Utility Week

UTILITY WEEK | JUNE 2023 | 13 Action on Bills platform was massive news for the energy retail sector. Eon UK, a member of the "big six", was only the second UK supplier to license Kraken from challenger brand Octopus. Good Energy announced it had struck a deal to use Kraken a year earlier. While the prospect of migrating more than 5 million customers on to a new system is a daunting task for any business, the fact that this was starting as the govern- ment was ordering all but essential workers to stay at home was clearly worrying news for Lewis. "I remember sitting there in the evening watching Boris Johnson at his lectern announcing this and think- ing, 'Wow, I don't even know how we run our existing business with everybody working at home, let alone engage in the most transformational project this busi- ness will ever have'," he says. When the pandemic arrived, Lewis was a seasoned industry professional. He joined what was then Pow- ergen in the early 1990s as an environmental special- ist. The company was bought by German firm Eon in 2002 and Lewis moved to Dusseldorf to work in group strategy. A'er spending well over a decade on the con- tinent, he returned to the UK in 2017 to become the UK retailer's chief executive. It was back on home soil that Lewis found the "perfect storm" of a highly competitive market, talk of introducing the price cap, the fallout from Brexit, "massive challenges" with legacy systems and, on top of all that, the absorption of rival Npower into the business. "Each of those breaking waves brought new chal- lenges and then right in the middle of that, a global pandemic struck," he says. The move into lockdown forced Eon UK, like the vast majority of other businesses in the UK, into home working. Lewis says shi'ing the organisation to home working in those first few weeks a'er lockdown was the "single biggest" challenge he faced. Yet as the world began to open back up, he soon found himself tackling an energy market in "meltdown". It was during this time that Eon Next took on just shy of 250,000 customers a'er becoming the Supplier of Last Resort (SoLR) to four collapsed energy retail- ers. All the while, bills were beginning to spiral. As the situation worsened, the government took the step of introducing the Energy Price Guarantee, which capped bills at £2,500 a year for average households – a move welcomed by Lewis. "There were times there where I had no idea how customers were going to cope before the Energy Price Guarantee was introduced. We were looking at bill increases that were terrifying – £4,000-plus. We were really concerned that there would just be mass non- payment, just because people couldn't pay. So that intervention, the Energy Price Guarantee, was absolutely critical there. And of course, furlough was absolutely critical during Covid as well," he says. Despite the level of the price cap being reduced by £1,200 from July, to just over £2,000, Lewis says the crisis is not over. "I thought last year, when the crisis was in full swing, that we were really getting solid engagement from the government. To his credit, Kwasi Kwarteng in particular was very engaged in looking at about how we solve this when he was energy secretary. "I get the sense that the pace has slowed down now that the crisis is perceived to have passed, but that's my perception." He urges the government to act sooner rather than later and backs Utility Week's Action on Bills campaign which, among other things, is calling for more targeted support measures to be introduced next year. In the meantime, he is calling for the Energy Bills Support Scheme (EBSS) to be revived for the coming winter. For longer-term solutions, Lewis continues to be a vocal proponent of a social tariff coupled with a relative price cap, which would cap the difference between sup- pliers' cheapest and most expensive tariffs. He believes it is "eminently feasible" to have targeted support in place for the most vulnerable consumers by April 2024 and points to how existing policies such as the Warm Home Discount could be expanded, which he believes should be paid for through general taxation. "I think we need to sharpen up sharing of data with government, and maybe even between … the water industry as well who are facing, in some ways, similar issues. So maybe we need to compare data and really focus on who are the people who are really vulnerable. But the Warm Home Discount is, in principle, a tool which we can use," he says. Since taking on the role of chief executive of Eon's UK business in 2017, Lewis has been one of the sector's most recognisable figures. Why, then, is a man so clearly pas- sionate about his company and the customers it serves choosing to leave the sector at such a pivotal time? "I'm always up for an interesting challenge and there's a nice circularity because the Uniper power generation portfolio is the old Eon portfolio, which is the old Powergen portfolio in the UK. Ratcliffe in Not- tinghamshire was the power station I first visited in June 1993 … it's almost going back to where I started," he explains. As he was preparing to leave the company he dedi- cated so much of his life to, Utility Week asked Lewis to reflect on the future and whether he was optimistic about the sector. In response he says he believes the industry knows what it has to do in terms of expanding renewable generation and decarbonising homes. However, he adds: "There's a question mark around how we manage flexible green generation in the future. Is it nuclear? Is it hydrogen? I think that's the bit of the energy transition that is currently unclear and that's the bit where more innovation is needed … so my concern is that we know what to do, but we haven't put the policies in place. "If you go back to Boris Johnson's 10 Point Plan, actu- ally, it's all in there. We just need a government with the political will and the resolve to do it. And that would be my plea. We need to get going because we talked about 30 years to net zero, it's now 27. The clock is ticking." He further observes: "When you're young, 30 years seems a long time. When you get to my age … it doesn't seem five minutes since I joined Powergen." Adam John, senior reporter

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