The battles of Greg Jackson, Britain’s clean-energy disruptor

They are FTSEEVITEVCEO,PRboth 53-year-old futurists. One wrote his first video game aged 12; the other dropped out of school at 16 to program games. Both studied economics and came to lead sprawling technology businesses involved in the defining 21st-century goal of electrification. Each dresses casually and retains a boyish enthusiasm for invention.Once you start seeing similarities between and Greg Jackson, the boss of Octopus Energy, it is hard to stop. There are also obvious differences. Mr Musk is the world’s richest man: having transformed carmaking, and satellites, he has waded noisily into America’s cultural and political battles. Mr Jackson’s company, whose focus, he explains in an interview, is “using technology to make the green revolution affordable”, made a profit for the first time last year. Yet as an evangelist for clean energy, and for a glimpse of the battles of the energy transition, he is worth watching, too.He has turned a startup into Britain’s largest electricity supplier. Almost a quarter of British households are now with Octopus, up from less than 2% in 2018. Octopus has wooed some with good customer service and flexible tariffs, offering cheap power outside peak times. It has also acquired struggling companies, notably Bulb in 2022. The same method is behind its expansion in places including France, Germany, Spain, Japan and Texas. In all it has 8m customers across 18 countries, and is valued at $9bn, enough to place it on the 100, were it ever to list in Britain.Mr Jackson’s bet is this: as the role of grids shifts to connecting intermittent supply with moveable demand, firms that can use software and data to match the two will prosper. With a snazzy app and an ability to experiment with products, Octopus is working out how to appeal to electricity customers with offers “just as supermarkets do”. In Britain it has a leading tariff with cheap overnight charging. Many customers get paid to stop using power at peak times, under a government scheme. Some near wind farms get discounted power when it is blowy.Much of Octopus’s success has been driven by its software platform, Kraken. That is what allows it to manage customers better than incumbents do (Mr Jackson talks of “applying the internet revolution” to energy). It has made growth via acquisitions viable: firms with clunky systems would find migrating millions of customers daunting. Octopus also makes money by licensing Kraken to others. Mr Jackson talks of having half a billion customers on the platform by the end of the decade.He is more interested in growth than making a profit. Britain is a great place to found a startup—it has little red tape, good tax incentives and a “remarkable” ecosystem of entrepreneurs—but a hard place to grow. Octopus has had to look abroad for backing from patient capital, including pension funds. There may come a point when being a disruptor and a big player in a low-margin sector come into tension. Nor have all of the firm’s tentacles—it makes heat pumps, invests in windfarms and leases s—been immediate successes. Above all, sustaining growth will depend on succeeding in heavily regulated energy markets. That explains why Mr Jackson has become one of the most outspoken champions of opening them up.Some countries put up barriers to foreign businesses. But a bugbear is markets like Britain with a single wholesale electricity price, rather than a system where the price varies with local supply, demand and grid capacity. That creates both waste and shortage, says Mr Jackson, by preventing price signals from reaching producers. Scottish wind farms are paid to switch off because the grid can’t carry their electricity, while in southern England data centres cannot access power. He likens this to the “wine lakes and butter mountains” created in Europe by the distortionary farm policies of the 1970s and 1980s.Changing market rules designed for fossil fuels, Mr Jackson believes, would unlock “dramatically cheaper, abundant green energy”. Several places show how. In Texas locational pricing has contributed to huge investment in renewables and a battery boom; in Sweden companies build factories in the north where electricity is cheaper. Yet he worries that elsewhere firms will not be forced to compete to push down prices. Incumbents have “phenomenal power” over regulatory code and legislation, he says, ”almost like a mafia”.Such talk has not endeared him to all. He is not “collegiate”, say others in the industry. Britain’s Labour government is squirming over market reform. He can sound like a hard-charging Silicon Valley as when he says he aspires to build a platform that changes the way a whole sector operates—“like Amazon or Uber”. Inspiration also comes from closer to home. Sir Richard Branson, who shook up air travel with a similar penchant for stunts, is “one of the role models of my life”. What about his contemporary, Mr Musk? “Blimey, he’s done well,” acknowledges Mr Jackson, “on some measures.” There’s “a lot to learn”, he says, despite “all the things I don’t like about the way his politics work at the moment”. Mr Musk, once focused on climate change, now spends more of his time tweeting about immigration, media regulation and space exploration. Mr Jackson remains motivated to use clean energy and technology to solve problems here on Earth.