in the desert to supply lots of electricity to the EU, you would have to have something that was not a liberalised market to create the right incentives for that kind of very large investment to go in. Investors are going to have to have security of where the electricity is going and who they are selling it to, and all of that, but, as I say, I am not entirely convinced it is the number one on that list of priorities for the Energy Commissioner sitting in Brussels. Maybe other colleagues want to comment on this.

  Dr Pollitt: I think that European grids have other priorities. I would like to see complete integration of the European gas grid, for starters, and effective gas trading, and that is the number one priority for the European Commission in terms of its grid policy. I was at a conference last week about energy security, and if you think that energy security problems of the gas system are bad, well, think about the energy security problems of importing electricity from North Africa. I think the record on disruption of electricity grids is much worse than their record on disruption of gas grids. There are serious geopolitical issues associated with some of the more optimistic scenarios for solar from Africa that really would demand very serious consideration, not to mention the fact that the electricity transmission grids are very weak in Italy or Spain or any of the places where we would be landing the electricity and then wanting to strengthen it and bring it up to northern Europe. I think this is a long way off and requires certain fundamental changes in geopolitics before we would want to be relying on large quantities of African solar energy.

  Professor Strbac: I could perhaps comment on the case of connecting the UK with the rest of Europe. We have done some analysis, in particular angled to see whether we will be able to manage this intermittency of wind better if we connect with our neighbours. This shows that the benefits of doing that will be rather limited because weather fronts are, in fact, bigger than countries. Fundamentally, when we have too much wind there will be a similar situation on the continent. So there will be rather limited opportunities to do that interconnection, and we would think that there would be better opportunities or more cost-effective ways of managing intermittency by integrating the demand side of the UK and moving towards a system where, particularly if you look at the longer-term, 2050 time horizons, when we anticipate a start to integrate transport, potentially, and the heat systems into electricity, there will be massive opportunities to manage the system if we get access to these resources, because these are all, if you like, storage resources—heat and then transport. Both providing storage. Opportunities there, in our view, are incredible and would have to be exploited. That is what we think. If anything, the UK should be moving into the area of integrating demand and generation in our system rather than having a vision as to where we need to put the wires.

  Q42  Dr Whitehead: Could I take you to the other end of the scale? To what extent does the talk and discussion about the strengthening of investment in the transmission network, as it were, ossify the system in future into a one-way transmission based system, whereby the transmission system supplies the DNOs and the customers in a one-way street at a time when, obviously, there is a great deal of discussion and potential in distributed energy going back the other way up the street and, therefore, requiring, particularly, DNOs to look at the local transmission systems and, perhaps, change the nature of how those systems work within the overall transmission system? Do you think there is a serious danger that the sort of investment that is suggested is going to shut the door on effective grid import of distributed systems?

  Dr Watson: It is a risk. You talk about "shutting doors"—I think the door is already shut and has been shut for sometime. In a sense, what a distributed generator of energy has to do is to open it. As I said much earlier on, we have had a tradition of distributed energy in Britain but you have to look pre-World War 2 for it. We are a very centralised system, so there is a risk of concentrating on the large at the expense of the small, and my partial reaction, on second thoughts, to the solar array in the Sahara is to say that there is a lot you can do with renewables embedded into distribution grids in local areas, whether it be in public buildings or private homes, heat and power systems in local towns and villages, and so on. There are huge opportunities. Actually, on the illustrative mix from the UK, from DECC, about how they might meet their renewables target, if you look at the pie chart they have got in the consultation document, lots of that pie chart is big stuff like offshore wind, but there is a lot of it which is local at various scales, whether it is house-local, village-local or town-local. Again, to meet these targets I think you have to open the system up to allow the possibility of local generation and integration with demand (going back to what my colleagues have also said), and to do that it is probably a bigger ask, in a sense, to change the way that distribution networks operate. As you know, they have been passive hitherto for a long time, and now we are asking them, if they do connect to a lot of distributed resources, to be active, to manage that actively, with lots of different generators of different sizes and types, which implies new control systems and implies integration with demand, and so on. In a sense, that is probably a bigger change, I sense, for them than, say, connecting offshore wind is for a transmission company. Perhaps it needs more attention. In a sense, I am agreeing with the premise of your question that there is a risk if you over-emphasise the issues of transmission access for big renewables at the expense of the smaller-scale technologies.

