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Welcome to the Decoding Innovation podcast series, brought to you by the EY-Nottingham Spirk Innovation Hub, where we explore the innovative technologies, business models and ideas that are shaping the future of industries. During each episode, Mitali Sharma, a principal in the EY-Parthenon Strategy practice, meets with stakeholders at the cutting edge to discuss innovations in their space, challenges they need to overcome and their outlook on the future.

Mitali Sharma

Hello and welcome. I'm your host, Mitali Sharma, and today's topic is nuclear energy. Our guest is Martin Freer. Martin is a nuclear physicist and the Director of Birmingham Energy Institute at the University of Birmingham and also, the Director of Energy Research Accelerator — both in the UK. Welcome to the show, Martin.

Martin Freer

Thank you for having me, Mitali.

Sharma

Martin, before we get into your tremendous work in the field, would you mind sharing with the audience your background and your journey so far?

Freer

Well, my background is I'm a physicist. In fact, a nuclear physicist, as you might have guessed from the introduction there. I'm very much looking at fundamental nuclear physics. So, for those of you who don't quite know what a nucleus is, so a nucleus is the thing, which is at the heart of the atom, which the electrons orbit around.

I've been working on nuclear physics and trying to understand the nature of the nucleus for many years. And then, after a while, I realized that being a physicist was useful for other things and got involved in the debate and discussion around nuclear power.

About 2010, UK was just beginning to think what its future energy system would look like. And there was a discussion of a nuclear renaissance, and I helped do some work in that space, working with government and working with industry to shape some of the thinking around what the UK might do in terms of nuclear power.

Then, I realized that there's much more to life than nuclear and much more need in terms of the energy system of other sources of energy generation. And it's not just about generation, it's about how we use energy and how consumers engage with their energy system. And I set up an energy institute at the University of Birmingham, and then I also set up this organization called the Energy Research Accelerator with some colleagues. And that was about bringing many universities together to focus on the challenges that we have around climate change.

So, I started with physics and ended up with a life which is anything but physics these days, politics and people.

Sharma

Thank you for that, Martin. We'd love to start with the basics. Could you give us a grounding on how do we define and understand climate change?

Freer

Yeah, I mean, it is challenging, isn't it? Because we hear about climate change and we hear about net zero — lots and lots of terms. And climate change, in its simplest terms, is the warming — the global warming that is happening to our planet. And we have seen some of the hottest temperatures in recent history — in the last few years, and they find plots.

When those hottest years are, they all cluster and are in recent times. So, we are, without doubt, seeing the planet warm up. And that is being driven by increasing densities and concentrations of greenhouse gases. So, greenhouse gases are gases which exist in our atmosphere. Once the heat is being transmitted from the sun to the earth, those gases then act as a blanket, stopping the heat, escaping from the planet. And gradually, atmospheric temperature is increasing. And those gases are things like carbon dioxide, but other gases as well.

Methane is an important greenhouse gas. And climate change — I guess the debate is not whether climate change is happening. It's pretty clear it's happening. We can plot that out. And it's really what is man's contribution being to climate change. So, how much of the global warming is driven by man's contribution to the emission of CO2?

Sharma

There are different sources of emission for CO2. And like you said, man is one part of it. To give our audience a sense, what is the portion that man or industrialization has contributed to CO2 emissions?

Freer

Say, one can chart the CO2 concentrations in the atmosphere, and there's a very famous observatory in Hawaii, which maps out the CO2 concentrations as a function of time. So, we can do that from modern records. But actually, if you look at little air pockets and the ice caps in the Arctic or the Antarctic, one can observe what the concentration is of CO2. But going back over 600,000 years, so huge record that we have, and what one sees is some natural cycles of those CO2 concentrations. And those natural cycles are wrapped up with the motion of the earth around the sun and wobbling of the Earth's axis.

And we've had ice ages and we've had periods of very low temperature, but also periods of higher temperatures. What one sees, in modern times, now you can chart this back to the beginning of the industrial revolution, here’s a quasi-exponential increase in the concentrations of CO2. And those concentrations are very, very significant compared with the 600,000 years. So, it's not a small blip. It's a very big change, which is happening as a result of industrial activity.

So, the fact that if we can trace it back to the industrial revolution times and see it grow, it is pretty clear of man's contribution to the concentration of CO2 in the atmosphere.

Sharma

For sure. But is there like a, in a percentage wise, relative term that the scientists use?

