Helm Talks - energy climate infrastructure & more

Hosted by Helm Talks - energy climate infrastructure & more

Business

Website RSS feed

Episodes

Latest episode

Jul 2026

Language

About the show

Helm Talks is full of short, 'pull no punches' insights into: Energy & Climate; Regulation, Utilities & Infrastructure; Natural Capital & the Environment. Professor Dieter Helm is Professor of Economic Policy at the University of Oxford.

Listen to episodes

60 recent

July 21, 202613 min

Some new faces, same old problems

Following on from the latest change of Prime Minister and announcements about his new Cabinet, what is going to change? Andy Burnham has a new ten-year plan, and is promising a fundamental revision of politics, but Britain’s deeper economic problems remain unresolved. The fact is, underneath the headlines, the country is still trying to live beyond its means, with high borrowing, weak growth and rising debt interest putting serious pressure on its public finances. Three key costs are holding the economy back: labour, capital and energy. Higher employment costs, high interest rates and expensive electricity all make it harder for British businesses to compete, and small political fixes will not be enough. If Burnham wants to make the radical turnaround he is promising, a more honest national debate about public finances, competitiveness and economic growth is needed. Without a serious, long-term economic strategy, the underlying problems will continue to build, whatever the political headlines of the day.

July 7, 202613 min

Hotter Days

As another heatwave grips the UK and much of Europe, we need to look beyond the immediate discomfort of hot weather and ask why existing policies are failing to dent the relentless rise in the carbon concentration in the atmosphere. More wind farms and solar panels are not going to crack the problem. Climate policy must be judged not by good intentions, but by its real-world costs, impacts and global effectiveness. Renewables alone cannot deliver cheap, secure and clean energy. The wider costs of electricity systems, storage, back-up power and networks also need to be taken into account. The UK’s choices need to be seen in the international context and compared with the energy strategies of major economies such as China, the US and those in Europe. No other country thinks relying on wind and solar plus a bit of nuclear is going to power a modern economy. A broader mix of technologies, including nuclear power, and a willingness to confront the costs of pollution created by our own consumption are needed. Climate change is real, action is essential, but policy must be practical, affordable and effective if it is to make a meaningful difference. The UK fails on all counts.

July 1, 202615 min

Beyond the nationalisation slogan

With the renewed political enthusiasm for nationalisation, what, in practical terms, does it mean and what would actually change? How might “Manchesterism” apply in practice? Using buses, rail, water and electricity as examples, in this podcast I argue that public ownership and public control are not the same thing, and that different sectors require different models of organisation, regulation and investment. Appeals to “take back control” are simplistic, and need to be examined with a focus on the long-term funding, planning and delivery needs of core infrastructure. While the nationalisation debate is useful, it needs to move beyond rhetoric towards detailed questions about ownership, regulation, incentives and the proper role of the state.

June 15, 202615 min

Why can't we build infrastructure in this country?

Politicians have been seeking for decades to put right the infrastructure crisis in this country that is rooted not in a lack of ambition, but in deeper economic and political constraints. Building in Britain is exceptionally costly, with high energy prices, high labour costs and high financing costs making major projects difficult to deliver at scale. At the same time, the country saves too little to fund long-term investment, leaving infrastructure heavily reliant on foreign capital, while government is constrained by debt and rising interest payments, and repeatedly prioritises short-term spending over capital renewal. Taking Thames Water as a case study, regulatory hesitation and political short-termism have both delayed necessary restructuring and entrenched decline. Meaningful renewal will require more than rhetoric: it demands lower input costs, stronger incentives to save and invest, firmer control of public debt, and a clear political willingness to favour long-term capital investment over immediate consumption. Without a whole-economy approach, the goal will remain elusive.

May 27, 202614 min

Crisis? What crisis?

The International Energy Agency describes the current Iran conflict as the “biggest energy crisis in history”. While oil prices have risen sharply, they remain below the real highs of past shocks. However, the impact is being felt very differently around the world, with some countries even benefiting from the situation. For example, the US and Russia are relatively well placed as major producers, while China and India have buffers through their domestic coal, stockpiles and alternative supplies. Europe, by contrast – especially the UK and Germany – is very exposed because of its energy choices and growing dependence on imported gas. Markets are already adapting: higher prices encourage new production, alternative routes, and renewed interest in nuclear and other energy sources. Rather than dramatic headlines, this podcast focuses on the more complex reality: an energy problem with very different consequences across the world, not a single historic crisis.

May 17, 202614 min

Britain's negative-sum society

The concept of a zero-sum game was fashionable in the 1970s. The idea was simple: competing interest groups, and especially unions, would fight for ever-bigger shares of the nation’s cake, and their gains would mean losses to others. Fast forward to 2026, and what we have now is a negative-sum game: cake for some reduces the cake for others, and reduces the size of the cake. The result is lower economic growth. This is indeed playing out now: the government’s core motors for economic growth – 1.5 million new houses, net zero – are all coming up against the need to pay for more welfare and other public services. To cover all this, the government has raised taxes, notably on the business costs of labour, and borrowed a lot more. The result: higher labour costs and higher costs of capital. Add to this the highest costs of industrial energy in the developed economies, and the results for economic growth can only be negative. Now add in the new renters’ rights with increased costs to landlords, and thence the supply of rented housing going down, whilst the higher labour costs have increased the costs of building new houses and reduced demand. 1979 is with us again. The negative-sum game is not sustainable, and thus it will not be sustained.