  Dr Pollitt: I think this is potentially very important and very exciting. It plays to actually engaging with the public on issues of climate change and getting public acceptability for adjusting our energy, and I think it is an under-exploited opportunity at the moment to move more into local energy service company provision and to engage people with smaller companies and smaller investments, and to look to exploit local energy resources. Longer term, these are the sorts of experiments that we should be doing now because they may pay off very, very substantially later on. They are difficult—no one pretends it is easy—and if you talk to any of the incumbents they will probably tell you that this is all terribly difficult, and any interactions that we have had with small energy service companies raise questions about their competence and: "We think we can do it better". But I think this is an area where we do need much more experimentation and where we have got the chance to actually get public support for doing something about climate change, because people can see and be engaged with it locally and engage with changing their behaviour because they are engaging with a local company. If it is a big national company telling you what to do you are very unlikely to do it. Also, I think, it offers the prospect of lots of innovation because different things will happen in different places; different technologies will be trialled, supply and demand will be traded off much more effectively; new ownership forms may come forward, so we may see customer-owned assets or private/private partnerships, which may all be necessary to achieve these very ambitious targets.

  Professor Strbac: The research which we conducted in terms of comparison of distributed and centralised systems is that in terms of integration there potentially would be significant benefits in a system which current regulation prevents them from accessing. For example, if the wholesale electricity market price, let us suppose, is £40 per megawatt hour, if you can take the full 400,000 volts (very few people can do that), if you want to buy at the end of the system, it costs 10-12p per kilowatt hour—£100 per megawatt hour—our current regulatory system means that (although the UK is leading the world, by the way, in terms of changing the regulatory regime around electricity generation, in my view) we are still far from making a level playing field for similar generators to compete on the same footing, if you like, with the commercial company. Asking electricity providers to produce at 4p per kilowatt hour without recognising their benefits in terms of networks is difficult. So if we were able to make changes in the regulatory framework, which I think is going to be probably dealt with, that would enable these distributors to merge and compete properly with centralised solutions.

  Q43  Dr Whitehead: You said they are exciting and you have said that, yes, some changes need to be made, but I think the central question remains: how do you deal with the DNOs in terms of how reasonably market-ordered access is provided? To put it the other way round: at what stage of penetration of the market, for example, would it be considered necessary to make the serious changes? At what point of penetration does the existing DNO arrangement simply break down, particularly in terms of, perhaps, an uneven demand for penetration in different areas, according to how the DNOs are working? Do you consider that there are, actually, as it were, regime changes which need to be undertaken, perhaps which look rather different from some of the larger concerns on the transmission network, in order to accommodate that new world?

  Dr Watson: I think you can go quite a long way before the system has to operate that differently, depending on the concentration of distributive generation—say, people generating electricity in their home through solar panels. You would have to have a very large concentration in a particular area to start causing problems, but if that is spread out around an area—studies have been done which show you can go quite a long way. Although, as Goran said, we are leading the world in regulatory change, the irony is we are way behind most countries in deployment of this stuff. We are very good at regulatory change but, actually, delivery is appalling bad, I think.

  Q44  Sir Robert Smith: There is a disconnect there?

  Dr Watson: A little bit, yes. The upshot of that is that you can actually go a fair way before you start getting to some of the real crunch problems where the regulatory system would have to change. In the meantime, I think Michael is quite right, there is a need for innovation, and government regulators through different schemes could do a lot more to incentivise the distribution companies and newcomers to trial and demonstrate some of the really new concepts, not just of technologies like PV but how they all connect together and connect together with demand in new ways. So then there has to be a lot of learning done, so that when the time comes where you do get this crunch and where you do have to do things differently, at least there is some knowledge there to build on rather than waiting till you get there and then sort of saying: "How do you do it?"—which, by the way, is what the Danes have done and they have done it quite successfully. It is not the only way but we have time to anticipate this, at the moment.

  Chairman: Can we have a look at this innovation a bit more?

