Octopus Energy CEO Greg Jackson, behavioral scientist Rory Sutherland, and Robert Llewellyn sat down for a live panel on Oxford Street, recorded before Ed Miliband announced the delinking of renewable energy costs from gas pricing. The backdrop was the current energy crisis, with Middle East supply disruptions and a fossil fuel industry that Jackson described as an abusive partner that keeps coming back with the same promises. The panel runs just over an hour but moves fast. The central tension: the technology case for electrification is essentially closed. In Norway, electricity costs roughly 1.15 times the price of gas. In the UK, it is four times. That gap is almost entirely policy and market design, not physics or engineering.
Jackson’s three wishes for a better UK energy system are specific and actionable. First: zonal electricity pricing, which would allow cheap wind generation in Scotland to flow toward consumption rather than being curtailed while gas plants fire up to compensate. Scotland currently generates three times more electricity than it uses and pays some of the highest per-unit prices in the country. Second: more onshore wind built where grid infrastructure already exists, which Jackson says delivers electricity at roughly half the cost per unit compared to offshore wind built in Scotland. Third: long-distance interconnectors, pointing to Saudi Arabia’s current plan to build 70 gigawatts of solar and connect it to four regions via undersea cable as the kind of global perspective the UK is missing.
Sutherland’s contribution is the behavioral half of the panel and is worth the time on its own. He argues that hostility toward EVs is not fundamentally about the technology but about social copying and the friction of doing something most of your social network has not done. His framing for the adoption curve is a sigmoid: slow at first, an inflection point, then acceleration that looks inevitable in retrospect. He also introduces the IKEA effect as an EV loyalty mechanism: buyers who wrestle with charging apps and home installation become disproportionately invested in the ecosystem. Robert Llewellyn adds a figure worth sitting with: the world’s 100 million-plus EVs, including two-wheelers, have already displaced the equivalent of 70 percent of Iran’s total fossil fuel output annually.
Bottom line: If you have been wondering why UK energy bills are structured the way they are while Norway watches the same geopolitical events from a safer distance, this panel explains it clearly. Jackson is specific about what should change, which makes the hour worth it.