April 24, 202611 min

No such thing as free electricity

There is no such thing as a free lunch, and there is no such thing as “free” electricity. What is true is that there are going to be days in summer when supply exceeds demands and hence the value of electricity generated will be zero. Surpluses arise because a renewables-based system needs far more total generating capacity to guarantee supply at all times, including when the sun is not shining and the wind is not blowing. Using the UK as an example, meeting a peak demand of around 45GW may require roughly double the capacity compared with the “bad old days” of fossil-fuel-based generation, as well as twice the grid system and lots of batteries and storage. There are bound to be times when lots of that 120GW is generating but demand is low. But excess electricity does not reduce the costs. These don’t magically go away. Investors will build wind, solar and nuclear plants only if they are paid through mechanisms such as fixed-price contracts, and households also need to fund the expanded grid, balancing and storage required to handle the extra capacity. As a result, “free” electricity during certain periods will still be paid for elsewhere – ultimately by consumers and taxpayers. Renewables are a good thing, but they need to be accompanied by an honest public discussion about the real system costs of decarbonisation rather than the promise of free energy.

April 20, 202615 min

Sticky plaster energy policy is falling apart

Another day and another bit of sticky plaster is applied. With the highest industrial energy prices in the developed world, the government is increasing the number of companies that will get a bit off their bills in 2027. This follows other moves, like the £150 off customer bills. It will not be enough, given the sheer scale of the problems. The industrial crisis will go on; domestic bills are scheduled to go up and stay up for the next decade; new energy-intensive inward investment (e.g. for data centres) is being deterred; and where there are projects, own generation from gas is the route to firm power. The facts are not changing, and it is getting ever more painful to ignore them. Climate realism means facing up to the relentless increase in the concentration of carbon in the atmosphere, the continuing 85% of the world’s energy supplies coming from fossil fuels, and the lack of any transition away from this, with the oil, gas and coal burn going ever up as the world energy demand looks set to double by 2050. Renewables on a system basis are not cheap. It takes 120GW now to meet the same peak 45GW demand, which 60GW once comfortably met, as well as doubling the transmission grid and adding all the extra batteries and storage. The renewables are not “home-grown” – the supply chains are foreign. Britain is not on a path to home-grown energy. It is not cheap, and other countries are not looking to Britain as a “clean-energy superpower”. They look to Britain to find out how not to do it – no one else wants the highest energy prices. It’s not difficult to sort all this out, but more sticky plasters will make the situation worse and harder to fix the longer the government ducks the need for a fundamental re-set of British energy policy.

March 24, 202613 min

Gas prices, gas mistakes and gas policy

The news is very much about gas price shocks, but this is to misunderstand the fundamental difference between temporary shocks and long-term trends. Gas prices spike when major geopolitical events occur (e.g. Russia’s invasion of Ukraine or the blocking of the Strait of Hormuz), but then often fall sharply afterwards. Such fluctuations are nothing new and should be expected, but they don’t prove that gas is inherently unstable or that the UK can simply “get out of gas” by relying more on wind, solar, and some nuclear. Despite two decades of expanding renewables, the UK still depends on gas for about 35% of its energy, with heating and industry making full exit impossible anytime soon. At the same time, the UK is not making good use of its own North Sea gas. Current policy effectively discourages domestic production through limited licences and heavy windfall taxes, while simultaneously encouraging imports, even though imported LNG is more polluting and exposes the UK to foreign supply risks. The claim being made that domestic gas always has to follow world prices is misleading – long-term contracts once gave the UK stable, predictable gas supplies, and could do so again, if the government required such contracts as a licensing condition. Moreover, the UK’s energy system is more exposed to global gas prices than other countries because electricity prices feed gas costs straight through, industrial electricity prices are the highest in the developed world, and the UK has very little gas storage. A more balanced, practical approach is essential to manage the gas we will inevitably continue to use, to prioritise domestic production over polluting imports, and to build proper storage and contract structures that improve security, environmental outcomes, and industrial competitiveness.

March 17, 202615 min

Britain's industrial energy price crisis

Britain is facing a deep industrial energy price crisis, with many major industries collapsing or shrinking because UK electricity costs are among the highest in the world. Recent closures—from refineries to steel, fertilizer, and fibreglass plants—show how uncompetitive energy prices have already pushed firms out, long before the latest geopolitical price spikes made things worse. The core issue isn’t temporary shocks but a long‑term cost problem baked into the UK’s electricity system costs. To restore industrial competitiveness, Britain needs permanent, structural reform to electricity pricing—not short-term fixes. This requires three big changes: charge industry based on long‑run marginal system costs rather than loading full network costs onto them; reform the electricity market by moving away from gas‑set wholesale prices towards a capacity‑based “equivalent firm power” system that properly accounts for intermittency; and index carbon prices inversely to oil and gas prices to stabilise overall energy costs. Together with improvements in gas storage and long‑term gas supply contracts from the North Sea, these reforms would deliver predictable, globally competitive energy prices to support both existing industries and the more electricity‑intensive sectors of the future.