Business

Rewiring Britain for an Era of Clean Energy

Published

11 months ago

April 14, 2025

Rewiring Britain for an Era of Clean Energy

In a career spanning more than 30 years, John Pettigrew has seen big changes in the electricity industry. He started out in 1991, working to introduce natural gas-fired power plants to the grid, gradually replacing polluting coal plants. .

Now, once again, he is managing a tectonic shift to an electrified economy that runs on renewable energy like wind and solar power. But these sources of power generation are far trickier to manage than their coal and gas predecessors.

“Effectively, what we’re doing is reconfiguring the whole network,” said Mr. Pettigrew, chief executive of National Grid, which owns and operates the high-voltage electricity grid in England and Wales.

Mr. Pettigrew was emerging from a tunnel nearly 20 miles long that National Grid has bored deep underground at a cost of about 1 billion pounds (about $1.3 billion). The shaft, which workers ride through on bicycles, will carry new cables to feed the power-hungry offices and residential communities of London.

Mr. Pettigrew and his company are in the spotlight these days. The Labour Party government of Prime Minister Keir Starmer, which came to power in July, is taking a close interest in the electric power system, which it sees as a primary vehicle for delivering political and economic goals.

A more robust, versatile grid will be crucial not only for tackling climate change but for securing Britain’s place on the cutting edge of artificial intelligence, which requires vast amounts of power to run data centers.

The government aims for 95 percent of Britain’s electricity to come from what it calls “clean” sources like wind and nuclear by the end of the decade, up from about 60 percent in 2023. At the same time, demand for electric power is expected to surge.

“We haven’t started to think about how seriously we need to invest in our core infrastructures for the resilience of our economy in a digital world,” Dieter Helm, a professor of economic policy at the University of Oxford, said in a recent podcast.

The price tag for an electricity system that can handle such changes is around £40 billion a year from 2025 to 2030, according to the government. National Grid alone has filed documents with regulators to spend as much as £35 billion over five years.

National Grid was founded in 1990 when the Central Electricity Generating Board, which managed the power network in England and Wales, was broken up in an era of privatization. (The company, which is listed in London, also has a large business managing power networks in the United States.) Mr. Pettigrew has run National Grid for nearly a decade, but he may be facing his greatest challenge, industry experts say.

“I think there’s a big question about how can they build rapidly enough all this new infrastructure at the same time as maintaining the same standards,” said Edgar Goddard, a former National Grid executive and now a director of EPNC Energy, a consulting firm.

An electrified economy will require a highly reliable grid for a host of reasons, including national security, analysts say. At the same time, critics of renewable energy say that relying on sources of power like wind and solar, which are by their nature variable, creates new challenges for the system.

On April 2, a parliamentary hearing on the Heathrow outage became a venue for executives from the airport and power companies politely dodging blame. Electricity executives said that there was sufficient power available. Alice Delahunty, National Grid’s president for transmission and a key aide to Mr. Pettigrew, conceded that the fast-changing demands being made of the power system called for a careful rethinking about it’s resilience.

Britain’s high-voltage network, like those of other countries, used to be relatively simple, bringing electricity from large generating plants — often near where the coal burned in them was mined — to London and other cities.

Now Mr. Pettigrew is extending National Grid’s tentacles toward the coasts, sometimes through scenic areas, to capture new sources of electricity like the giant offshore wind farms now being built in the North Sea.

He also must make sure the system can carry a lot more power.

Demand for electricity, which has been sluggish in recent years, is expected to double in the coming decades as more drivers take the wheel of electric vehicles and data centers spring up to handle everything from financial services to artificial intelligence.

There is already a long line of wind farms, battery storage facilities and data centers waiting to hook up to the grid — sometimes with increasing frustration. “Their connections process is very poor,” James Basden, a founder of a power storage company called Zenobe Energy, said about the large power operators.

A small industry has sprung up to advise companies on how to navigate the gauntlet of securing access to the grid. “We’re seeing huge demand,” said Simon Gallagher, managing director of UK Network Services, one of those firms.

The government is betting that installing swaths of wind turbines — both on land and in the seas off Britain’s coasts — as well as thousands of miles of high-voltage cables will attract investment, nurture clean tech jobs and reduce the country’s vulnerability to price swings in energy like those that occurred after Russia’s 2022 invasion of Ukraine that led to reduced supplies of natural gas.

Since that invasion, high energy costs have been a major issue in Britain and across Europe, where governments have been forced to spend heavily to help households pay their bills.

Some analysts, though, say the huge costs of installing a new energy system may at least partly cancel out the low running costs of wind and solar. “There’s a lot of infrastructure that needs to be built and that’s going to be paid either by taxes or electricity prices,” said Chris Wilkinson, a senior analyst at Rystad Energy, a consulting firm.

Much is at stake for Britain and the wider clean energy industry. If the government’s ambitions prove unrealistic, that could be a blow to the industry, which is already under fire from the Trump administration in the United States.

