Great British Energy spent its first money.
£57.5m. Out of £8.3bn.
Great British Energy made its first direct company investments in the first week of August. £7.5m into a solar thermal manufacturer and up to £50m into a floating offshore wind farm. It has £8.3bn to spend.
🔧 What it bought
Naked Energy, which makes solar thermal panels, got £7.5m as part of a £27m funding round led by Barclays Climate Ventures. Up to 40 manufacturing jobs.
Pentland, a 100MW floating offshore wind project off Caithness, gets up to £50m alongside the Scottish National Investment Bank and the National Wealth Fund.
🤔 Is that a lot
Not against the mandate. £57.5m is under 1% of the pot. The point is that it has started.
The rest of the money is meant to go into projects that would not get built at all without a public backer. Floating wind is exactly that: expensive now, cheap later, nobody wants to be first.
🏠 What it means for your bill
Nothing this year. Publicly owned generation takes years to build and the government has ruled out full energy nationalisation.
What moves your bill this winter is gas, and how much of it Britain needs to burn at 6pm. More wind helps. So does less demand at 6pm. Only one of those is available now.
Great British Energy has a decade of work ahead. Your bill has a winter ahead. The two are not on the same clock.