  Q45  Dr Turner: We have established fairly well this morning that the management of the grid is firmly rooted in the first half of the 20th Century. Sadly, so is most of the technology. There is an unfortunate history of lack of investment for many decades in research and development in transmission technology. Can you give us your views on the current state of investment and actual work going on to develop technology? Clearly, there are several outstanding areas where we could use advances in technology, in terms of tackling transmission losses, facilitating smarter grids and, particularly, the immense cost of under-sea cabling and DC transmission. Just how much work has been going on in these areas?

  Dr Watson: Along with most of the energy industry, a corner has been turned, probably, in the last few years, because of the availability of money from governments but, also, commensurate anticipatory investment by companies, whether it be utilities or whether it be equipment suppliers like ABB—people who have geared up their investments in R&D. One of the consequences of privatising the industry in the UK, particularly for the distribution grid, was a real run-down of what little R&D they did to the point where they did virtually none at all. One of the issues has been, from a grid perspective, with the regulatory regime, that there have been efforts to incentivise innovation and demonstration of new concepts, but because they are starting from such a low base they have not been that successful. They have brought forward some projects and some activity, but not on the scale that I believe is required. I have questions about whether you can rely on the regulatory system, with some adjustments, so that people can get a greater rate of return by investing in innovation during a regulatory period; I have questions whether that, in itself, is enough and whether actually, as I said in answer to the previous question, government itself needs to not only support new types of PV cells, and so on, but a series of area-based demonstrations of smart grid concepts in practice, which is being done in many other countries. There is a very big demonstration in Boulder, Colorado, which I think is $100 million, by the local utility on a smart grid, and there are many examples in other, European countries. Those kinds of investments do need to be made so that people have a better understanding of how all these things work together. Until we do that we are not going to have it. We do have a problem with the current system in investment.

  Q46  Dr Turner: Are we missing out on a considerable green industrial opportunity here by not investing in up-to-date transmission technology? Can you see any useful policy instruments that the Government could deploy, whether it is direct government investment or by Ofgem pricing mechanisms, to not only increase the, frankly, pathetic level of R&D investment in relation to turnover from its present 0.5 per cent level, which is derisory, and, also, achieve some intelligent direction of the R&D effort?

  Dr Watson: I think there is an opportunity here, in the sense that government centrally could fund things under its current programmes, or you could see it channelled through bodies like the Energy Technologies Institute, which already has a programme of work on distributed generation, although it is relatively small. The other thing you might consider, if you think about it slightly differently, is perhaps whether you might build on some of the exceptions, if you like, that have occurred in the UK, such as Woking, which everybody talks about, where innovative things have been done through investment, and think about: is there a case for creating or granting more powers to, say, local authorities, or thinking of new ways to bring in newcomer energy service companies of the kind that Michael mentioned earlier, so that they would be the ones that are actually experimenting with some of these new concepts? Another interesting lesson from history is that it is often the outsiders and not the incumbents who are the ones that really innovate; do the new stuff and actually bring on more radical change which is not incremental.

  Q47  Dr Turner: What worries me is that I am hearing a deafening silence from the three of you on whether there has been any significant technological advance in transmission technology itself—any advance in DC cabling, for instance, that could make it much cheaper and more flexibly applicable, because there are so many applications where it would be extremely useful if we had such advances. Is there anything happening there?

