GB Energy given five years to turn a profit

The boss of Great British Energy has been given a five-year target for Labour’s flagship state-owned energy company to become “profitable”, MPs have been told.

Juergen Maier, who was appointed chairman of GB Energy in June, was asked at the Commons energy security and net zero committee whether he had a timeline on profitability.

He told MPs: “I’ve been set a target which is within this Parliamentary term. 

“We’re going to have to be innovative on this. It’s not just going to be a return from investments, there are going to be other support lines we develop within GB Energy.”

Maier said he wanted GB Energy to work on accelerating projects through the planning system, meaning they could ultimately sell the expertise as a service to developers.

GB Energy jobs

But he added that this was “not definitely going to be part of the business case” but an example of how to “generate revenue streams to achieve that objective of being profitable in the first five years”.

The former Siemens UK boss also said GB Energy was likely to create up to 300 jobs at the Aberdeen headquarters.

He said: “We haven’t yet completed what we think the workforce plan is going to be, but we’re starting to recruit.

“Within this first term I think there will be 200-300 jobs in the office… what happens beyond that, let’s see.”

Maier said his experience and “background of taking pretty risky technologies to market… ultimately needing to make a return” would help him in his role launching the company and investing into offshore wind, tidal energy and large scale carbon capture and storage.

‘Crowding in’

“I also want to reassure you I’ve been involved in bringing technology to market which has failed and I know that the right answer at that point is to fail fast,” he told MPs, stressing that GB Energy would have an “entrepreneurial mindset”.

And he added: “I don’t believe the technologies we’re currently talking about are going to fail.

“I think there’s enough engineering prowess, enough private investment already crowding in to these spaces to know these are going to scale.”

The businessman, who will be based in Manchester, said GB Energy would aim to emulate the model of state-owned energy firms Orsted and Vattenfall, as opposed to “the EDF model”, and said he wanted it to be “the national champion of the new technology areas”.

He added: “We’re going to be unapologetically long term in how we set this up.”