Episode 5: Can Britain build the energy system it needs?

Future of Utilities Podcast 

Can Britain build the energy system it needs? 

Lindley Gooden: Hello, I’m Lindley Gooden. Welcome to the Future of Utilities podcast. Let’s talk about energy security and the role of nuclear with Josh Buckland from EDF. Josh, great to have you here – tell us a bit more about yourself. 

Josh Buckland: Lovely to be here this morning. I’m director of strategy and policy at EDF. EDF is the owner of the UK’s nuclear fleet, and operates globally, with a main base in France. I’ve been with the company about 18 months, and my focus is really on how we translate what we’re trying to achieve on major projects to a broader audience, and how we make rapid progress on new investment. I’ll get into some of that today. 

Lindley Gooden: Let’s start with the big picture. This is the second time in four years our reliance on fossil fuels – our energy security – has come into sharp focus, largely because of conflict. What’s changed, what’s improved, and what still needs to be done? Nuclear might be part of that, but what’s your view? 

Josh Buckland: We went through a major energy crisis, and now we find ourselves in another one very quickly. It’s fair to say we’ve learned some of the lessons from the last one, but not all of them. Where we’ve made the most obvious progress is investment in clean power – governments around the world, and particularly in the UK, have realised that investing in renewables and nuclear to reduce exposure to imported fossil fuels has genuinely worked. With a government focused on its 2030 clean power mission, we’ve seen real progress there. 

Where we’ve made far less progress is reducing the country’s overall economic reliance on fossil fuels. We’re decarbonising electricity quickly, but 75% of our energy supply still comes from fossil fuels. We’ve done very little on electrifying the wider economy – increasing the proportion of our energy that comes from electricity in the first place. I think that’s worth getting into, because if we reduce our exposure to imported fossil fuels through electrification, we’ll be in a much stronger position on energy security and sovereignty. 

Lindley Gooden: Let’s come at that through nuclear, because Hinkley Point C will eventually power around 6 million homes. That matters, but people want short-term results, and this doesn’t happen overnight. With electrification in mind, how do we make the case for long-term nuclear build while also making progress in the shorter term? 

Josh Buckland: One of the things that frustrates me most in this job is how short-term the conversation around nuclear new build tends to be – people look at it over a two or three year window. Hinkley’s operational life will be at least 60 years, possibly longer. You have to think that far out: what will the economy look like, where will energy supply be, what geopolitical shifts will have happened? These projects outlast all of that. 

And it’s not just the new projects. We recently marked the 50th year of the Advanced Gas-Cooled Reactor fleet, which has delivered 2,000 terawatt-hours of electricity over its lifetime and more than £110 billion in gross value added. You have to look at nuclear, and technologies like it, over that kind of time horizon – the long-term value, but also the enabling factors that actually get new projects delivered. It’s inherently risky too, because build times are long, and the world changes underneath you as you build. So for us, it’s always about adapting to new technology and bringing in innovation as we go. We’re doing that now at Hinkley, shifting focus toward large modular projects rather than only small modular ones, because we’re already seeing how changes in manufacturing technique can cut costs. We need to convince people that long-lead items are worth committing to, but we also need to keep innovating so they stay relevant over time. 

Lindley Gooden: Communication matters not just because of the infrastructure need, but because of appetite from the bottom – from people like us. We need to actually want it, and for it to be more than an early-adopter technology, the way an EV or a heat pump can still feel today. Sometimes it feels harder than it should be, and more expensive. 

Josh Buckland: Frankly, it needs to be better and cheaper – that’s the only thing that makes electrification actually work. And in some areas, that’s already happening. Take electric vehicles: we’ve got 2 million on UK roads now, and the stat I love is that over 90% of people who own one say they’d never go back. That tells you it’s a technology that’s genuinely better than the alternative. New EVs are still relatively expensive, but costs are falling, competition is increasing, and the second-hand market is now genuinely affordable. EVs are a good example of a technology breaking through and making a real difference. 

That said, we’re not seeing the same shift elsewhere – electrifying heat remains a real challenge. The technology still costs more than the alternative, there’s disruption involved, and it’s simply a different heating experience people have to adjust to. So we need to focus where rapid progress is possible now, while giving the areas that need more time to develop the right technology. Critically, we also need to help people through that transition properly – because if you do take up electric products at home, you can drastically cut your electricity bills and meaningfully improve your cost of living. 