Freer

If one was to take an average concentration — so, this is kind of parts per million — so parts of CO2 in our atmosphere per millions of molecules, over those 600,000 years, it's been about 200 to 220. We are now at a point where the concentration of CO2 in the atmosphere is close to, in fact, about now 400 parts per million. So, there has been a doubling of the CO2 concentration in the atmosphere.

Sharma

Interesting. And when you think about net zero, what is that?

Freer

Net zero, I mean, I think strictly speaking, is the development of energy and generation of energy, which doesn't produce any carbon contribution to the atmosphere. So, we are thinking about in terms of primarily the CO2 emissions, which are generated through energy production. But of course, it's not just about CO2, it's also about gases, such as methane, so, natural gas, for example. We are using natural gas. You burn it and it produces CO2, but if you don't burn it, your efficiency for burning that gas is not particularly high, then that gas is going into the atmosphere. And methane is worse than CO2 by about a factor of 30. So as greenhouse gases, it's worse to put methane in the atmosphere than CO2.

So, it is trying to produce energy in a way which is as carbon zero as possible. But we should recognize that is almost impossible. So, every technology, even wind power, produces or uses some carbon, produces some carbon in its manufacturing of the wind turbines. So, you're going to need to think about other ways to offset that. So, either offsetting by planting trees or doing what's called direct capture, absorbing CO2 from the atmosphere and thinking, then what do I do with that CO2 from the atmosphere?

Sharma

And just for our audience’s sake, methane is CH4, right? So, we're still talking about carbon, whether we talk about methane or carbon dioxide. Am I correct?

Freer

That's right. But there are NOx. Nitrous oxide is also a greenhouse gas. So, one needs to think about not just carbon, but other gases as well.

Sharma

Interesting. What are some of the strategies people are using to go net zero?

Freer

Government people are setting strategies. So, most countries have a target for reaching net zero, which will involve a detailed analysis of their whole energy system and industrial system. And usually, that starts with looking at electricity — electricity generation.

So, how can we decarbonize our electricity production? For a lot of countries, it will be utilization of coal and coal power stations. It might be utilization of gas and gas power stations. And coal is the worst in terms of carbon intensity by a very long way. Gas is about half as bad.

But if you can then move away to renewables, such as wind and solar, and although not strictly renewable, but nuclear, then that is a way of decarbonizing your electricity grid. But then beyond that, of course, when we look at transport and when we move away from fossil fuels to alternative fuels, and those might be electric vehicles, they might be hydrogen-powered vehicles, they might be vehicles which are using more sustainable fuels, for example, in aviation, sustainable aviation fuels.

And then, depending on where in the world you are, you need to think about how you decarbonize your heating. We are burning a heck of a lot of gas to heat our homes and that is very carbon intensive. In other parts of the world, cooling is the challenge. And so, depending on where you are, actually, that space heating or space cooling is a really important challenge.

And so, because that last part is a very personal choice, decarbonizing your electricity grid is fairly easy. You replace a coal power station by a big wind farm, and nobody notices a person building the wind farm, but at the consumer end, heat is a really big issue. You've got to change the way people insulate their homes and change the way that people put heat into their homes.

That's expensive and it requires people to oblige by changing the fabric of their building. So, anything which is focused on consumer is very challenging.

Sharma

You talked about both sourcing the energy right and then usage of that energy in a way that is not carbon intensive.

Freer

There's a famous example of the British cycling team, who became very good in terms of the Olympics, and they managed to do that by looking at every single bit of data, no matter how small it seemed to be. And we are pretty much in that situation as well. No stone can be left unturned. We have to examine every bit of the system.

Sharma

Right, because it's an ecosystem solution now, which crosses many, many industries.

Freer

Yeah. If one thinks about manufacturing as an example of an industry which is in a very difficult place at the moment, particularly if it's an energy-intensive industry, not just because the energy costs are high now, that makes the industry less competitive, but this drive toward net zero.

So, if you are doing steelmaking or energy-intensive manufacturing, you're probably getting large amounts of energy from burning gas or burning coal. How on earth are you going to now stop doing that and use other energy sources?

And so, there is a big discussion around displacing natural gas with hydrogen for utilization by industry. So, that is a very sharp end of things.

Sharma

Interesting. And net zero means we keep the levels that we've got today, right? Because you're saying we will produce energy without net new additions of carbon. What about the carbon that's already in the atmosphere? Over the course of time, does it get reabsorbed?