  Professor Strbac: Regarding the question as to can engineers make a CO2-free electricity system, the answer to that is absolutely yes. To remind you, engineers have sent men to the moon in 1968, which was 40 years ago, and making a CO2-free power system is much less of a challenge than flying to the moon. The issue which we have is all about the budget; what is the budget required to get to the problem? That is where the issue is. I have lots of, if you like, dumb solutions to how we can arrive at this but not many clever solutions. That is where, in our view, there is a massive business case for investing in alternative ways in which we manage the task. Let me give an example. There are two key factors of the present system of operation. One is that the British system needs to balance very tightly. That has to be done. Also, demand is completely uncontrollable. When you switch the lights on in here, somewhere generation produces immediately, or almost immediately, the amount of energy which you have just demanded. The whole culture and philosophy of the system was being based on a predict-and-provide mentality. Given that supply of demand is valuable (blackouts are not very desirable and we want to make sure we do not have blackouts), the traditional solution is to then build enough resources, build enough concrete, steel and copper to be able to meet that big demand, because your only source of control is in generation. Transmission control is the only way we can do that, but also by changing generation. In that respect, nothing has fundamentally changed since 50 years ago. If we continue with this philosophy, which we obviously can do, if we build huge amounts of nuclear power stations and huge amounts of wind, the system is going to work, but we are going to have to waste energy whenever production exceeds demand, so there will be no problem maintaining demand supply security. We have done some analysis, if we have climate change at 2050 targets we have an all-electric future, so we integrate transport and heat into this, and you would end up with about a 300-gigawatt system, which is now 60 gigawatts—big demand. So a five-fold increase in capacity but only an increase in energy of about two times. Your utilisation of the investment, which is already quite poor, generates 40 per cent with wind, and networks about 30 per cent, so if you continue with this philosophy of just provide on demand, the utilisation of the investment will be incredibly low; it will be below 25 per cent. The alternative to that is to become cleverer in the way we organise ourselves. One extreme would be that if we go to this electric-transport future, when people come home everybody plugs their car in and then they are getting it recharged, versus when the car gets plugged in it sends information about what is the status of the charge of the battery, and when we want to use this car the next time we can reduce the investment from 300 gigawatts to 150 gigawatts supply. A massive savings in investment efficiency. That is, in our view, a major opportunity for research and investment. In terms of individual technologies, they are all available, but what is not available, what is not understood, is how we get all this together, which Jim has pointed out. Given that the UK is not very linked in terms of infrastructure with Europe, we are going to hit first the problem of inefficient investment, and we could turn this potential problem into a massive opportunity. Obama talks about smart grids—that is not an unknown phenomenon—but what we could do, in the UK, given that we would need to have this in our own patch in order to make the system work efficiently, is we could start leading the world in this area and exporting that technology, which is really all about service provision, and which is all about integration, and sell this to other countries. There is a massive opportunity for us.

  Q48  Charles Hendry: In addition to the issues of managing demand, can I ask about managing supply as well? One of the issues about wind is its inherent variability. What about the technology of electricity storage? Is it viable to be investing in batteries, in hydrogen-compressed air, water storage—those technologies? Is this also an area where you think we could be carving out an opportunity for UK plc? Or are we in a situation where, simply, the costs of those technologies would never be justified by the return which it would make?

  Professor Strbac: Certainly several years ago, there was an argument being built that for every megawatt of wind farm you put out you need one megawatt of some sort of storage. That would be a complete disaster for wind because the cost of storage is twice the wind cost, which is already quite expensive. Also, when you put the energy into storage you only get 75 per cent back, if you are lucky, because storage wastes a lot of energy. So you need to be quite desperate to go into building dedicated storage for this. If we move into a world of having, let us say, heat pumps in cars, the storage will have been bought for you because the buildings have got the storage already inherent in them, and also people who drive the cars would have to have the batteries, so somebody else has paid for them anyway. All you need to do is make use of it in a way that integrates the system. I am not saying there is not mileage in building new technologies—there would be definitely—but I would suggest that we first try to make sure we can exploit significantly cheaper options and become significantly more sophisticated in how we manage the system. I think that is where the massive potential gain is. It is just getting more organised and it requires investment because what you need to do is merge information and communication infrastructure with energy infrastructure. Making energy cleverer is where, in our view, the massive gain is, and that is where the UK potentially could lead the world. It is very clear that this is required, and, as I say, a bit of the technology exists—we have mobile `phones and we know how to communicate—but how you make this system work coherently and how you make the regulations facilitate that development is where we need to spend our time.

  Q49  Colin Challen: It confuses me a bit when we have heard a lot about the markets producing efficiency and yet smart grids, which are all about efficiency, are struggling. I have seen many manufacturers of things that you can put in freezers, or put on industrial plant and all sorts of things, that can reduce electricity consumption tremendously. Is anybody at all driving a coherent policy on this—Ofgem, the Government, the EU? Where could we look to find a coherent policy on smart grids and the associated technologies?