Lindley Gooden: How do we bring costs down at the larger scale? The UK is one of the more expensive places to build nuclear, it can take a long time, and finding partnerships isn’t always easy. How do we speed that up, and build more appetite at the top for doing this? 

Josh Buckland: Two things. First – and we’ve seen this in France, South Korea and elsewhere – the only way to genuinely cut the cost of nuclear is through repetition. Programmatic build: delivering multiple projects over a constrained period, carrying the lessons from one straight into the next. We’re already seeing that at Hinkley, where we’re effectively building two reactors, and we’re seeing performance on the second improve by 20 to 30% based on what we learned from the first. You can imagine how that compounds into Sizewell C – reactors three and four – and beyond. 

The evidence from other countries is consistent: without that kind of programmatic, time-constrained build, you don’t get the value that comes from carrying learning through the system. The second thing is regulation, and this is an area the current government has taken real action on, which I welcome. Regulation has undoubtedly driven up the cost of construction generally, nuclear included – largely for sensible reasons, improving safety. But there’s a limit to how much benefit that improvement delivers relative to the cost it adds. You also see interesting debates about balancing different priorities – the famous “fish disco” at Hinkley, and the investment made there to protect marine life, is a good example of environmental protection weighed against delivering a project at a known, reasonable cost. The regulatory reform the government has launched under John Fingleton and the regulatory task force is, I think, a genuinely important part of bringing costs down over time. 

[This conversation is brought to you by Modulr, the payments automation platform. Modulr automates how money moves, delivering the efficiency, accuracy and reliability that finance operations need to scale.] 

Lindley Gooden: Is anything missing? There was a time when nuclear was a genuinely controversial hot potato – that doesn’t seem to be the case in terms of public awareness now. What still needs to happen to keep momentum going? 

Josh Buckland: One thing a recent review flagged is the need for a lead regulator. We’ve struggled historically with accountability in the system – nuclear projects are complex and multifaceted, and having clear accountability across government and regulation to actually drive projects through is critical. The review addresses that, but I’d like to see it happen faster. 

The other area we’re increasingly focused on is how new nuclear investment connects with new sources of demand – back to that electrification point, but specifically around AI data centres, which we see as one of the biggest areas of potential electricity growth. The new projects we’re looking at, particularly in the SMR space, are about co-locating new nuclear build with known, guaranteed demand in the form of a data centre – building an integrated system where costs can fall over time, but where you’ve also got a guaranteed route to market for the power. Government is looking at changes to planning, and potentially exemptions on certain cost elements, to support that. It matters not just for energy competitiveness, but for how competitive the UK is on digital technology too. 

Lindley Gooden: That’s interesting – small modular reactors potentially work through that problem via scale and speed, maybe even cost, if you end up with more SMRs than a small number of very large reactors. But that strays into a separate conversation government tends to keep apart: data centres treated as an AI issue, nuclear treated as a separate energy issue. Does this need to be a much more joined-up conversation? 

Josh Buckland: Completely – particularly in areas where new technology is emerging, like SMRs. There’s a genuinely exciting prospect there, and we’re actively pursuing projects here and elsewhere, but none are operating yet anywhere in the Western world. The logic – smaller projects, better financeability – makes sense, but the proof will be in whether that approach actually cuts costs over time compared to large-scale projects. It’s too early to say for certain. 

But we have to try. The UK has a proud nuclear heritage and a genuinely strong digital sector – we often look at the US with envy, and the US is clearly moving fast, but the UK actually has more data centres than the rest of Western Europe combined, and real projects are underway, some of which we’re involved in. That integration between the new digital economy and the energy sector is going to be absolutely central. We’re developing a new SMR and data centre project at Cottam in Nottinghamshire – effectively a gigawatt data centre, developed over the coming years, alongside an SMR project we’d hope to deliver in the 2030s. That shows the kind of integration we’re thinking about: taking an existing coal power station site, repurposing it, investing now, and investing for the long term in nuclear at the same time. 

That seems to be the direction the world is moving, particularly in the US, and there’s no reason the UK can’t do the same. The big question for us is how we make the best use of technology – Rolls-Royce is developing its own SMR design, but we’re also pursuing partnerships elsewhere; the Cottam project is with a US company. The challenge is avoiding a situation where you have to completely redesign a proven technology to bring it into the UK, which is exactly what drove up costs and caused delays at Hinkley Point C. 