Freer

Yeah. The oceans, for example, are natural reservoirs of carbon. Carbon dioxide is absorbed by biological matter, such as plants. Those plants are then digested by mammals, and then in the case of the sea system, by fish. And then that biological matter, when it comes to the end of its life, goes to the bottom of the sea. And then, you have this reservoir where you are storing carbon.

So, there's this kind of natural balance, which exists between the atmosphere and the biological systems of the earth, which, for millennia, has been in a delicate balance. And at the moment, we're tipping that balance in an unfavorable way.

And if one looks at what is happening as the ice caps are melting, take Greenland as an example, there's less and less ice and you're revealing more of the land underneath. The reflectivity of the land is reduced. So, if you've got ice, a lot of the heat light is reflected back into space. As it becomes darker and darker as you're revealing the land underneath, you begin to absorb more and more energy from the sun and you heat up more quickly.

And one is seeing some dramatic changes in places, like Russia, where the permafrost is melting. That is releasing large amounts of gas and indeed, rather dramatic explosions, which are resulting from the combustion explosion of that gas. And you can see these huge craters, which are resulting from those explosions. We're at a point where we see pretty much runaway.

Sharma

You mentioned that we’re tipping the balance already. And I juxtaposition that statement with the fact that different countries have different ambitions on when they want to get to net zero. So, for example, the UK in 2050, I guess my question is how does that interplay with your statement that's saying we're already beyond — or maybe not yours, but generally, the doomsday predictors were saying we're beyond it?

Freer

Yeah, So, the Conference of the Parties (COP) has been wrestling with limiting global warming to 1.5 degrees. And to be honest, we're so close to 1.5 degrees already. The level of intervention that one requires is extraordinary. And I don't quite see that level of ambition and drive in global economies, which would see us limiting global warming to 1.5 degrees.

So, we're in a position now — you could say, “Well, we're not going to make 1.5, so we just give up.” And the reason not to give up is because the more CO2 that we put into the atmosphere, the hotter it's going to get and the more extreme forms of climate that we will see — storms, fires and all sorts of things. And the worse it's going to be for the planet and the people who live on this planet.

So, we are in a position of doing the best that we can and it is going as fast as we can, because future generations will either thank us or not thank us, depending on what happens.

Sharma

You made an interesting statement, you said something around the geopolitical distribution of industries. I guess I'd love your opinion on the fact that the different countries have these ambitions which are ranging across decades. If I understand correctly, India and China are not till 2060–2070. And industrialization is shifting to those parts of the world. So, how do you think that will play into the whole global warming? Because it's not a country effect, it's a global effect by its very nature.

Freer

It is extraordinarily challenging, because, well, some of those countries would point to the UK, America and Europe and say, “Well, you've had industrialization for a few hundred years. You've benefited from that industrialization. And now, yes, you may not be so industrialized. You may not have such a level of manufacturing. And in some ways, you've outsourced that to the world and to the point where these countries now have a chance to grow their economies, because they are now the manufacturing engine room, which is underpinning global economic growth, not at the moment, but in better times. Why is it that we should hold back while you've had all of the benefits set into your economies?”

So, it's a really extraordinarily hard topic to wrestle with. I think there is, and this, again, was part of the discussions that were happening as part of COP, if the developed world doesn't want other parts of the world to be benefiting from industrialization, then how are those countries going to support the economic development?

And so, there is this discussion about this international fund to help invest in growing economies.

Sharma

What we're talking about is, again, going back to the initial problem, that we need to find the sources of energy that are carbon neutral. And then utilize them in a carbon-neutral manner. I guess that's a perfect segue to talk about nuclear energy and other forms of energy that are playing a role and how we think about sourcing them.

So, with that in mind, let me start with a broad question. What do you think the role of different energy sources is going to be in the future? Because do you imagine a world where we will get rid of carbon entirely? Because you've been working in the field for so long, or do you think there will still be a role, but a different role?

Freer

Okay, well, let's pick up that last bit first. Can we get rid of carbon? Probably not completely. So, there are examples of where carbon and carbon-based fuels will still have a role to play.

In aviation, we're heading toward potentially electric- and hydrogen-powered aviation. It's still a very long journey to get there, I would say. In the interim, finding fuels which are sustainable, so that could replace or displace aviation fuels, kerosene.

So, can we take biomass and convert biomass into fuels which would displace those aviation fuels? Can we process waste, which has organic content and plastics, to produce fuels? So, waste to fuels. So, that's an important area to develop. Biomass and biomass burning — harvesting biomass and converting that, and through a combustion process, capturing the CO2.

