Utility Week

UTILITY WEEK | 3RD - 9TH NOVEMBER 2017 | 7 Interview M ichael Lewis has just come off the stage at the Energy UK annual conference where, as the only representative of the big six suppliers, the Eon UK chief executive found himself in the firing line during a debate on price caps. It's a topic that has dominated the six months since Lewis took over the top job at the company in April, step- ping into the shoes of predecessor Tony Cocker. He started his career at Powergen in 1993 aer com- pleting an MSc in pollution control at Manchester University, where he had also studied mechanical engi- neering at undergraduate level. Aer an initial spell in technical and environmental roles, he moved into corporate strategy and development at the privatised generation company. Following Eon's acquisition of Powergen in 2002, Lewis moved to the German company's Düsseldorf headquarters in 2004. Then in 2007 he was appointed to the board of Eon's climate and renewables business as managing director for Europe before being promoted to become its chief operating officer with responsibility for worldwide wind power development, construction and operations. Here, he had a pivotal role in implementing the Energiewende, the German term for the country's transition from coal-fired power plants to renewable energy. The big lesson he learned in Germany was how the country has incentivised the uptake of energy efficiency. "When I bought a house, I had to have it upgraded to the very highest energy standard as a condition of the loan," he says. As a result, while the cost per kilowatt-hour of genera- tion has mounted as a result of the Energiewende, con- sumers' bills have not risen to the same extent. And bills have been very much on Lewis's mind since he moved back to Britain this year aer 13 years in Ger- many. Within a few weeks of each other, the two biggest Westminster parties had promised to cap energy bills in their 2017 election manifestos. Meanwhile the privatised industry, which he entered in the early 90s, could be fac- ing a profound shake-up, with Labour having pledged to bring the sector back into public ownership. Lewis kept his head low during his first few months in post, while he mulled over how Eon should respond to the fast-changing energy landscape. He made his splash in September when he announced that the company will no longer automatically roll over its fixed-deal customers onto standard variable tariffs. He insists that the move is not about getting one step ahead of regulatory moves to control energy bills. "It's designed to be one step ahead of the competition," he says. "When I joined a few months ago and looked at what we were doing for those customers [on SVTs] it was relatively limited. This is a real opportunity to change the rules of the game for those customers. "I took the view having come back from Germany that the SVT has had its day: it's not the right way to engage with customers. We've accepted that the SVT needs to change and we are doing something about it." The move is designed to address what Lewis sees as the real problem in the retail energy market, which isn't price at all, but engagement.

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