Lindley Gooden: Short-term thinking has always been a classic problem with nuclear specifically – you can’t approach it that way. In France, it’s treated as independent of politics, and continues over a long period regardless of who’s in power. It sounds like Britain simply needs to commit to it, and commit for the long term, whatever the details end up being. Nuclear, controversy aside, is also more sustainable once built – and using it to power data centres would resolve another conversation entirely, since data centres are extremely energy-hungry. 

Josh Buckland: Agreed – leadership is what’s needed. One thing that’s genuinely surprised me over the past year: we’ve seen political division on a range of energy issues, including data centres. But on nuclear specifically, there’s been a huge amount of consistency – a shared view that you need firm power alongside a system mostly driven by renewables. So when we look at political risk for our sector, we think it’s relatively limited. There are always unknowns, but right now we feel we have long-term support, particularly from this government. 

That said, there’s a gap between short-term ambition and long-term delivery. One thing we’ve been pushing government on is a genuinely long-term nuclear strategy – where do you want to be by 2050? The previous government set out more detail on this than the current one has. Once you’ve set that target, the next question is what steps get you there. They’ve made real progress on regulation, but what’s the plan on financing, planning reform, and the other critical pieces? With that longer-term strategy and target in place, you can properly think through the enablers – and, as you say, the other drivers too, particularly around data centres and coordination across government. I’d say we are seeing a government that understands that connectivity – there’s good work happening on AI growth zones and other efforts to integrate the system. There’s a lot to build on. 

Lindley Gooden: One thing I’ve taken from talking to you is that we need to bring a lot of apparently separate conversations happening in public – nuclear, electrification, data centres – into a much more joined-up way of thinking about energy supply. Otherwise none of it actually gets built. 

Josh Buckland: Completely. We talk a lot about energy supply – new nuclear, renewables – which is all good. But going back to where we started: electricity demand has actually fallen 20% over the last two decades. We technically need less electricity than we used to, and yet we’re building all this new supply. So the point on integration that matters most, that we’re trying to get government and the system to understand, is that you can only justify building this new infrastructure on the supply side if you’re also electrifying the broader economy – growing the pool of demand. If you don’t, you end up with a fixed-cost system being paid for by a shrinking demand base, and simple economics tells you costs will rise. We need to connect investment in supply much more directly with investment in demand – not just in the old economy, but in the new one we’ve been talking about too. 

Lindley Gooden: Final question, and it’s a small one – let’s build the Monopoly board of what the energy system looks like in a few years. In an ideal world, what’s on it? A mix of nuclear, maybe SMRs if we can manage it, sustainable renewables, still some oil and gas coming in – what proportions, and what should we actually be prioritising right now to find a better balance? 

Josh Buckland: On the final energy demand picture – we currently get around 20% of our total energy demand from electricity. We think there’s real scope to go much further over the next 10 years, to 30 or 35%. That’s exactly the debate happening in Europe right now, and we can have the same one here. 

That shift would fundamentally improve our energy sovereignty, because it’s homegrown electricity – whether from nuclear, renewables or other sources – and homegrown power will always make us more secure than imported fossil fuels. There’s an active debate about the North Sea and its future, but having spent time in government previously, I know the North Sea is in structural decline over time, so realistically we’ll be importing more, even accounting for the fact that we’ll need gas, and probably oil, for a long time yet. That electricity-first scenario may well be the one that boosts UK energy security most directly. 

The other thing I’d point to is that the system right now is slowed down by how quickly you can connect to the grid. That’s partly historical – we haven’t built enough transmission infrastructure to enable the transformation the system needs – but it’s also about how we prioritise new connections for demand and supply. So to your question about the future: in five years, I want a situation where, if you’ve got a project, you know when and how you’ll actually connect. That would make a real difference, not just to supply, but to demand – if I want to connect a data centre or a new EV charging hub. That uncertainty is, right now, the thing I worry about most – it’s holding back economic growth and making the whole system harder to manage. 

Lindley Gooden: Josh, thank you very much – quite the whistle-stop tour, but really appreciated. 

Josh Buckland: Thank you. 

Lindley Gooden: And that’s it for now from the Future of Utilities podcast. Great to have you with us – see you next time. 

This conversation is brought to you by Modulr, the payments automation platform.