An interview with energy, power and utilities partner Euan Bremner. This is part of a series of interviews gathering perspectives on infrastructure. Watch the full interview (or read the transcript) below.
Energy supply and storage
The energy sector is such an exciting place to be at the moment and innovation is the buzzword now and will continue to be for a number of years. There are so many things that I could talk about but there's one area which particularly excites us and that's around the concept of energy supply and storage. The supply industry has been pretty binary and pretty stagnant for a number of years and what's emerging is the concept of multiple suppliers of energy, decentralised energy and when you add in the concept of storage and energy storage it's a really exciting area to look at going forward.
There's some great examples out there already you know Tesla have just launched their solar tile, which will be a tile that goes on commercial and residential roofs, the technology around electric cars and the battery packs in particular in electric cars is improving all the time and I think it's only a matter of time before we have people who invent solar bricks and that we can actually create infrastructure out of solar panels.
Investor certainty in the energy sector
Well what our energy clients are telling us at the moment is that the country could really do with more business and investor certainty in the energy sector. There have been far too many cliff edges of late – whether that be financial investment decisions or withdrawal of subsidy support – and with each cliff edge comes more and more uncertainty.
The way the thinking is crystallising at the moment is that the National Infrastructure plan could do with being less political so that we could have a consistent plan going forward into the future. As a law firm which operates in all three of the UK's jurisdictions, being Scotland, Northern Ireland and England Wales, we probably see more than most the divergence which applies both in the political and economic spheres throughout the UK.
Recent data has shown that the UK has once again become an attractive place to invest after a period of time in the comparative wilderness and I think it's very important for the energy sector that we as advisors stay very close to the political framework in those jurisdictions so that we can give our clients the best possible advice.
For more perspectives on infrastructure, read our industry report featuring 13 in-depth interviews with industry leaders and key decision makers in the infrastructure sector.