Net Hero Podcast – With Sumit Bose

Was Labour right to open up Jackdaw to secure home grown fuel or is it a retrograde step on our journey to 2050?

The energy system is getting smarter very quickly. More renewables, more batteries, more digital controls, more connected infrastructure and eventually far more of our homes and businesses talking to the grid. All brilliant. Until you remember that every clever bit of kit connected to something else is also potentially another way for somebody to get in and cause the energy sector chaos... That was the slightly unnerving part of my conversation this week with Sean Arrowsmith from NCC Group. We talked cyber attacks, hostile states, AI and whether our rush to build a much more digital energy system is also creating a much bigger security problem. Sean explained that the old separation between IT systems and the technology actually controlling physical infrastructure is disappearing. “The digitalisation that's happening within the energy market more and more, so, you know, the drive for a modern energy system, for net zero purposes, but also for just better management of those systems. So yeah, that convergence between IT and what we call operational technology that controls those physical processes within energy substations, etcetera. Bringing those two together has brought the attack surface out to the attackers and made it more available.” In plain English, the more connected everything becomes, the more opportunities there are for somebody to have a go. And this isn't just about the big established energy companies. We are bringing thousands of new technologies and businesses into the system through renewables, storage and distributed energy and some of them are learning about critical infrastructure as they go. “You've got lots of new firms coming into the energy market in terms of renewables. You've got battery and these energy storage solutions. They look relatively innocuous from a technology standpoint but it's really important that those are architected in the right way and that security is built in at the engineering point in the design phase to make sure that we don't introduce more risk into the system.” One example Sean gave me rather summed it all up. You can install sophisticated technology, spend a fortune on the right equipment and then undermine the lot by leaving a default password in place. That sounds ridiculous but that is exactly why he says cyber security has to be part of the engineering from the beginning, not something somebody remembers to add once everything is built. “When actually you're building the kind of systems architecture for these sites, you're thinking about security in that context from the very start. Because if you build it in from the start, it's much easier to then implement, get right, and also you don't have to retrospectively go and re-engineer stuff and take stuff out to fix it.” Then I asked the obvious question. What happens when AI gets involved? “Unfortunately that is already a reality. So that kind of level of automation coming in is happening. And it's happening on both sides and to a certain extent, cyber because of its very nature, there's always been something of an arms race and we'll continue to see that go on into the future.” That phrase stuck with me: an arms race. The good news is Sean isn't predicting some Hollywood moment where somebody presses a button in a basement and Britain suddenly goes dark. The energy sector increasingly thinks about resilience, containment and how quickly systems recover when something does go wrong. But there is a fairly obvious lesson here. We are building a cleaner energy system and at the same time making it far more digital. We just need to make sure that in our rush to make everything smarter, we don't also make it easier to attack. Listen to my full conversation with Sean Arrowsmith from NCC Group on the Net Hero Podcast, download the episode wherever you get your podcasts and please subscribe.   🎧 Listen now on Apple, Spotify & all major platforms. Subscribe, share, and dive in! To read the full article, Click Here. For any enquiries, please contact: [email protected]

The popularity of electric vehicles has undoubtably increased in recent years. So much so, there are now second-hand EVs sat on forecourts across the UK. However, people are still hesitant to buy second hand EVs and the same questions continue to arise: How good is the battery life? Are the brakes still safe? Is the resale value as good as petrol and diesel vehicles? Toby Poston, CEO of The British Vehicle Rental and Leasing Association (BVRLA) has brought the raw facts and figures to this week’s podcast, to explain how reliable second hand EVs actually are. The BVRLA has carried out research that looked into around 47 million MOT tests on electric, petrol and diesel cars. Their findings suggest that EVs are actually more reliable than petrol and diesel cars at higher mileages! The data contradicts certain rumours people hear about EVs. Toby said: “Where the battery starts degrading. Strange that, isn’t it. We’ve got millions and millions of bits of data now that show that on average, it’s about 1% degradation a year. So if you if you’ve got a battery that does 280 miles, 1% degradation, it’s just negligible. You know, not absolutely negligible.” Affordability is also a huge thing. Are people buying more luxury second hand EVs or opting for cheaper new ones? Toby said: “A whole host of host of things they’re doing, the big painful bit has been the Chinese coming in with excellent products. It’s better and cheaper. So you could end up with a three year old car, that is a luxury brand. But you can get a new Chinese model that has better range, similar features and it’s cheaper.” The majority of public charging points are overseen by private companies, which is a factor that makes charging more expensive and unreliable. Many people are now pushing for these facilities to be regulated by councils. To listen to the full conversation with Toby Poston on the Net Hero Podcast, download the episode wherever you get your podcasts and please subscribe.   🎧 Listen now on Apple, Spotify & all major platforms. Subscribe, share, and dive in! To read the full article, Click Here. For any enquiries, please contact: [email protected]

