Electricity

Electricity prices are going up. Pick your reason, from EV demand through to the data centres powering the AI revolution. It doesn’t matter. They’re going up. Indeed, one Patty Cook, a senior VP at the consultancy ICF laid it out at a recent coffee morning. “The whole notion of clean, affordable, and reliable [power] got incredibly, monumentally complicated in a very quick period of time,” she said to those who had popped in. As the hob-nobs got passed around, she cracked on, warning of a “sea change” in electricity demand. And all this power has to come from somewhere. Preferably not coal. Or any fossil fuel come to mind. Which explains why South Korea is the latest country to do done one of those high-profile U-turns and come out all pro-nuclear, approving two new reactors that had previously been canned, with three more in the pipe. Sweden, too, is also going all in. For those who took a keen interest in their recent budget bill they would have read that “the government’s work to enable the expansion of new nuclear power is now entering a more intensive phase.” South Korea and Sweden are not alone. The problem, though, might be in finding the pounds of uranium to make all this electricity, given much of it comes from countries that have a bit of form. Tables show that almost 25% of the uranium bought up by European utilities comes from either Russia and Kazakhstan. And doesn’t Putin know it, lighting up the tape this week with some rhetoric that will have utility company fuel buyers sucking hard on a Dunhill out by the bins: RUSSIA’S PUTIN: MAYBE WE SHOULD THINK ABOUT EXPORTS RESTRICTIONS OF SOME GOODS, SUCH AS URANIUM. Nuclear ambitions are one thing, but the approval of such high profile plans might just be the easy bit.