It certainly won’t be easy to rewire Britain. National Grid is working on 17 large power projects. Some of the schemes involve laying cables for miles offshore to transfer electricity from clusters of wind farms planned for Scottish waters to consumers in England.

Others involve new power lines marching through rural areas on enormous pylons — a prospect that riles up local residents against both the government and National Grid.

The government is taking advantage of its large majority in Parliament to push through legislation curbing the options of opponents of power projects to pursue what it recently called “meritless cases” in court. The government is also planning to offer up to £2500 in compensation over 10 years to people living near the new pylons.

It often takes many years to push projects through the planning system in Britain. Mr. Pettigrew says that process needs to speed up so that Britain can meet its green energy goals.

To achieve anything close to the government’s targets will require an abrupt change in Britain’s leisurely pace of building infrastructure. Offshore wind capacity, for instance, will need to roughly triple. To bring this clean power to consumers will require adding around 3,400 miles of new power lines to the grid, about twice as much as was constructed in the previous decade.

“The way I would describe it is that everybody has to play their part perfectly over the next five years,” Mr. Pettigrew said.

Click to comment

Business

California gas is pricey already. The Iran war could cost you even more

Published

4 hours ago

March 2, 2026

Press Room

California gas is pricey already. The Iran war could cost you even more

The U.S. attack on Iran is expected to have an unwelcome impact on California drivers — a jump in gas prices that could be felt at the pump in a week or two.

The outbreak of war in the Middle East, which virtually closed a key Persian Gulf shipping lane, spiked the price of a barrel of Brent crude oil by as much as $10, with prices rising as high as $82.37 on Monday before settling down.

The price of the international standard dictates what motorists pay for gas globally, including in California, with every dollar increase translating to 2.5 cents at the pump, said Severin Borenstein, faculty director of the Energy Institute at UC Berkeley’s Haas School of Business.

That would mean drivers could pay at least 20 cents more per gallon, though how much damage the conflict will do to wallets remains to be seen.

“The real issue though is the oil markets are just guessing right now at what is going to happen. It’s a time of extreme volatility,” Borenstein said. “We don’t know whether the war will widen or end quickly, and all of those things will drive the price of crude.”

President Trump has lauded the reduction of nationwide gas prices as a validation of his economic agenda despite worries about a weak job market and concerns of persistent inflation.

The upheaval in the Middle East could be more acutely felt in the state.

Californians already pay far more for gas than the rest of the country, with the average cost of a gallon of regular at $4.66, up 3 cents from a week ago and 30 cents from a month ago, according to AAA. The current nationwide average is about $3 per gallon.

The disruption in international crude markets also comes as refiners are switching to producing California’s summer-blend gas, which is less volatile during the state’s hot summers. The switch can drive up the price of a gallon of gas at least 15 cents.

The prices in California are largely driven by higher taxes and a cleaner, less polluting blend required year-round by regulators to combat pollution — and it’s long been a hot-button issue.

The politics were only exacerbated by recent refinery closures, including the Phillips 66 refinery in Wilmington in October and the idling and planned closure of the Valero refinery in Benicia, Calif., which reduced refining capacity in the state by about 18%.

California also has seen a steady reduction in its crude oil production, making it more reliant on international imports of oil and gasoline.

In 2024, only 23.3% of the crude oil refined in the state was pumped in California, with 13% from Alaska and 63% from elsewhere in the world, including about 30% from the Middle East, said Jim Stanley, a spokesperson for the Western States Petroleum Assn.

“We could see a supply crunch and real price volatility” if the Middle East supply is interrupted, he said.

The Strait of Hormuz in the Persian Gulf, through which about 20% of the world’s oil passes, was virtually closed Monday, according to reports. Though it produces only about 3% of global oil, Iran has considerable sway over energy markets because it controls the strait.

Also, in response to the U.S. attack, Iran has fired a barrage of missiles at neighboring Persian Gulf states. Saudi Arabia said it intercepted Iranian drones targeting one of its refinery complexes.

California Republicans and the California Fuels & Convenience Alliance, a trade group representing fuel marketers, gas station owners and others, have blamed Gov. Gavin Newsom’s policies for driving up the price of gas.

A landmark climate change law calls for California to become carbon neutral by 2045, and Newsom told regulators in 2021 to stop issuing fracking permits and to phase out oil extraction by 2045. He also signed a bill allowing local governments to block construction of oil and gas wells.

However, last year Newsom changed his stance and signed a bill that will allow up to 2,000 new oil wells per year through 2036 in Kern County despite legal challenges by environmental groups. The county produces about three-fourths of the state’s crude oil.

Borenstein said he didn’t expect that the new state oil production would do much to lower gas prices because it is only marginally cheaper than oil imported by ocean tankers.

Stanley said the aim of the law was to support the Kern County oil industry, which was facing pipeline closures without additional supplies to ship to state refineries.

