Episode 1 (Season 2 Premiere) with Boris Johnson (Former UK Prime Minister) and Greg Jackson (Founder & CEO, Octopus Energy)

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In Season 2, Episode 1 of The Smart Society Show — the Season Two Premiere — co-hosts Brynne Kennedy and Rt Hon Chris Skidmore return to unpack a world where the energy conversation is rapidly changing shape. After a short break between seasons, they open with a wide-angle view of what’s shifted: rising geopolitical tension, accelerating electricity demand, and a noticeable reframing from “climate” to the “energy transition” — with the dominant priorities becoming security, affordability, growth, and system performance.

They’re joined by two of the UK’s most influential voices shaping the public debate on energy. Former UK Prime Minister Boris Johnson reflects on COP26, public support for net zero, and the need to keep ambitions aligned with what households and industry can afford. Greg Jackson, founder and CEO of Octopus Energy, explains how software and AI are transforming the energy system — from customer service and utility operations to smart charging, distributed storage, and the case for market reform.

What’s News: From “Climate” to the Energy Transition — and the Grid Becomes the Bottleneck

The episode opens with Brynne and Chris setting the context: the energy transition is no longer framed primarily as a moral debate about emissions, but increasingly as an economic and strategic challenge focused on efficiency, security, and growth. Chris notes that even among climate professionals, the conversation has shifted toward making the transition work in practice — proving jobs, competitiveness, and resilience in real time.

A major flashpoint in the UK, Chris explains, is the breakdown of cross-party consensus around net zero. He describes a new, more partisan climate politics emerging — not just skepticism about net zero targets, but challenges to foundational structures like carbon budgets and long-term commitments. At the same time, he emphasizes a key countertrend: companies still want to move forward, and the work of “transition finance” — funding the decarbonization of existing assets — is becoming central, even if it’s harder and less celebrated.

But the dominant theme in this season premiere is unmistakable: electricity demand is rising faster than grids can adapt, and AI is pouring fuel on the fire.

Brynne calls out the sheer velocity of data-center momentum — constant announcements, mega-projects, and huge pools of capital forming around power and infrastructure. She highlights investor excitement around what she calls “the brain behind the energy” — the software and systems layer that orchestrates and optimizes electrons, batteries, and generation in real-world conditions.

Chris adds a crucial point: the grid is now the limiting factor — and recent operational stress events reinforce that the challenge isn’t simply “more renewables,” but system flexibility, storage, and grid modernization. He argues governments still haven’t fully “connected the dots” between AI strategy, industrial strategy, and energy strategy — and that alignment is becoming the difference between competitiveness and constraint.

Brynne closes the segment with a key investor lens: even if AI demand projections are wrong or overhyped, electricity demand is still rising sharply due to electrification, industrial shifts, and emerging-market growth. Their takeaway: the most durable opportunities are solutions that serve data centers, industry, and households — with downside protection if AI forecasts miss.

Climate Leaders: Boris Johnson on COP26, Public Support, and the Case for Cheaper Electricity

In the first guest segment, Chris introduces Boris Johnson, reflecting on his time leading the UK during COP26 and the momentum that moment created. Johnson describes COP26 as a “high watermark,” citing commitments to cut CO₂, move beyond coal, expand reforestation efforts, and support financing to help poorer nations decarbonize.

But he argues the political economy changed sharply after the invasion of Ukraine. The spike in energy prices, he says, made it harder to sustain public support — and exposed a constraint policymakers can’t ignore: you can’t move faster than people can afford.

Johnson positions his current view as pragmatic rather than ideological. He says he still believes the energy transition is fundamentally right and full of job creation potential — but insists the UK must confront a core competitiveness problem: electricity prices that he describes as unacceptable for both households and heavy industry. He repeatedly returns to the need to “fix the price,” framing affordability not as a nice-to-have, but as the condition for maintaining legitimacy and momentum.

He also points to the coming pressure from AI-driven demand, warning that without cheaper power, the problem becomes even more acute. In that context, Johnson argues for maintaining green ambitions while also taking a more “pragmatic inclusion” approach to hydrocarbons in the near term — not as the destination, but as part of the transition mix while infrastructure and technology scale.

On the UK’s “green industrial revolution,” he highlights pride in pushing nuclear and renewables, including the ambition around multiple reactor projects. But he also reflects on where the strategy didn’t translate into domestic industrial strength — particularly around EV manufacturing capacity. His frustration isn’t with the ambition, but with execution and duration: he believes the UK didn’t have long enough to align policy, supply chains, and public buy-in.