  Dr Watson: At the technology level, obviously, European research is funding technology platforms, but I think what you are getting at is what is the incentive for people to actually deploy these technologies—in the fridge and in appliances in the home? Then you have to look at the wider business model and drivers of the utilities which dominate the energy market, which (basically put) are: the more they sell the more they earn; the more units they sell the more money they get. There has been some rhetoric and talk within government about thinking about how they might be transformed into energy service companies—there have been ministerial speeches going back, I think, three years now, on that—and the idea of giving them different drivers. Actually, what they are trying to do is to manage the service, and that would lead you into all sorts of things, including local generation, and so on. My reading of recent consultations that came out in February is that DECC has really pulled back from this idea of trying to regulate companies differently so that they behave as energy service companies. The favoured solution was to put a cap on the emissions from the electricity and gas supplied by companies, and to reduce that over time, so that eventually the companies would then have to either invest in demand-side measures in people's homes or in low-carbon generation. Analysis has been done which shows that that is all terribly expensive, so they have pulled back from it. I suspect there is the economic analysis behind it, but also there is a pushback from industry because it would need a very serious change in their business model. Those kinds of changes are required if you are going to get energy service companies on-stream.

  Q50  Colin Challen: That is the generation industry you are talking about?

  Dr Watson: Yes, but obviously these same companies are the supply companies—the retail companies; they are not different companies, they are the same.

  Q51  Colin Challen: One driver is price, of course. If the Government is not prepared to legislate and regulate for smart technologies in a sort of direct, interventionist fashion, if they simply change the pricing structure so that, as an industry now, you do have banding and all sorts of approaches to pricing every half-hour and that kind of thing, would it change the attitude to technology if we introduced variable pricing so that the more you use the more you pay per kilowatt hour?

  Dr Watson: Again, those things may help but I think there is an infrastructure investment issue here—the kinds of things that Goran was talking about, about the ICT revolution having an effect on energy systems. That can only happen if you made a set of infrastructure investments; smart meters—not just the box in the cupboard but smarter, and that can give you information, but it is actually the IT system that lies behind that so that that information is available; real-time pricing, information about what you are using and the carbon emissions from it. My view is that that does require some sort of programme of co-ordinated investment just like the investment that gives us the pipes and wires we use now as required.

  Dr Pollitt: I think the Government has substantially interfered with the market for smart meters. It was the case, about, say, three years ago, where the companies were expecting to roll out smart meters to about 30 per cent of their customers, simply on a private business case, but that has been delayed as a result of the Government's investigation of a policy on a ten-year roll out, which of course is in line with European directives. I think this area is quite a good example of government interfering in the emergence of what would have been quite strong market pressures to introduce some of these technologies. There is a case for (a) the Government getting out of the way of incentivising these things and (b) making sure that if they are going to go ahead with these policies they go ahead with them quite quickly and introduce some clarity into how the market is going to evolve over time. I do know that there are technology companies out there—British ones—who are very, very interested in this; they see smart appliances as the next big thing to mobile `phones, and there is a lot of read-across from, say, mobile `phone technology into smart appliances, and there are companies that are willing to invest, as long as we can get the incentives set up.

  Q52  Colin Challen: Does something have to happen to Ofgem, really, to transform this? Do we need to change Ofgem's functions?

  Dr Pollitt: My interest has been declared. Clearly, the pushback on smart meters came from outside Ofgem, and Ofgem were letting the market emerge for smart meters, and it was about to emerge when wider government policy got in the way.

  Professor Strbac: In terms of wires, currently companies get a rate of return on copper, aluminium and steel, not on making better use of that which we have. That is just a fact.

  Q53  Anne Main: Very briefly, on the government interference, as you said, on smart meters. Having met the smart meter companies very recently, part of it was not only government interference but they actually believed there has been a lack of clarity on what is expected of them—just smart meter technology as a whole. Is this going to be a big problem if we just do not know what we want of the industries that we are expecting to deliver this?

  Dr Pollitt: Yes.

  Q54  Sir Robert Smith: Just to reinforce what Professor Strbac was saying just now about the companies and copper, and so on, surely what Dr Watson was saying, which the Government, rather sadly, seems to be turned against, is that turning the providers into providers of heat, light and mechanical power in your home would automatically build into them the incentives to make best use of the whole system, and to deliver this smart technology.

