Utility Week

UTILITY WEEK | MAY 2022 | 13 "If you have a wind farm on the side of your village and you can get as much as 50% off your bill for using energy at all the right times, does that change people's opinions as to what renewables look like?" Zoisa North-Bond, CEO, Octopus Energy Generation Renewables says their sheer size and lack of connection to the local community, at least metaphori- cally speaking, means the industry has been "creating friction by trying to shove these projects into place that they didn't belong. "It's such a great shame because from my perspective while I was working for another utility, the biggest limiting factor to the mass rollout of renewables in the UK was actually how people felt about them," she states. North-Bond hopes that by building smaller, more "palatable" turbines closer to demand and o• ering cut price electricity to those who live nearby, Octopus can foster this sense of connection and overcome some of the resistance that has been limiting the deployment of renewables, particularly in England. She believes this will be much more e• ec- tive at winning people over than local ben- e‚ ts funds: "You ended up giving this to a community or town of 500 people and they would end up with millions and millions of pounds, all sat in town halls in the middle of January disputing how to spend it." Recounting her previous experience as director of Coop Community Energy, she says this money was usually "given over to a third party so people just felt really disconnected. Its nothing to do with energy". She says there were "only so many Brownie huts you could save". North-Bond says the initial response to the o• er "blew us away", and it now has "a pipeline of over a thousand towns and vil- lages" asking them to build wind turbines and solar farms in their area: "We got to the end of last year and we saw this massive pull coming from communities." She says the limited number of Fan Club packages available sold out in "something like two weeks" and there are clear signs adopters have been changing their domes- tic routine to take advantage of the cheaper electricity. "Of course, not everybody can do those things – not everybody will want to do those things in terms of adapting what they do in the household – but the option is there and when they can, people seem to be doing it," she says. It's no surprise, then, that Octopus has ambitious plans to expand the model with more turbines: "We have ‚ ve that are going to be launched immediately this year… so very, very soon. We're just about to sign all of the land leases on those. "There will be at least 30 in the next two years and we've said there will be 2,000 – that's in this market and across the world – by the end of the decade. That's something we're estimating will be about £4 billion- worth of investment." North-Bond acknowledges that, all other things being equal, smaller turbines pro- duce energy at a higher cost per unit. But she believes this di• erence can be o• set in several ways, ‚ rst through lower develop- ment costs. "We are ‚ nding that because you're not constantly ‚ ghting a community, you can do this much more quickly. When you've got people saying, yes, we want it here, it drives down a lot of those develop- ment costs, which is absolutely fantastic," she says. Building generation closer to demand should also reduce the need to build expen- sive network infrastructure: "If energy is travelling a really short distance into house- holds and homes, that electron should be the cheapest electron than can possibly be created." Locational charging But for this to work, North-Bond says the bene‚ ts of transporting power over short dis- tances need to be re˜ ected in pricing, which will need to vary by location: "This idea at the moment of having a single wholesale price doesn't make much sense." Her sentiments in this regard appear to contrast with many others in the renew- able industry who argue that high locational transmission charges in Scotland, for exam- ple, are merely making renewables more expensive and deterring investment. North-Bond argues that Octopus's Fan Club model is the best way of rolling out renewables faster and at greater scale: "I would love to see onshore wind and solar development pick up massively because I think it's possible and we haven't really seen much since 2015 when some of those subsi- dies dried up." She believes this will be attractive to the growing number of environmentally con- scious investors looking for a steady pipeline of projects to put their money into, even if the returns are slightly lower: "You get some people that are chasing subsidies across the world but they are drying up." While the immediate focus is onshore wind, North-Bond says they also have their eye on other types of energy assets – solar farms, storage and even o• shore wind. "There are many places where people don't like an o• shore wind farm but if they could get much cheaper energy as a result, does that change their opinion? There are things afoot that we would like to look at there," she says. Tom Grimwood, news editor "If you have a wind farm on the side of your village and you can get as much as 50% off your bill for using energy at all the right times, does that change people's opinions as to what renewables look like?" , CEO, Octopus Energy Generation

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