He ends with a broader philosophical framing: climate has become “technology dressed up as religion,” he says — and argues the challenge is solvable through innovation, not moral polarization. His optimism is rooted in a belief that the core energy problem is fixable — and that the real next frontier, once energy becomes abundant and cheap, will be whatever humanity tackles next.

Chasing Unicorns: Greg Jackson on Kraken, AI at Scale, and Why Energy Needs Its “Uber Moment”

Brynne then welcomes Greg Jackson, founder and CEO of Octopus Energy, for a fast-paced conversation that ties together software, customer experience, grid economics, and the future of distributed energy.

Greg introduces Octopus as the UK’s largest energy provider with roughly 7.5 million household customers, operating across 30 countries, with a major renewables footprint and a defining asset: Kraken, the software platform that runs Octopus and is licensed globally.

He describes the origin story as a classic “build the demo” moment: Octopus became the proof-point customer for Kraken when incumbents told him the tech was compelling — but nobody wanted to be first.

Kraken as the operating system of a modern utility

Greg explains that traditional utilities are siloed because their systems are siloed. Kraken changes that by consolidating operational and customer data into a single platform — enabling frontline teams to resolve issues end-to-end, and enabling product teams to innovate quickly because they’re not blocked by legacy infrastructure.

He emphasizes the cadence difference: while legacy enterprise systems update monthly or quarterly, Kraken updates hundreds of times per day. The result, he claims, is dramatic gains in productivity, cost efficiency, and employee satisfaction — because modern tools unlock modern operating behavior.

AI beyond hype — and at serious scale

Greg makes a point that energy has been using AI and machine learning long before today’s LLM obsession — because forecasting and optimizing a renewables-heavy system is fundamentally a data problem.

He cites a striking internal metric: Octopus processes 300,000 data points per second to optimize the system — across forecasting renewables, charging/discharging batteries, EV charging, and heat pump management. He then brings the LLM era down to earth with a practical application: nearly half of customer service emails are now drafted by AI with a human in the loop — and receive higher satisfaction ratings than fully human-written emails, because the AI can synthesize complex account histories instantly.

The transition fails when it ignores citizens

One of Greg’s most repeated themes is that the energy transition has been overly focused on supply-side generation, and not enough on citizen experience. That mismatch, he argues, creates backlash — because people are forced into a perceived tradeoff between affordability and climate action.

His alternative framing: the best transition technologies are not sacrifices — they’re upgrades.

He points to:

• EVs becoming dramatically cheaper over time and potentially far cheaper per mile when paired with smart charging
• Smart optimization as the missing link that makes heat pumps and electrification cheaper in practice
• The historic cost declines in solar (he cites a dramatic multi-decade drop) and the need for software to fully capture those benefits

In short: the transition works when it’s better, faster, cheaper — not when it’s “good for you.”

Market reform: “We’re running grids like a minicab office”

Greg’s most vivid analogy comes when he talks about energy market structure. He argues that modern grids still behave like old dispatch systems — and that without granular price signals and automation, consumers and industry can’t respond to abundance when it exists, or reduce strain when scarcity hits.

He calls for dramatically more granular pricing and smarter market design, saying the world needs an “Uber moment” for grids — where the system becomes dynamic, automated, and efficient rather than manual and expensive.

Distributed storage as the superpower

Brynne and Greg end on a future-facing point: Greg is excited by large-scale batteries, but even more excited by distributed storage — especially EVs. He describes Octopus already managing huge flexible load through smart charging, and argues that EVs become grid assets — and household resilience tools — at scale.

Final Thoughts

Season 2 opens with a clear message: the energy transition is no longer a single narrative. It’s now an intersection of electricity demand, AI infrastructure, grid constraints, industrial strategy, and political legitimacy.

Boris Johnson frames the challenge as public buy-in and competitiveness — insisting affordability is the foundation of any durable transition. Greg Jackson reframes the opportunity as software-led modernization — arguing that when energy is optimized like any other digital system, the transition becomes cheaper, more resilient, and genuinely better for citizens.

Together, the episode captures the season’s guiding tension: the future of energy won’t be decided by ambition alone — it will be decided by execution, economics, and systems design.

Listen to Season 2, Episode 1 of The Smart Society Show to hear how energy, AI, and geopolitics are converging — and why the next phase of the transition will be defined by grids, software, and the race for affordable power.

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