In conversation with Greg Jackson
Octopus Energy CEO Greg Jackson talks to broadcaster Lucy Siegle about the power of electrification, UK energy chaos, why populists have a point on bills, and how to deal with oil executives planning for Armageddon
Summary
Greg Jackson, CEO of Octopus Energy, argues that the clean-energy transition is being held back by markets that have been built for fossil fuels, not renewables. In conversation with journalist Lucy Siegle, he highlights the power of electrification, the need for market reform and the drag caused by entrenched incumbents. From heat pumps to falling battery costs, Jackson insists the technologies are ready; what’s missing is the policy that will allow consumers to benefit, accelerating the shift to cheaper, cleaner energy.
“Our current energy system wasn’t built for renewables – it was built for fossil fuels”
Lucy Siegle: Greg, your early years were spent in North and West Yorkshire in the 1970s. Help me plot a route between that upbringing and how you became this disruptive force in energy.
Greg Jackson: There’s one main thread: being brought up by a single mum. When my parents divorced, Mum had three kids – eight (me), seven and one. She worked in a bar in the evenings and studied for a sociology degree.
But she also campaigned for causes she believed in. We were always doing things, never sitting around watching TV.
She gave us responsibility early. She explained she was given a bit of money each week by the government to look after us, and that she was handing it to us directly. From that we had to buy clothes and do our laundry. I used to darn my clothes so I had money to spend on little bits of electronics. It gave us an early sense of decision-making and accountability – foundations for choosing entrepreneurship over a typical career.
Photos by Jooney Woodward
Siegle: You left school at 16 to programme computer games but later returned and read economics at Cambridge. Are you glad you did economics?
Jackson: Yes, because I learned that the core of economics isn’t about money – it’s about trade-offs. Out of all the things people want, there just ain’t enough stuff. So you need mechanisms to make choices. In business it’s a trade-off between what you can be certain about and where you take risks, like investing in R&D. That thinking’s incredibly useful.
Siegle: How did you come to start Octopus Energy?
Jackson: With two fellow Cambridge students; we’d started a business in 2003 building software for big companies. We noticed that as companies grow, they slow down. We realised that at some point you have to revolutionise your technology and your organisation. Utilities seemed ripe for that. Globally, it was a $3trn sector running on software that was 50 years old.
In the 2010s, energy companies were also offering poor value and service. As a customer, I was frustrated. We thought: we can change this. But when we pitched to utilities, they weren’t interested. They couldn’t see that tech changes the world. So we decided to become our own first client – create our own energy company and build the technology ourselves. Once we proved it worked, we could use it to transform other big organisations.
The final driver was climate change. You could see the energy system was going to transform as the world tackled it. Utilities would have to adapt, and we wanted to be part of that.
Siegle: Octopus Renewables became part of the group in 2021, at which point Octopus becomes one of the largest European investors in renewables. Why did you make this move into generation?.
Jackson: One of the reasons I’m in business is that, rather than hoping for change, you can just get on and make it happen. The magic of renewables is using more electricity when it’s windy or sunny, and less when it’s not.
We couldn’t optimise, because we couldn’t get the data we needed on when the wind farms and solar would be generating in order to forecast when the best times were for our customers to charge. So to get what we needed we started our own renewables business.
Siegle: What do you make of the anti–net zero agenda, tied to populism and claims that renewables are driving up prices?
Jackson: I understand why it’s happening. UK energy costs are among the highest in the world, and people are struggling with living costs. It’s natural that populists exploit that. The diagnosis isn’t entirely wrong.
People like me share graphs showing solar and wind are the cheapest sources of energy. Others show graphs that countries with more renewables have higher prices. They’re both right – we’re in a transition. Renewables are cheaper, but you have to use them properly. That requires market reform.
Siegle: What kind of reform does the market need?
Jackson: Our current energy system wasn’t built for renewables – it was built for fossil fuels. Our markets are dominated by traditional incumbents, so when cheap renewables arrive, consumers don’t benefit. For example, we’ve built loads of wind farms where there’s no grid, or there’s not enough grid. When it’s windy, they can’t generate, so we have to pay them a fortune not to generate [a scenario known as ‘curtailment’]. Then we pay gas plants a fortune to generate somewhere else.
Siegle: Do you think electrification is the big game-changer?
Jackson: Electrification is huge. One thing driving high energy prices now is the global cost of gas after Russia’s invasion of Ukraine. As a mega-trend, electrification is the most important shift we can make and the West is falling behind.
Twenty years ago, China’s economy was 10% electric; now it’s 34% and accelerating. We were at 20% then and we’re still at 20%. Once you electrify, costs fall dramatically. Electric cars are cheaper to run and maintain, and far cleaner. Clean energy keeps getting cheaper as the technology improves.