We talk constantly about Britain's skills shortage. We need more engineers, more people in energy, more people in nuclear and renewables and the answer nearly always seems to be the same: get more young people into STEM. Fine. We absolutely need them. But what about the thousands of highly skilled people we have already trained who are sitting outside the workforce because they took a career break, were made redundant or simply couldn't find a way back in? Natalie Desty, founder of STEM Returners, tells me this week why she's leading a crusade to do just that, bring back people who have fallen out of favour, lost jobs or simply had to walk away due to family life. And how they have so much to offer to plug the gap! Natalie spent years in engineering recruitment watching perfectly capable people disappear from consideration simply because their CV wasn't neat enough. “I saw these really capable people who wouldn't get seen through standard channels,” she told me. “And we had an advanced skills gap, particularly within defence engineering. I went to a Women's Engineering Society conference about the year before I started STEM Returners and the speaker said there are 75,000 people who have left STEM who would love to return.” Women are a huge part of that missing workforce. Natalie says 46% of the engineering returners she works with are women compared with around 12% of the wider industry, with caring responsibilities the biggest reason people step away. “There's a retention issue for sure at that mid-career female bit,” she said. “A lot of these people would have been retained if they were in a more supportive, flexible environment. It's almost like they felt they had to leave because they were letting the company down.” And the frustrating thing is that a short break can become a very long one. “Often women will think I'm going to step away for a bit. I'm going to step away for six months, a year without realising that actually that's going to turn into five years because it's going to take that long to get back in.” STEM Returners tries to provide that bridge through supported placements where employers can see what somebody can actually do rather than dismissing them because of a gap on a CV. Natalie says they have now returned around 700 people to work and 96% get a job at the end. But I think the bigger point goes beyond helping individuals back into work. Returner programmes can also become a way of moving skills between industries as the energy transition accelerates. “A returners programme, it's almost like it automatically doubles up as a transfer of learning programme,” Natalie explained. “They're a mechanical design engineer but they're pivoting their skills from a different industry.” That could mean taking decades of experience from oil and gas, automotive, defence or rail and using it in renewables, nuclear and other growing sectors. Natalie believes we need to stop treating this workforce as an afterthought. “For me, I just think we need a fourth pathway. We've got apprentices, we've got graduates, we have about reskilling… We have absolutely no pathway for the experienced people who have left and all of that capability that we've lost, that we've already invested in as a country.” And perhaps most importantly, bringing experienced people back helps the next generation too. “We cannot fill this gap through early career routes alone,” she said. “Bring those mid-career, experienced professionals back at the same time who can mentor, who can help and develop the young people coming through as well.” That really does feel like a no-brainer. Listen to my full conversation with Natalie Desty on the Net Hero Podcast, download the episode wherever you get your podcasts and please subscribe.   🎧 Listen now on Apple, Spotify & all major platforms. Subscribe, share, and dive in! To read the full article, Click Here. For any enquiries, please contact: [email protected]  

Hugo Energy will soon launch a product that allows households to earn cash from their batteries For today's podcast, we sit down with the CEO of Hugo Energy to get a vital insight on the ever-growing battery and energy storage landscape. After starting off as a lawyer, Ben Dehsi made his name in the energy industry with the creation of Hugo Energy, an all in one energy app. The company is gearing up to launch its newest product, Hugo Flex which is set to be a game changer for battery storage by helping households earn money from their batteries. Listen to today’s podcast to find out how this innovation is made possible and how important battery storage is in the energy world.   🎧 Listen now on Apple Podcasts, Spotify and all major podcast platforms. Subscribe, share and join the conversation. 🎥 Read the full article and watch the video podcast: Click here. For any enquiries, please contact [email protected].