Octopus Energy chief executive and founder Greg Jackson has advocated for regional energy pricing to prevent imports.
The Octopus boss said that it is “absolutely outrageous” that there are wind farms in Scottish waters that are stopping production “at times” while the country is importing power from Norway.
The Octopus Energy Boss argued that when the wind is stronger in Scotland, instead of paying wind farms to turn off, “we give Scottish people cheap or free electricity at those times”.
He added that regional pricing would make “every region cheaper than it is now”. He said this is the case as his firm would be “eliminating waste”.
“Data centres wouldn’t be queueing up, waiting 10 years to be built in Slough or going overseas – they would be setting up in Scotland, and they’d have the cheapest electricity in Europe,” he said.
Mr Jackson shared at an event hosted by the Tony Blair Institute for Global Change that his firm offered a discount of 20% to those living near turbines when it was windy and 50% when it was “very windy”.
However, these discounts have only been offered in Yorkshire.
Octopus explains the reasoning for regional pricing on its website, writing: “It costs us more to supply energy to some areas depending on things like proximity to generators, cost of maintaining local networks and more.”
Recently, Octopus Energy took a 40% stake in Simply Blue, a joint venture partner in an experimental floating wind farm off the coast of Aberdeenshire.
The renewable energy firm’s impact fund, Octopus Renewables Infrastructure Trust, upped its share in Ireland’s Simply Blue Group to 20%, while another fund managed by the group, Sky, took a further 20%. This represented investment worth £11.8m.
Simply Blue is a partner in Salamander, a 100MW floating offshore wind scheme 22miles off the coast of Peterhead.
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