  Dr Watson: That is why I am particularly disappointed to see that being dropped at the first sign of, possibly, lobbying behind the scenes.

  Q55  Sir Robert Smith: Some of the companies are quite up for it, are they not?

  Dr Watson: Yes, they were.

  Q56  Chairman: I had the impression the companies were keen.

  Dr Watson: I have seen Vincent de Rivaz give speeches where he said: "I can see a time when we won't make money just by selling units". (That is a slight paraphrase.) It is not like they were not up for it at the time, and I am slightly puzzled as to what has happened to that.

  Chairman: Let us have a look at this in terms of rounding up on these things. You have talked about technology, innovation and regulation. Of course, the big issue is the costs of all this, which seem to be huge.

  Q57  Mr Weir: We all struggle with the problem of how we balance the cost to the consumer of energy with the investment needed. Obviously, as we have been discussing, huge investment is probably needed in our transmission networks to meet our targets for renewables into the future. Do you think the consumer should pay the full cost of the network upgrades arising from, essentially, public policy objectives? Or do you think that in the future there will be support needed from the taxpayer?

  Dr Pollitt: Of course, there is the "polluter pays" principle; clearly, if consumers are consuming "dirty" energy, of course, they should pay, and it is costly to decarbonise the electricity sector. The first port of call must be the consumers, and we clearly want to incentivise people to reduce their consumption when they are faced with the true cost of their electricity, which includes the cost of its carbon. I think consumers must pay more, and it would be very wrong if we blunted the incentives which higher prices will give to more efficient use of energy. That said, of course, there is a serious fuel poverty concern, and I think the case for taxpayer intervention is to help the fuel-poor. What I think we need to maintain is the principle that somebody pays and that prices for individual units of energy do reflect their true cost, but there is clearly a case for us directing any subsidies that we want to put into this towards the poor customers. There is a lot of potential there because many poor customers, of course, are quite price sensitive and would welcome direct subsidies either to reduce demand or to help them to respond better to price signals. So if we are thinking about rolling out energy service companies, it is quite interesting to observe that the sort of local authority energy service companies which we already have (the Woking example and, also, Aberdeen and Southampton), have been created specifically to target low-income customers, mainly operating around council housing stocks. So there is a principle there that is already established that if we do want to raise the cost of energy we can direct our subsidies towards helping poorer people. That is a legitimate use, I think, of taxpayers' money because it maintains the efficiency incentives of everybody facing the correct price but it gets to the equity problems of: "We don't want to raise prices on the poorest customers".

  Mr Weir: You are faced with a problem: every time the price of energy goes up the number of fuel poor goes up as well. It is a very difficult cycle to break.

  Q58  Dr Whitehead: Talking about the issue of somebody has to pay and how that may be structured, do you think the present system of five-yearly reviews of network access payments is likely to be in the immediate future up to the task of accommodating what is an unprecedentedly large investment proposal, not just in terms of the vision for 2020 costs—the £4.7 billion—but, obviously, the offshore connection costs as well?

  Dr Pollitt: I think this is something, of course, that Ofgem is consulting on, at the moment. There is an issue about whether you would maintain, basically, a five-year review but you would have more re-openers around it. So it is clearly the case with the offshore regime that that will be a rolling process, and as new investment and new proposed investments come forward then there would be an auction process for connection. That will not be a five-year cycle. However, there will need to be some network planning of the five-year type because we need to make investments which anticipate future demand as well as just responding to demands as they arise. I think we need both strategies. We do need to maintain at least a five-year planning horizon within the price controls, and we need to have the prospect of more frequent re-openers or renegotiations as new investment proposals come forward, but in order for that to be feasible, of course, we need a more streamlined process so that these things can be properly assessed but quickly.

  Q59  Chairman: Is there a longer-term indicative programme in relation to the costs you have been talking about? There is the five-year pricing plan, which is a reasonable kind of a period for the pricing, but is there a longer indicative programme? In the water industry, for example, the water companies are now required to have a 25-year investment indicative programme. Is there anything like that within the energy sector?

  Dr Pollitt: No, not to my knowledge. My reaction to that is that with water much less technological progress is expected over 25 years than would be the case in energy. So it is not clear that there is a parallel to be drawn there, but it is interesting.


 
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