Preaching Realism About Renewables

摘要

National grid, the biggest utility in the U.K., where it distributes natural gas to some 12 million custom- ers, has spent much of the past decade balancing that business by strength- ening its foothold across the Atlantic. In contrast to its counterpart Scottish- Power, which bought West Coast utility PacifiCorp in 1999 and sold it in 2006, National Grid has gotten in deeper. It paid more than $7 billion in cash last August for Brooklyn, New York-based KeySpan Corp. to become the biggest utility in the Northeast and second in the U.S. in number of customers, behind California's PG&E Corp. That strong presence at the heart of the energy infrastructure on two continents means that issues related to carbon emissions and global warming land squarely on National Grid CEO Steve Holliday's doorstep. He's confronting them head-on: In April the London-based company raised its corporate target for reducing greenhouse gas emissions by 2050 from 60 percent below 1990 benchmark levels to 80 percent. Some of that is a stretch. "We have a plan to get to 65 percent" from the current 38 percent, says Holliday. "I don't know what will get us the remaining 15 percent. That's why we set the target."