http://t.co/PHa9Jotv – great p…

June 12th, 2012

http://t.co/PHa9Jotv – great piece in Foreign Policy about disruptive economics of self-driving cars

Looking forward to our next ev…

June 8th, 2012

Looking forward to our next event – Next Generation of Electricity Interconnectors for the UK http://t.co/7RGgwW6D http://t.co/K6r1HdoK

Thanks again to our speakers – some powerpoints from a New Dash for Gas event

June 7th, 2012

7th June 2012A very special thanks to all our speakers for what was a superbly informative and stimulating event last week – A New Dash for Gas?    And an extra special thanks to David Odling and Nick Grealy, who have most generously offered to share their slides with the wider world via this website after the event. The slides are downloadable from the links below;

David Odling – Oil & Gas UK

Nick Grealy – NoHotAir

Really looking forward to our …

May 17th, 2012

Really looking forward to our next event – A New Dash for Gas? If, how and why http://t.co/xkpz5QXc get tickets now ! http://t.co/QJsaKKFq

The impact of economic troubles on European energy consumption

May 16th, 2012

Beat this for a showstopper of a chart – as illustrated in yesterday’s Wall Street Journal.  Of course, continued low and declining energy consumption can only feed through to a smaller pool of resources for the utilities to invest in power stations and the related infrastructure.

UK nuclear build requires taxp…

May 11th, 2012

UK nuclear build requires taxpayer rescue – says Peter Atherton at Citi http://t.co/YL2Y4g0j via @reuters

The coming convergences on natural gas prices . . .

May 11th, 2012

Today’s announcement by Centrica that they plan to raise average home gas bills by £50 for it’s 15.9 million customers doesn’t make for popular news headlines , especially with the Mirror. It certainly used to be that our natural gas prices were very seasonally affected – going up in the winter and down in the summer. But if you look at the latest 12 month chart – apart from a brief spike – spot wholesale NBP prices have actually been very stable at around 60 pence a therm and traders must be finding it pretty boring. Now look over the Atlantic and see the 50% drop to a price around 4 times lower than our own.

In the years to come, there’s huge scope for two major convergences on natural gas prices;

1) Between the wholesale and retail price – I feel sure the wholesale market is going to be opened up to smaller players and cooperatives who will sell back at much lower margins

2) Between Henry Hub and the NBP – when LNG cargoes start arriving from North America

Until then though, I reckon we could be in for another year, much like the last one.  And Centrica and other utilities will struggle to make a case for raising bills while successfully pursuing even bigger subsidies for their nuclear and renewables programmes.

 

The New Dash for Gas – if, how…

May 11th, 2012

The New Dash for Gas – if, how and why? Our next seminar on 29th May http://t.co/xkpz5QXc http://t.co/sUDwP0Ri

Peter Atherton on Utility Finance in the 2010s

May 1st, 2012

What a fantastic talk last night by Peter Atherton to Future Energy Strategies.

Here are Peter’s slides which he has generously agreed to share with us all.

Finally, a special thanks to our hosts for the evening, Allen & Overy.

 

Sir Ian Byatt on The Global Water Industry’s Future

January 19th, 2012

In February last year, Future Energy Strategies held this event on The Global Water Industry’s Future with three excellent expert speakers. Perhaps the best known of these was Sir Ian Byatt, former DG of OFWAT between 1989 and 2000. With his kind permission, we are reproducing a version of his lecture below.

The Global Water Industry’s Future;
Address to Future Energy Strategies;
Seminar Allen & Overy; 14 February 2011

“At the global level the challenges & opportunities are immense, but the achievements are modest & the prospects uncertain.
The world desperately needs better water & sanitation facilities to meet both economic and social objectives. Yet supplies are inadequate, quality is poor. There is considerable waste; non revenue water i.e. leaks, both physical and financial (bills not paid, water stolen) is a major issue.

Take the example of India. The WSP (water & sanitation program) at the World Bank estimates that inadequate sanitation alone is responsible for economic losses equivalent to 6.4% of GDP. The 3 big factors behind this are: premature mortality & other health-related impacts of inadequate sanitation (72% of impacts): productive time lost to access sanitation facilities or sites for defecation (20%): & drinking water related impacts (8%).

These costs are equivalent to $48 per person. Comparable figures are $29 in Indonesia, $32 in Cambodia & $17 in the Philippines.

Water supplies are often inadequate, with supply for only a few hours a day in many areas, while economic growth implies prospective large demands, both for agriculture and industry.

Why, in these circumstances has the world water market not taken off, as was expected by Enron when it set up its water division to exploit a hundreds of billions of $s market? The technology is there; & the finance can easily be made available. But progress is slow – often two modest steps forward and then one big step backwards.

There has been some progress. Water works well in Manilla & badly in Jakarta. But the position is very patchy.

Despite this, there is, considerable -and sustained- activity in the public/private partnership (if partnership rather than conflict is the right word) by large companies managing a variety of concessions. These concessions take a variety of forms – ranging from short-term management contracts to longer term contracts involving substantial enhancement of inadequate systems. This activity worldwide is dominated by French companies, notably Vieola & Suez (previously Generale des Eaux & Lyonnaise des Eaux.

