Octopus CEO: Sector facing an epoch-defining moment

Octopus Energy was named Utility of the Year at the Utility Week Awards 2022. You can see a full list of finalists and winners here.

Like so many industries, we had to work hard through the pandemic to support customers and staff, to keep lights on, and to help people who were often in difficult circumstances. And we’ve been catapulted straight from that into the energy crisis.

While other sectors battle with double-digit inflation, energy inflation has been triple-digit – and it’s far from over. Managing the huge complexity and volatility is challenging. But even more difficult is trying to look after customers who are facing terrifying bills.

We’re also the industry right at the heart of the other crisis: the climate crisis. The responsibilities upon us are enormous. It’s important we accept and rise to the challenge.

Indeed, the solution to the climate crisis is the same as the solution to the energy crisis: investing in a strong, homegrown energy system increasingly powered by renewables, and using smart technology to enable costs to fall as we go green.

We need to do everything we can to mitigate the crisis in the short term, while doubling down on our commitment to delivering a better medium- and long-term energy system.

I’m so proud and humbled by the fact that we have received the Utility of the Year award. I hope we can accept it on behalf of all companies and participants in the energy sector who share the same focus.

While the energy price cap is imperfect, it helped millions of customers get through the crisis and bought time for government, regulators and industry to bring mitigations. Companies need to keep putting customers first through transparency, value, and innovation – or risk a huge backlash that’ll threaten our license to operate.

Many companies are also successfully piloting National Grid’s new demand flexibility service – the first time ever that customers have been paid to be an active part in grid flexibility by shifting their energy usage outside peak times.

This consumerisation of energy is so much more efficient than the old world of assuming all demand was inelastic and exogenous.

We started Octopus Energy because we could see that the energy sector was ripe for a tech revolution. We’ve been working relentlessly since 2016 to make energy better for people and the planet – and we’ve made enormous progress in that time.

I’m incredibly proud – Octopus now supplies 3.5 million customers in the UK with cheaper, greener energy, and our Kraken tech platform is licensed to do the same to over 25 million accounts worldwide. With its flexibility arm, we help control a huge number of grid assets – from cars to grid scale batteries. We manage £5bn of generation and our offshore wind portfolio has gone from zero to a billion this year. Octopus Electric Vehicles is a leading company, our heat pump tech is set to accelerate decarbonisation of heating and we’re innovating in hydrogen and grid tech too.

Let there be no doubt: we’ve still got a mountain as a company and as an industry to climb in order to unlock cheap, green energy for customers everywhere.

But if this award is anything to go by, we can all be confident in redoubling our efforts. It’s proof we face an epoch-defining moment as an industry to build a better society, powered by green energy.