Juliet Davenport (JD): Tell us about young Andy – why the energy sector?
Andy Brown (AB): I wanted to see the world. So, when I left university I joined Shell, and worked for 35 years for them. I lived in seven countries and saw the world of energy from an oil and gas perspective, but increasingly taking on the challenges of the energy transition. I spent seven years on the Executive Committee of Shell, and we were really tussling about how we move this juggernaut towards our 2050 commitments, which is a big challenge. Then I went through my own energy transition.

JD: What did that look like? 
AB: I quietly retired. Then I got a phone call to go and be a CEO in Portugal. Who doesn’t want to go to Portugal, with a mandate to take Galp [a Portuguese multinational energy corporation] through an energy transition? We grew its renewables portfolio. There was something very exciting about transitioning an oil and gas company to renewables.

I then left there – [after] only a couple of years – to join Ørsted, the poster child of a company that had changed from DONG [a Danish multinational energy company] to Ørsted. Now I am very much tussling with the renewables sector, having lived a life which was very traditional oil and gas.

JD: I didn’t come from oil and gas [as Founder and CEO of Good Energy]. What was traditional oil and gas like?
AB: The variety was enormous. I worked a lot of projects in lots of different cultures across Europe, Asia and the Middle East. I led a project in the Middle East with 54,000 workers, an $18bn investment; 3,500 patents for just one massive plant [Pearl GTL]. The technology, the capability was huge, and getting all of them safely through that journey had great moments. Companies like Shell have enormous capabilities. How do they evolve to not only deliver oil and gas that the world needs but eventually renewable fuels that the world needs; that is [another] big challenge.

JD: That was obviously an inspirational moment in oil and gas. What about in renewables? What has inspired you?
AB: I tend to think of renewable projects as smaller and distributed. But I actually became COO of Ørsted for a few months, and the first thing that I tussled with was the FID [final investment decision] for the launch of Hornsea 3 in the UK. That was an £8bn project, with 200 massive wind turbines in the sea. The engineering is extraordinary. I used some of the project management skills I had learned at Shell to help Ørsted hone their skills on delivering these massive projects. I think there’s more excitement now in the new energy sector than in some of the traditional oil and gas.

JD: Not many years ago we repowered one of the first commercial wind farms in the UK; it went from 10 small wind turbines to four big ones... and I still remember this guy sitting on top of the turbine, waiting for a blade to be delivered to him, guiding this massive thing in – just extraordinary. 
AB: These blades [at Hornsea 3] are 115 metres long, longer than a football pitch – and 40 tonnes. The turbine itself weighs 800 tonnes, sitting on the tower. This is really big engineering.

JD: Turning to the present, what are your frustrations with this sector? We’re in an energy transition, but the Energy Institute’s Statistical Review of World Energy shows that there are more fossil fuels than ever before. How do you feel about that?
AB: I’m really worried about it. One of the reasons that I wanted to be – and am now – President is I think the Energy Institute can play a role here; it has a mission to accelerate the just energy transition.

But it is frustrating how difficult it is to change the system. As long as renewables aren’t growing faster than energy demand, we have an issue, because that means that fossil fuels are growing. We will only transition when renewable energy is growing faster than energy demand. And then we’ll see fossil fuels declining and emissions declining. We all need to work really hard on what that means. And working in Ørsted and seeing these enormous projects, I can see how difficult it is to make a decent return when the cost of capital is so high and the risks are so high. So, this sector really needs government regulatory support.

The other thing that frustrates me [is whether] renewable fuels are having another false dawn. We talked about me being at Shell; in 1999 I helped set up Shell Hydrogen. 1999! Then everyone said: ‘It’s just a bit too early.’ We have got to find ways to tackle the emissions in hard-to-abate sectors. And regulation will be the only tool to set a price that will get momentum behind that industry. Until that takes place, we will still be a little bit stalled on the most difficult part, which is tackling industry.

