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johndoe's avatar

Thanks for putting this all in one place, really interesting. What is your policy prescription? Renationalisation? Or are nationalised coordination type reforms enough (e.g. NESO)? If renationalisation, do you have views on how that could be done and what the costs would be?

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Alexander Harrowell's avatar

As I was complaining about a previous post, this is actually very good.

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Rufus Grantham's avatar

Very interesting piece, thank you. I feel the need to reread several times, but has many lessons for how we deliver local energy infrastructure and the ownership models we consider.

But you didn't finish the story on British Energy that the end point of renationalisation was the transfer into a different National state. It is a potentially interesting area of research how much of the "privatised" energy infrastructure in the UK is actually nationally owned. Just not by the UK.

Nuclear and a big chunk of electricity supply owned by the French State (EDF), 800MW of wind generation and an increasing chunk of heat networks by the Swedish State (Vattenfall), the largest supplier of electricity and gas owned by the German State (EON), Scottish Power owned by Qatar and Norway (Iberdrola owned by QIA/Norges) as examples and that is before even thinking about the 70% of the water sector owned by overseas states and investment firms.

I wonder how capital formation for EDF or EON differ between their UK based assets and their "home" based assets. Are UK assets being sweated to cover investment in national assets??? That would be an economically rational approach.

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