So, take a coal power station as an example. Imagine you took the coal out of the coal power station, put biomass into that power station and burn that biomass. Imagine that you then capture the CO2 coming out of the combustion process. And imagine that you could find a way of then sequestering and storing that CO2 underground somehow — people are doing this.

Then, what you're doing is taking CO2 out of the atmosphere and putting it underground and generating energy at the same time. So, there will be a role to play for those kinds of technologies. So, one is optimistic about that. But the biggest contribution is going to be most obviously solar and wind. If the countries that have a geography which allows hydro, so ripple-pumped hydro, where you've got mountains or rivers, where you've got large rivers for the generation of hydro power. And then, nuclear power is part of many countries’ solution to the energy mix as well.

Sharma

Martin, you talked about nuclear energy as being one of the potential sources. And we know that you've done a lot of work there. Could you educate our audience what the advances have been in the nuclear fission in the last, maybe, a decade or so?

Freer

Yeah, I guess one should remember where nuclear has come from and how long ago was nuclear power started. Nuclear energy, as many people know, grew out of the nuclear weapons program. So, all of that was kind of postwar — 1940s and 1950s.

As we got to the 1950s, in fact, in the UK, we had the first commercial nuclear power plant. There was a place called Calder Hall in the north of England, which generated, actually, a decent amount of electricity into the grid, which was about 250mw of electricity. So, a smallish power station. But at that time, that's pretty impressive. So, that was generation one nuclear. We are now on generation three and some people say generation three plus.

So, we've moved through our whole cycle of trying to understand how you optimize the performance of a nuclear power station. And I'm sure we'll come back to the safety, but people worry about the safety of a nuclear power plant. People worry about the nuclear waste issues and all of those sorts of things. But the power stations that we have now are by far the safest way of generating electricity.

There's been a huge amount of development on safety systems. The current generation of reactors — there’s a reactor called the AP1000, which has passive safety system. So, even if the power vanishes, the reactor behaves in a safe way. So, the reactors that we have now are way, way safer than what we had before.

And if we dig in a little bit into nuclear power, how safe is it, and all of the accidents that we will have heard about, so, of course, Chernobyl or Fukushima or Three Mile Islands. And then you ask, what was the real impact of these nuclear accidents? It was fairly modest, actually. The worst of them was actually Chernobyl. And if one was to look at a number of people who died in the Chernobyl accident directly, it was about 40 people. And yes, there's probably an increase in the cancer rates of people who lived in and around Chernobyl, but not one that you can really measure, because the natural rates of cancer are pretty high in the population. So, a marginal effect in terms of the cancer deaths.

Whereas, other energy technologies are some examples of thousands and thousands and thousands of people dying in mining accidents. And there's the failure of a dam in China, which killed huge numbers of people. So, it's about perspective, I think.

I think the fact that when they hear nuclear, somehow people think about the weapons and how the bomb program is infected, thinking around how safe nuclear is. And it's a very safe technology.

Sharma

What you said just before, I just want to push back a little bit, because you talked about cancer, and you talked about the direct impact of the Chernobyl disaster. But another thing that I've heard, and I'd love to get your opinion on it, is the genetic mutation that goes across generations. That is also, at least for the layperson, a really frightening scenario, especially in the context of the fact that you're not just harming the generation that exists today, but potentially future ones. What's your opinion on that?

Freer

I would say that we, as humans, live in an environment, which is full of radiation. So, if you are next to a concrete wall, I'm sure the thing behind you looks like it might be a concrete wall, there is quite a lot of radiation coming out of that concrete wall. And indeed, if you were to fly transatlantic, you would get a reasonable dose of radiation, as a lot of our radiation is coming from cosmic rays. As you go higher up in the atmosphere, you get less absorption of those cosmic rays, and you get exposed to radiation.

If you were to have medical treatment in a hospital, you would be exposed to radiation. And indeed, you may not want to know this, but you yourself are a radiation source. So, you have isotopes within your body, which are emitting radiation. So, you can actually see that radiation coming from inside out. We are creatures who are designed to live in radiation environments. The kind of mutations that you talk about, and that's the way we have evolved over millennia.

We are, as I say, designed to live in that kind of world. And there is a lot of work which is being done in Japan to look at the population and the genetics, and the effects of radiation on people post-Fukushima and there is no obvious measurable effect. The biggest effect in Japan was the psychological one.

Sharma

Let's shift our focus a little bit and talk about the latest developments within nuclear fission, specifically. What do you think are the exciting things that are happening in this field, whether it's small reactors or modular reactors or others?

