National Grid chief: ‘We’re doing the equivalent of what the Victorians did’

John Pettigrew is a rarity among Footsie bosses. A National Grid lifer, he joined the utility group’s first graduate trainee programme after the privatisation of the electricity industry under the Thatcher government. He is now steering the company through efforts to clean up Britain’s energy system in the shadow of stretching net-zero targets set by Labour by the end of the decade.
We meet for lunch on a sunny September afternoon in Covent Garden, central London. The National Grid chief executive is a fan of restaurants with personality, although he’d hardly call himself a foodie. “I like to eat,” he laughs, “but it’s not like it has to be a posh restaurant.”
Parsons, a seafood restaurant that he had previously stumbled upon, fits the bill well. A former greasy spoon, the white tiles adorned with prices scribbled in black pen, and a mix of low and high tables with stools, have the eatery decked out like an old oyster bar.
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Today, Pettigrew, 55, is restrained enough. We skip straight to the main course where he chooses the pan-fried cod in a savoy cabbage and smoked bacon sauce with a side of samphire new potatoes. I have exactly the same. To drink, he sticks with plain still water.
Summer might only just be over but there hasn’t been much downtime for the Welsh executive. He is readying the company for a mammoth £60 billion spending plan, to be unleashed over the next five years, to ensure that the operator of electricity transmission and distribution networks in Britain and the northeast of America can cope with the level of demand coming down the cables. A £7 billion rights issue in May was the largest by any company in Europe outside the banking sector in 15 years.
The task is not just to increase the capacity of the electricity grid but also transform a transmission system built in the 1960s. They were designed around the coal-fired power stations that sprouted up in Britain’s mining heartlands in the Midlands and north of England but now need to connect up to the wind farms being built offshore — which Labour is aiming to quadruple in terms of the power being churned out — over the next six years.
The £60 billion plan, which will be split 50/50 between the UK and United States, is double the amount spent by National Grid over the previous five years. But while it sounds like a blockbuster number it is just “the first wave of investment”, Pettigrew says.
“There’ll be other waves of investment following, right out to the 2040s,” he says. More motorists switching to electric vehicles as well as an increase in data centres being built to power a boom in artificial intelligence will swallow more power, he says, particularly if the so-called hyperscalers come to Britain.
“These are the Googles, the Amazons, who are starting to want data centres that are ten times the size in terms of electricity consumption that we’ve seen historically for back-office data centres like banks and stuff like that,” he says.
The practicalities involved in beefing-up the power networks are more complex, he explains. Not surprisingly, he is encouraged by Labour’s promise of planning reform. It’s always been hard to get things built in Britain, he says. “The reality is, to build a transmission line and energy line in the UK typically takes ten to twelve years, and seven to eight of those years are the planning process.”
The protracted planning process is not the only barrier. There is also the clamour for the cables and pipelines needed to enable the upgrade, which is “quite tight at the moment because everybody, not just the UK is doing it”, as well as the question of winning over the locals where new overhead pylons will be built.
The latter has become a particularly thorny issue. Plans to construct a 184-kilometre transmission line from a substation in Norwich to Tilbury in Essex has sparked a backlash among some local residents. It will connect the huge increase in wind power being generated in the North Sea, including Hornsea 3, which will be the largest wind farm in the world, to the grid in the southeast.
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The line will involve the construction of 510 steel pylons that will blight the open countryside, opponents say. Even Ralph Fiennes, the Hollywood actor and a native of Suffolk, has got involved, making his own four-minute film campaigning against the pylon line. “Yeah, I’ve seen his video,” Pettigrew says with a slight smile.
It is no coincidence that the company has started a TV advertising campaign for the “great grid upgrade”.
Campaigners have argued for the line to be buried underground, an option that National Grid has said would cost several multiples more. The cost of maintaining and upgrading the networks is levied on all billpayers.
It is a balance between environmental, engineering and aesthetic factors alongside local feeling, he explains. “If that’s not the right engineering answer or on balance, then we can’t just agree because some protesters would rather it go underground,” he says.
Does he think we have a nimby problem in Britain? “I’m not going to say we have a nimby problem. We have people who are passionate about their local communities and would rather the infrastructure go somewhere else,” he says, diplomatically.
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Pettigrew knows first-hand the impact that dramatic shifts in the energy landscape can have on an area. He grew up in a large household — he is one of two sets of twins and five children — in Church Village, just south of Pontypridd, a gateway town to the Rhondda Valley in south Wales. His school was about a mile down the road from the Cwm colliery, which closed when he was a teenager — one of a wave of south Wales to mines to be shut within months of the 1984 miners’ strike being broken.
“When I was a teenager, you were watching the coal strike, you’d see the impact that had on communities,” he recalls.
He is an avid rugby fan. Befitting his tall stature, he used to play as an openside flanker, he tells me. The Ospreys are his professional pick, although he is a natural supporter of semi-pro side Pontypridd. He says local rugby isn’t what it used to be.
“When I was a kid I used to watch Pontypridd play and, at the time, Welsh rugby at the club level was doing really well, so you’d get 7,000 or 8,000 people for what was quite a local match,” he reminisces. The last time he was back for a game there was only 200. “It was quite sad in a way.”
The week before we met for lunch marked 33 years since he joined as an economist at National Grid on its first graduate trainee programme since privatisation. The department he arrived at, which no longer exists, was looking at how to create a market for trading electricity.
He recalls a more stuffy organisation where management addressed the staff by their surnames, and the company shared just one computer to help forecast the electricity demand of the whole country.
“I think if National Grid had stayed exactly as it was in 1991, I suspect I would have lifted my head and gone ‘I should try something else’,” he said.
As it turns out, he worked his way through the transmission, gas — since sold off — and US businesses before being appointed to the top job in 2016. It is the most exciting time to be in the driving seat, he thinks, not least because of the net-zero challenge that has been laid down by the new Labour government.
“It is unprecedented in ambition, scale and pace. It is the equivalent of what the Victorians did I guess, in terms of the scale of infrastructure.”
Will we manage it in such a short timeframe? “It is hugely challenging, there’s no doubt it’s a Herculean effort, it’s going to require everyone to play their part.”
Age: 55
Education: Bryn Celynnog Comprehensive School; LSE (economics); Cardiff University (BSc economics, MSc International Economics and Banking); Harvard Business School
Career: 1991 joined National Grid as trainee; 2003 director of engineering for UK transmission; 2007 chief operating officer for US electricity distribution and generation; 2010 chief operating officer UK gas distribution; 2012 UK chief operating officer; April 2016 chief executive officer
Family: Two daughters
2 x cod £492 x new potatoes £13Service £11Total £72