It is, however, very easy to lose money in this area. In the early 1990s, some privatised companies suffered heavy losses – a notable example being North West Water (now United Utilities) in Bangkok. Contracts, entered into in the enthusiasm of the moment, are not always sufficiently well specified, e.g. when exchange rates change. Once investment in plant is made, it is largely immobile. Governments can be volatile and subject to dramatic changes, not always short of revolutions.

Water services in many/most countries are not being treated as businesses, with proper attention to revenues, costs, performance, levels of service, efficiency, etc. Governments are inefficient and often corrupt. A significant amount of international (aid) money finds its way into the back pockets of politics. Despite the scarcity & value of water, prices charged are low, often not covering operating costs and rarely covering capital (maintenance and enhancement) costs.

Politics lies at the heart of this problem. Governments are reluctant to see water services as a business. Privatisation is out of the question in most countries. Corporatisation may be a useful way ahead, as a first step of disentangling water services from local government and getting them seen as a separate economic activity. But there are serious & contentious issues about the governance of such bodies and the guidance/control/influence over them by government.

It has not been easy to develop competition in the water business. Some of this may be due to the nature of the product. But Scotland has shown that completion for retail services for non-household customers can work to good effect and there is prospect of extending this to England. After a long gestation period, the arrangements for making “inset” appointments for new developments are taking off. We should note, however, the antipathy among many of our politicians – & even many of our customers – for such competition.

What is the value of water – & waste water? Probably well above the price charged to consumers as the means of collecting it, treating it, transporting it, collecting waste water, transporting it and discharging it are typically provided below cost. There is no systematic evaluation of the scale of any subsidy that might or might not be provided by public authorities.
I want to stress the local nature of many water activities. There are big differences in costs in different locations. There do seem to be economies of scale – up to a point – but water, compared with electricity or gas is heavy and expensive to move compared with its value.

While water is a renewable resource, it matters – from an economic as well as an environmental perspective whence it is abstracted and whither it is discharged. Environmental, economic and social factors are relevant in looking at this issue, but there is little worthwhile analytic work to be found on these issues.

Localism can conflict with economies of scale. The excellent book edited by Kendra Okonski shows how local people can get together to deal with local water issues (big society approach?). It also shows that governments often get in the way of such solutions because of their commitment to the utilities that they may own – or accept public responsibility for.

The management of water in many jurisdictions is, frankly, a muddle. Prices are kept down for social reasons i.e. tariffs are below cost for the middle class users who have access to public supplies, while the poor pay a lot for often contaminated water, all too often stolen from the public supplies. Farmers get water at low rates – especially in California – and proceed to use it to grow water intensive crops in arid areas. Environmentalists take over-generalised – and often extreme positions on conservation, & sometimes by neo-Malthusian arguments.

There is no way to take politics out of water. Indeed there are critical international issues involving the supply of water from one jurisdiction to another, such as a river crossing a frontier or supply, such as that from Malaysia to Singapore across political boundaries. But it is possible to separate economic, social and environmental elements.

We in the UK have made significant institutional progress on this – & the principles behind these separations are, I think applicable to many jurisdictions – always remembering that the circumstances of particular situations always require some adaptation & modification.

The first of our innovations was to remove water services from local authorities in England & Wales and put them into ring-fenced corporations; this in 1974.

Secondly we privatised these bodies, – putting their water & waste water quality monitoring into a National Rivers Authority, duly absorbed into the Environment Agency.

Thirdly we appointed an economic regulator Ofwat with the specific tasks of ensuring that companies properly carried out their functions and could finance their functions, and, subject to that to protect customers.

In Scotland & Northern Ireland, corporatisation was delayed – to 1996 in Scotland and to ? (has it happened yet?) in Northern Ireland. Regulators were appointed to good effect in Scotland and, so far limited effect in Northern Ireland.

In England & Wales – and to a large extent in Scotland – this set up arrangements that enabled companies to act as businesses, instituted specialised quality & economic regulators and left the government in a position to devise whatever overall policy seemed appropriate for the water industry- i.e. in the national interest – a matter on which there is a wide range of views. So we can envisage a (reasonably) clear division of labour between suppliers, regulators and politicians.

But managing this division of labour – into the outcomes that the political process desires, the outputs that regulators can, and should, specify to meet these objectives and the efficient deployment of inputs by suppliers to deliver these outputs is no easy matter.

First, the political process is rarely content, perhaps because it find it too difficult, to set out its desired outcomes and leave matters of implementation to regulators and suppliers. Political events often resemble a series of crises, which politicians are expected –and indeed want – to “solve”. And the power of public ownership is easily contaminated by bowing to special interest groups.

Secondly regulators, whose job (in my book) is to regulate outputs, can, so easily stray into micro-management and specification of inputs. This destroys strategic thinking and corrupts incentives to efficient business behaviour.

Thirdly, suppliers can become contractors with their prime loyalties to shareholders rather than to customers.

We struggle with these issues at home – and will continue to do so. They are magnified in jurisdictions where power is highly centralised (even where ineffectively so) and where notions of the separation of power (essential to good regulation) are much less developed than they are here.

And we must ask ourselves whether the kind of political arrangements developed in the (Anglo-Saxon) West are the best arrangements for government in other parts of the world. Maybe Woodrow Wilson got it wrong.

If so we may need to start on whole new agendas. Whatever the politics, ignore them at your peril! If, however, they are properly recognised – and analysed – progress can be made. (The cost of capital is not the only game in town.)”