Freer

We are at a time where there's lots of new ideas and new developments in the nuclear energy sector. And the idea is that you might be able to move from a big nuclear power station, which is extraordinarily expensive to construct. So as a benchmark, the ones that we're building in the UK at present, it's about 3.2gw of energy generation. That's about 7% of the UK's electricity. So, it's a big plant that is going to cost close to £25 billion. And a pound is not so far away from a dollar at the moment.

So, the challenge around large-scale reactors is the capital cost. And if you've got a smaller reactor, then the upfront capital cost is less. And you could use then, once you built your first reactor, the profits from that first reactor to fund construction of the next two reactors. And those then, next four reactors. And you can then build up to a larger-scale plant but soften the curve around that capex investment.

So, that's interesting. There are many companies around the world who are developing smaller-scale reactors. A small modular reactor (SMR) typically is something which is less than 300mw. Calder Hall, which I talked about earlier, would have been classed as a small nuclear reactor — a small modular reactor. So, the one that the UK is developing is slightly bigger. It's about 400mw. But these technologies that are building on expertise have been in the sector for a long time. So, nuclear reactors have been used to power submarines. Most of the submarines, which are traveling around the world at the moment, are powered by small nuclear reactors sitting inside them. And have for many years, adapting that technology such that it can be a commercial power station. So, there's that.

Those next generations and there's something called generation four nuclear power stations, a next generation beyond three and three plus. And those are really exciting, because they will open up new possibilities and greater efficiency, and more accident-tolerant fuels. So, greater levels of safety, the ability to take nuclear waste and burn nuclear waste inside these reactors.

At the moment, what happens is at the end of the nuclear fuel cycle, the fuel comes out of a reactor, and it will go and be stored. And then eventually, it’ll be put into a waste disposal facility. What if we could use that fuel that comes out of a reactor, reprocess it and put it back into the reactor? And you can have a closed nuclear fuel cycle.

We can do all sorts of different things with advances in technology, which are being explored at the moment. And then the last one, of course, is fusion. So, one day we might have fusion power.

Sharma

Let me double click on the second one, because it sounded pretty exciting. All the developments are pretty good, but I got intrigued by the second one. When you're saying there will be a closed loop, so it takes away, if we can get there, it takes away the problem we have with disposing of the reactor fuel. Is that correct?

Freer

Yeah. And they may not take it away completely, but it would mean that a lot of the material that we take out of the reactor. So, as a reactor operates, because what is happening is that you are splitting uranium, and it's usually uranium 235. So, you would have an isotope of uranium, which doesn't have high abundance, but you enrich inside the fuel. That then gradually gets burns away and then, that fuel's no good inside the reaction when you take it out.

What you've built up inside that fuel rods are some waste products. These are the fission products, and you would extract those, and then, you would need to dispose of them. But you have also made a whole bunch of really useful isotopes, which could go back into the reactor and be part of the next cycle of the fission process. And it's not a new idea in some ways. So, one thing the reactors create is they take uranium and they convert it slowly into plutonium. So, when you extract the fuel rods, then you've got some plutonium inside it.

And historically, we have been able to take that plutonium out and make what is called MOX fuel, mixed oxide fuel, and put that back into the reactors. So, we've already been doing this in part, but there's an opportunity to be much better at it. That's what next 10, 20 or so years hold in store in terms of the technology development.

Sharma

I guess I want to talk about convening the ecosystem. When we had started the discussion, you had talked about the fact there're a lot of universities in the space, governments are setting their own standards and industries are setting their own standards. In fact, that was your reaction to the word “people” that I'd used. So, my question is, when you think about where innovation is going to come from, it's probably not going to be in places we expect or maybe not just in the places we expect. So, how does one bring it around that ecosystem to ensure that the right brains are being tapped?

Freer

The right ecosystem requires some careful thinking and some careful planning. And it's more about facilitation. I think that the ecosystem, which is as you describe, is finding ways that you can promote that innovation, which is happening, and not killing it off the first stages of those creative steps.

At the highest level, of course, government has got a really important role to play and that is setting a framework, a set of ambitions and a strategy, which is not just, you know, this is what we want to do for the next two years and this is how we're going to support it through investment. But this is a long-term plan, so it has to be over decades or indeed take us through to 2050. So, you need a long-term strategy. And that's a little bit challenging, because there is a big flux of — what does the energy system look like? Is it all wind power? Can we run an energy system just on wind power? No, we can't. So, you know, there is all of this mix which is going on in government minds around what the energy system looks like, but a long-term commitment is really important.