Statewide, the industry supports more than 535,000 jobs, $166 billion in economic activity and $48 billion in local and state taxes, according to a report last year by the Los Angeles County Economic Development Corp.

Bloomberg News and the Associated Press contributed to this report.

Business

Block to cut more than 4,000 jobs amid AI disruption of the workplace

Published

16 hours ago

March 2, 2026

Press Room

Block to cut more than 4,000 jobs amid AI disruption of the workplace

Fintech company Block said Thursday that it’s cutting more than 4,000 workers or nearly half of its workforce as artificial intelligence disrupts the way people work.

The Oakland parent company of payment services Square and Cash App saw its stock surge by more than 23% in after-hours trading after making the layoff announcement.

Jack Dorsey, the co-founder and head of Block, said in a post on social media site X that the company didn’t make the decision because the company is in financial trouble.

“We’re already seeing that the intelligence tools we’re creating and using, paired with smaller and flatter teams, are enabling a new way of working which fundamentally changes what it means to build and run a company,” he said.

Block is the latest tech company to announce massive cuts as employers push workers to use more AI tools to do more with fewer people. Amazon in January said it was laying off 16,000 people as part of effort to remove layers within the company.

Block has laid off workers in previous years. In 2025, Block said it planned to slash 931 jobs, or 8% of its workforce, citing performance and strategic issues but Dorsey said at the time that the company wasn’t trying to replace workers with AI.

As tech companies embrace AI tools that can code, generate text and do other tasks, worker anxiety about whether their jobs will be automated have heightened.

In his note to employees Dorsey said that he was weighing whether to make cuts gradually throughout months or years but chose to act immediately.

“Repeated rounds of cuts are destructive to morale, to focus, and to the trust that customers and shareholders place in our ability to lead,” he told workers. “I’d rather take a hard, clear action now and build from a position we believe in than manage a slow reduction of people toward the same outcome.”

Dorsey is also the co-founder of Twitter, which was later renamed to X after billionaire Elon Musk purchased the company in 2022.

As of December, Block had 10,205 full-time employees globally, according to the company’s annual report. The company said it plans to reduce its workforce by the end of the second quarter of fiscal year 2026.

The company’s gross profit in 2025 reached more than $10 billion, up 17% compared to the previous year.

Dorsey said he plans to address employees in a live video session and noted that their emails and Slack will remain open until Thursday evening so they can say goodbye to colleagues.

“I know doing it this way might feel awkward,” he said. “I’d rather it feel awkward and human than efficient and cold.”

Business

WGA cancels Los Angeles awards show amid labor strike

Published

1 day ago

March 1, 2026

Press Room

WGA cancels Los Angeles awards show amid labor strike

The Writers Guild of America West has canceled its awards ceremony scheduled to take place March 8 as its staff union members continue to strike, demanding higher pay and protections against artificial intelligence.

In a letter sent to members on Sunday, WGA West’s board of directors, including President Michele Mulroney, wrote, “The non-supervisory staff of the WGAW are currently on strike and the Guild would not ask our members or guests to cross a picket line to attend the awards show. The WGAW staff have a right to strike and our exceptional nominees and honorees deserve an uncomplicated celebration of their achievements.”

The New York ceremony, scheduled on the same day, is expected go forward while an alternative celebration for Los Angeles-based nominees will take place at a later date, according to the letter.

Comedian and actor Atsuko Okatsuka was set to host the L.A. show, while filmmaker James Cameron was to receive the WGA West Laurel Award.

WGA union staffers have been striking outside the guild’s Los Angeles headquarters on Fairfax Avenue since Feb. 17. The union alleged that management did not intend to reach an agreement on the pending contract. Further, it claimed that guild management had “surveilled workers for union activity, terminated union supporters, and engaged in bad faith surface bargaining.”

On Tuesday, the labor organization said that management had raised the specter of canceling the ceremony during a call about contraction negotiations.

“Make no mistake: this is an attempt by WGAW management to drive a wedge between WGSU and WGA membership when we should be building unity ahead of MBA [Minimum Basic Agreement] negotiations with the AMPTP [Alliance of Motion Picture and Television Producers],” wrote the staff union. “We urge Guild management to end this strike now,” the union wrote on Instagram.

The union, made up of more than 100 employees who work in areas including legal, communications and residuals, was formed last spring and first authorized a strike in January with 82% of its members. Contract negotiations, which began in September, have focused on the use of artificial intelligence, pay raises and “basic protections” including grievance procedures.

The WGA has said that it offered “comprehensive proposals with numerous union protections and improvements to compensation and benefits.”

The ceremony’s cancellation, coming just weeks before the Academy Awards, casts a shadow over the upcoming contraction negotiations between the WGA and the Alliance of Motion Picture and Television Producers, which represents the studios and streamers.

In 2023, the WGA went on a strike lasting 148 days, the second-longest strike in the union’s history.

Times staff writer Cerys Davies contributed to this report.