Anyone in marketing who looked at how countries handled the launch of renewable energy would be appalled.
Listening to Jackson speak, I thought how refreshing it was to hear a green energy leader touting the potential of renewables for ordinary bill payers. And Jackson is not just any green energy leader. There is a crucial point about this: Jackson may have joined Greenpeace in his teens but at heart he is a tech person. He left school at 16 to write computer games. Octopus’s hidden success is Kraken, a software platform for utilities that is a backbone of its operations and which it licenses to other energy companies.
The place opened less than a year ago and is already at bursting point, with 115 groups working on everything from “smart air bricks” that cut energy use to cleaner tyres for electric cars. In a country like the UK, the first big economy to put a net zero emissions target into law, you might think this climate tech story would be better known
That’s a shame in a country with a history of bipartisan support for climate action, especially when the US and EU are ramping up green industrial policies.