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About this episode
In this episode, Kathryn Porter explains why energy is civilisation and how he UK grid may be heading toward rationing and rolling blackouts within the next decade. We discuss aging gas power stations, unrealistic utilisation assumptions, weak grid conditions, North Sea decline and why no single institution is accountable for security of supply. We also cover what a blackout would actually look like, why nuclear build timelines matter, and how regulation and governance failures are compounding energy risk.
TL;DR
Energy analyst Kathryn Porter joins Peter McCormack to make a case that cuts against the entire consensus of Western energy policy: that cheap, reliable, abundant energy is not a luxury or an environmental problem — it is the foundational technology of civilisation, and that the UK's net-zero programme, as currently designed, is removing this foundation under the pretence of saving the planet. Porter argues the physics doesn't work, the costs don't balance, and the people bearing the greatest burden of bad energy policy are the ones least able to afford it.
Guest
Kathryn Porter is the founder of Watt-Logic, an independent energy consultancy and research firm. She has advised governments, regulators, businesses and investors on UK and European energy markets, policy and regulation. She holds a degree in biochemistry and an MBA. She publishes accessible energy analysis at watt-logic.com and is one of Britain's most rigorous independent voices on the gap between energy policy ambition and physical reality.
Episode Summary
The central claim of this episode is stated in its title: energy is civilisation. Not a commodity, not a policy question, not a problem to be managed — the foundational input without which modern life in its entirety ceases to function. Porter builds this case from first principles: every medical procedure, every food mile, every heated home, every functioning economy depends on reliable and affordable energy. When that energy becomes unreliable or unaffordable, the consequences fall first and hardest on the poorest people.
The technical core is Porter's analysis of what "net zero by 2050" actually requires physically. She works through the maths that the policy does not: the volume of grid-scale storage needed to back up intermittent renewable generation across a country with British weather patterns; the new transmission infrastructure needed to move renewable electricity from where it is generated to where it is consumed; the scale of the electrification programme required to replace gas heating and petrol vehicles. Her conclusion is that the current programme does not add up, and that the officials who designed it either know this and haven't said so, or haven't done the arithmetic.
Porter distinguishes two arguments: the first is about climate (she accepts the scientific consensus and does not dispute that decarbonisation is a legitimate goal); the second is about methods (she argues the specific policies are economically and physically poorly designed). The episode's most pointed section analyses offshore wind: the Contracts for Difference strike prices, the socialised transmission costs, the system balancing costs, and the increasingly obvious evidence that offshore wind is not the cheap-electricity story it was sold as.
The final section covers energy security: what the invasion of Ukraine revealed about European energy vulnerability, and why Porter argues the right response is to rebuild domestic baseload capacity — including gas with carbon capture and a serious nuclear programme — while the transition to renewables is designed properly.
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