In some countries, including the UK, we’ve cleaned up our electricity – moving from coal to renewables backed by gas – but electricity is only 20–25% of the economy. The real progress comes from shifting more sectors onto electricity, then decarbonising the source. The more electricity you use, the easier it is to make it clean.
So now the focus needs to be on getting electricity prices down so people buy EVs and heat homes with heat pumps, and so industries electrify. Building renewables is great – we do it! – but getting energy cheap enough to drive that shift is even more important.
Siegle: Do you wish people would just get on and use heat pumps, for example?
Jackson: Yes. They are about four times more efficient than a gas boiler. You put one unit of energy in and get three or four units of heat out. If you remember your GCSE physics, that sounds like breaking the laws of physics. But you’re not creating heat, you’re shifting it from one place to another. It’s incredible. Compare that to gas which is nowhere near as efficient.
Siegle: Perhaps installers should greet householders with: ‘Good morning. Are you ready to break the laws of physics?’
Jackson: Let’s do it. We should have that on our vans! The only catch is price. Electricity in the UK is about four times the price of gas. In France, it’s only twice. So in France, a heat pump halves your energy bills automatically. In the UK, we’ve built a system that favours gas over electricity [in energy reform circles, this is known as ‘The Spark Gap’]. We’ve got to change that.
Siegle: Where are we now in the energy transition?
Jackson: Margaret Thatcher said the worst place to be is the middle of the road because you get hit from both sides. That’s where we are – halfway through.
The good news is the technologies for cheaper, cleaner lives are improving fast. In many regions it’s already cheaper to get 24/7 electricity from solar, wind and batteries than from fossil fuels. Electric cars convert 80% of energy to motion; petrol cars manage 20–25%. The future tech is the clean tech.
We’ve invested hugely, and now we could reap the rewards – but markets still don’t give renewables a fair shot. It’s like the famous boulder scene in Indiana Jones: we’re seconds from blocking the door, but there’s still time to snatch victory.
Seventy-four per cent of the world’s renewables are being built in China. Once they saturate their market, they’ll flood the world with cheap, clean technology. The cat’s out of the bag – it will happen.
“One of the reasons I’m in business is that, rather than hoping for change, you can just get on and make it happen”
Siegle: When? Are you seeing it already?
Jackson: It’s just a question of how long we delay. The countries that move fast will lead the future; the ones that don’t will be left behind.
I flew from China to the US recently, and for the first time it felt like going back in time – China’s cities are quiet, electric, efficient. In New York, you’ve got huge diesel-churning SUVs. The change is already visible.
Siegle: What’s the UK’s role?
Jackson: The UK made bold moves early – we were probably the first to back offshore wind at scale. I’m proud of our innovation in smart renewables, like battery optimisation. Octopus processes a million rows of data every three seconds – 10 times more than Visa globally for payments.
The UK punches above its weight in innovation: ARM chips (in practically every device), the jet engine, Turing, the web. But we risk walking away just as clean energy becomes commercially valuable, as we did with the jet engine.
We’ve got to reform markets and policy to show that clean energy brings costs down. If we do that, we’ll have world-class intellectual property to export.
Siegle: Have all the key technological challenges been solved – is it now just about implementation?
Jackson: Tech is never ‘solved’. Nokia was once the biggest phone company, then came the iPhone and changed the world. But now when you look back – when the iPhone was launched, its mobile wireless signal was ‘Edge’. Today, if you get the letter E on your phone (signifying the Edge wireless signal) you just give up and write a letter! We’re now on iPhone 18.
Every year it gets better and better. Electrification and renewables are getting cheaper and cheaper. The stats are crazy! Batteries today are 10 times cheaper than they were 12 years ago. Ten times cheaper! The world’s biggest battery company, CATL, recently announced batteries that are going to end up being $10 or $20 – 50 times cheaper than they were 15 years ago.
Energy markets and energy policy don’t reflect this. Last year, UK energy policy was based on the assumption that battery prices would be $350. We’re basing policy on outdated assumptions. So what we really need to do is radically reform our markets and our policy.
“Why are Western economies not growing? It’s because they operate for the power of the incumbents”
Siegle: What about the environmental and human costs of cheap renewables?
Jackson: Honestly, this is minimal compared with fossil fuels. I’ve looked at lots of supply-chain claims and on almost any metric, clean energy is better.
A wind turbine’s lifetime emissions are about 95% lower than fossil equivalents. People talk about water use, too, but renewables use about 1% to 2% of coal’s and gas’s water intensity. Nothing’s perfect, but renewables are an order of magnitude cleaner.