It is that then which allows larger companies to invest. So, companies do want to invest, industry wants to invest, both if they're a manufacturing company, around the technologies which sit inside the factory and sit around the manufacturing process to make sure that they are low carbon, but also, to invest in infrastructure. So, for development of energy infrastructure, we are going to need a heck of a lot of infrastructure across the world. Renewable generation is not often in the place where coal power stations. We're going to need new grids, a challenge which many countries have been wrestling with. We might need large amounts of heat networks, those sorts of things. So, companies are prepared to invest if they know that the risks are not going to be too high and that they will have invested. And then suddenly, a government decides, well, we're not really bothered with net zero anymore. And if you've got then some sunk assets, that's problematic.

Sharma

If you were to look at the nuclear energy landscape and think about sort of in that landscape, where are the most exciting things that either are being solved or need to be solved, where would you point the energy of the listeners?

Freer

I would say in the nuclear space, the most extraordinary challenge at the moment is to get fusion power working. And there is so much enthusiasm and indeed, so much investment which is going into the nuclear sector at the moment. So, there is a good number and it feels like there're about 30 companies who are pursuing, so not just public investment, but private investment going into development of fusion technology one way or the other.

So, this has been a journey that we've been on for a long time. If you can make fusion power work, then the waste issues are not so problematic. The source of the fuel is not so problematic. The uranium has a finite abundance. Deuterium that you would put into a fusion reactor is endlessly plentiful. So, there's so much free fuel, it's pretty much free fuel, if one could exploit it. But there are challenges still, the challenge is getting fusion power working are very significant. So, that is where the energy for those who are ambitious should go.

Sharma

Martin, given your vast experience convening such ecosystems that we talked about, could you give us some examples of maybe some successful private-public partnerships? And what made them successful? What can we learn from them?

Freer

So, that is your hardest question so far. I mean, a lot of infrastructure development has been around public-private partnerships. So, where government and industry come together, there's a very high cost of borrowing, if you've got to develop infrastructure, you typically source that investment from the market and borrowing, of course, and that puts a premium on any project — any capital project.

So, often public-private partnership has been government working with big industry around offsetting some of the costs and some of the challenges, which one might have around that investment.

We have a market mechanism in the UK called Contracts for Difference. Contracts for Difference is a vehicle by which you agree with to be with a nuclear company, it could be with an offshore wind company, an agreed price, the electricity from that plant would be purchased then for a term.

So, that price is called a strike price and the strike prices, which are being used for the nuclear or for offshore wind investments, have meant that we now have a big nuclear power plant being built in the UK. Without that long-term agreement, so if you invest upfront, you know, over 30 years or 60 years or whatever, that you are going to get so much money back per kilowatt hour of electricity that you can then do the sums, then you can work out, as well as doing that capital investment upfront. In the UK context, that has worked most fantastically in the case of offshore wind.

So, we started out with an offshore wind strike price, which was £155 per megawatt hour or somewhere up there. And now we are down below £50 per megawatt hour. So, the cost of offshore wind generation has come down by a factor of three, and that is by industry working in close partnership with the markets, but also with government that was set up this framework.

Sharma

Interesting. You talked about de-risking the investment with a private-public partnership. I guess the counterargument to that would be would there have been a steeper decrease in the pricing if the government had not set up that strike price, but it got limited by that strike price adjustment? And I'm not saying in this particular case, but that is sort of the sentiment that comes along with when governments get involved and put their thumb on the scale. I don't know if you had an opinion on that.

Freer

So, the answer is no. Well, I have an opinion and the answer is no. The process is an auction, so you don't fix a strike price, but you go out to auction and there are some lands offshore that you would like companies to tender against to construct the offshore wind farm.

So, as a kind of an auction of the contracts, the difference is the kind of mechanism and then the market is coming back with their best offer. And then, the government has a choice to make around which of the tenders is as accepted. So, the companies will be offering up the strike price and then the government has a choice to take that strike price or not. We'll move on to the other parts of the next company, so the market mechanisms are still applied.

Sharma

Interesting. Thank you so much, Martin. Really enjoyed the discussion.

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The Decoding Innovation podcast series is a limited production of the EY-Nottingham Spirk Innovation Hub, based in Cleveland, Ohio. For more information, visit our website at ey.com/decodinginnovation. If you enjoyed this podcast, please subscribe. Leave a review wherever you get your podcasts and be sure to spread the word.

 

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