To me, last week’s podcast episode “Is the electricity grid ready for Net Zero?” is the most important since I started the pod in late 2023. Paul Glendinning’s optimism that his grid would be Net Zero by 2028, including projected increases in the electrification of vehicles and heating, was mind-blowing.

But the real jaw dropping moment for me was that the UK’s amazing progress to date in decarbonising the grid had been done despite legislation rather than because of it. This is incredibly frustrating: the Climate Change Act went into law in 2008 and yet no-one in the following 16 years acted to make it legal for DNOs (the companies who run the grid in the country’s regions) to prioritise the queue of projects coming on board so they can accelerate what they need for Net Zero – until now. I often advise organisations that the easiest quick wins come from removing barriers to green behaviour; this is the same principle at the national level.

This morning, the CBI has announced that the net zero sector has been growing at three times the rate of the rest of the UK economy and now employs almost a million people – four times as many as oil & gas – at much better than average wages to boot. This hasn’t stopped centre-right voices in the press continuing to blather about how Net Zero is somehow holding back economic growth (today’s Carbon Brief Summary quotes at least three).

The biggest challenge to the energy transition is that we are still locked physically, economically and mentally to the fossil fuels which have powered global society since the Industrial Revolution. We’ve got to invest in the new infrastructure, rip away the red tape holding clean energy back and get our collective heads out of the past and look forward. The green economy is going great guns already; imagine what it could do if we took the brakes off.