JD: You mention frustration there with government and the current economic cycle with high cost of capital. Most of these technologies are up-front costs; the majority of renewables have zero fuel costs and very low-end costs. The economic model doesn’t work very well in this context. We’ve got a new government in the UK. What should governments be having us do?  
AB: Quite specifically, we have got the AR6 bid round in the UK [Allocation Round 6 for offshore wind contracts]. What budget will be set to allow all the people that want to invest in these projects to invest? The UK CfD [contracts for difference] system is probably one of the best in the world: it’s [been around] 15 years. People talk about it being a subsidy. No, it’s a revenue stream that you can invest against. It’s great if we can actually stimulate that with a decent budget.

I am very concerned about continental Europe and how difficult it is to make investments now against a merchant market for electricity. Because with the renewables build-out, you get renewables versus renewables, and end-costs very low, therefore you can get very low merchant prices, and a lot of investors in renewables are really getting scared. The [UK] government has got to create an electricity market that people can invest in.

AB: But you know about this. I want to know about you and Good Energy. You’ve done amazing things in your time.
JD: I’m not sure about ‘amazing’. 
AB: I’ve worked for big companies – that’s  simple. You’ve created companies – that’s much more difficult.
JD :I think it was because I didn’t think I could get a job! I started out as a climate scientist. I did atmospheric physics, but didn’t want to be an academic. At that time there were no jobs in the energy industry for someone interested in pro-climate work. There were no renewables then, only large-scale hydro, so I did a conversion course to economics and went to work in energy policy at the European Commission, which was extraordinary. I got this amazing geopolitical overview. What came out was that renewables offer such a plethora of benefits: security of supply, low carbon and they are decentralised, so [they] can be deployed at small and large scale. I went into the European Commission technology-agnostic and I came out believing in renewables.

Then I became a consultant, and met a German entrepreneur, and we started talking about government process. Legislation was moving so slowly at that point. NOFAs had come through: non-fossil fuel obligations. They were very slow. We talked about just going directly to consumers, creating a green proposition and open up the market that way, and that’s what we did.

What was really interesting, I was on the board of [trade association] Energy UK for a while with all of those CEOs of big energy companies. At the time, we used to come up with virtual products all the time, because there weren’t the markets, so we had to create them. And I remember Ian Marchant, [CEO] of SSE, coming up to me and saying: ‘I love what you do, because it means I can go back to all of my engineers and commercial team and tell them that the things that I had told them we couldn’t do, we can now do, because you just proved that they are possible.’ That was a brilliant role to play in the sector; to come up with new ideas and for the bigger companies to then copy you. [However,] we found it very difficult to grow scale.

AB: You’re still on lots of boards. Is innovation still your passion? I come from almost the complete opposite sector: massive projects. You’re coming from the creativity and SME side.
JD: I am still on the board of Crown Estate, so offshore wind is still very important to us. That I find fascinating because it is very strategic about the future of the seabed and where these technologies are heading. I also sit on an advisory board for British Growth Fund, where I see lots of early-stage projects with new ideas to fix problems. I have to say I do get super-excited by that.

AB: So, tell me about [your role at] the Energy Institute? 
JD: When I first joined, I found it difficult getting under the skin of it. It is quite broad. 
AB: [For example] there’s International Energy Week. I’d spoken there in my Shell days, and it was always a highlight of the year, and I think it is going to go from strength to strength.
JB: I love the fact that we are moving [International Energy Week] to the QE2 conference centre [for 2025], because it means you can have more pull, more side events. Maybe it’s just because I’ve been in the heart of it for the last two years – much more than previously, but it really feels like it [the Energy Institute] has momentum and pace now.  
AB: My perception is that there is so much good work, but it is across a very broad base, whether the EI Academy, International Energy Week, the [Technical & Innovation] team, the Statistical Review of World Energy. I don’t think a lot of people – big decisionmakers across the energy world – fully appreciate how many things the Energy Institute is doing. We’ve got a big job to put a ring around it, so people understand and want to be a part of the Energy Institute, because it does so much good work.

• Further reading: ‘The efficiency of power’. At International Energy Week, Energy Institute President Juliet Davenport emphasised the importance of electrification to the global task of decarbonisation, as she introduced a conference session on electricity generation and the electrical grid. 
• The outlook for the large-scale production of ‘green’ hydrogen is improving and prototype projects are being built in several countries. New Energy World takes the pulse of this new industry, which is also addressing hydrogen storage and transportation challenges.