Humans will always create some waste; that’s life. The goal is to live great lives while minimising damage and we absolutely can.
Siegle: But what about the true human and ecological cost of rare earths like cobalt?
Jackson: Cobalt’s a special case because around 70% comes from the Congo, and yes, there are serious human rights issues. But that can be fixed. Companies and governments should be working with the DRC to clean up the supply chain.
Also, cobalt’s being phased out. Many new EV batteries don’t use it at all. It’s worth noting that cobalt is also used in oil refining, but you don’t see those stories on social media. The outrage only appears when people want to attack clean energy.
Half the world’s lithium, for example, comes from Australia under very high standards. We need to stop false comparisons pushed by industries that are far worse.
Siegle: Since July 2025 you’ve been a non-executive board member in the UK Cabinet Office. You obviously can’t advocate for energy in that role, but what will you do to promote innovation and efficiency in government?
Jackson: One of the things Octopus created was Kraken [a smart energy platform which was spun out from Octopus in September 2025]. When other companies adopt it, they become more efficient and agile. One large utility cut its innovation cycle from 15 months to three weeks.
Wouldn’t it be great to see that in government? The UK now has 25% more civil servants than before Brexit, but I don’t think anyone feels services are 25% better. That’s not about individuals – it’s about structure. We can use technology and organisational innovation to make public services dramatically more efficient. That’s what I hope to contribute.
Siegle: Some might say that this has echoes of another well-known tech-disruptor’s foray into government efficiency?
Jackson: Well, I am definitely focusing on the day job. Investors and staff depend on that. I’m purely advisory with government and that advice is really interesting. What you saw with the US Administration’s DOGE was irresponsible disruption – shutting things down and leaving chaos. What we need is responsible disruption: sitting down, defining the service we want to provide, and then finding the most efficient way to get there with technology.
Siegle: How important is it that we maintain momentum on the climate and nature crisis at this moment?
Jackson: I sat next to a senior exec from a major oil company recently. Asked about climate change, he said, “We’re planning on 2.75 degrees: six metres of sea-level rise.” The idea of being comfortable with that is terrifying.
Asked what he was doing about that, he said, “well we need the energy, so we’ll mitigate, by building sea walls or whatever.” I asked if we’d finance that with a tax on fossil fuels. His response? “Well, not if you want the oil.” This illustrates how we’re being asked to shoulder huge costs so one sector can carry on business as usual. That’s wrong.
Later, he said, “You can’t build renewables in Africa.” I replied that Africa has some of the best renewable resources in the world. Besides, for decades, the oil industry didn’t care that 600 million Africans had no energy. Now suddenly they care? The point is, unless we call this out, we let them define the path forward. That cannot happen.
Siegle: You talk a lot about ‘incumbents’, slowing down the energy transition. This year the Nobel Prize in Economics went to Joel Mokyr, Philippe Aghion and Peter Howitt for showing how incumbents drag on growth. Is this idea finally mainstreaming?
Jackson: I hope it is mainstreaming because the mechanisms by which incumbents hold stuff back are well hidden. The decades of lobbying capability they have are not visible. So we don’t see the ways in which they’re doing it. It’s great to shine a light on it. Certainly my experience has been, if you are an incumbent, it’s a lot cheaper and easier to put a bit of money into lobbying and media and PR campaigns than it is into doing the hard work of reforming.
I read a great article recently that said nearly all of the growth in mature economies comes from new companies. We’ve got to remember that. So it always feels like this is esoteric, but the reality is why are Western economies not growing? It’s because they operate for the power of the incumbents.
Siegle: What advice would you give young people right now on how to stay true to their values and make real world change?
Jackson: I think what you do with your career matters far more than people will often talk about. The really big difference you make is effecting big change through, for example, bringing people electric vehicles rather than petrol ones. I think that the very big stuff is going to come by moving away from fossil fuels to power our society, but giving people the same quality of life or better as a result of that.
Siegle: Greg, thank you so much. On behalf of the RSA, an organisation that is very disruptive at heart and remains so, thank you for giving us so much of your time. That was absolutely fascinating.
Jackson: Well, honestly that was one of the most enjoyable interviews I’ve had in the 10 years we’ve been in this business. Thank you.
Greg Jackson is CEO and Founder of Octopus Energy.
Lucy Siegle is a journalist, writer and presenter. Currently, she presents BBC1’s The One Show.
Jooney Woodward is an award-winning photographer with clients ranging from Architectural Digest, American and British Vogue, Burberry, Christie’s Magazine and the Financial Times.
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