11-05-2025
‘I can save Britain from Spain-style blackouts'
Power generated by Icelandic volcanoes and sent at hyper-speed down a 1,000-mile subsea high-voltage cable could help save Britain from Spain-style blackouts, one of the City's most prominent financiers has said.
Edi Truell, a self-proclaimed 'disruptive capitalist', made the claims as he edges closer to a decade-long dream of building a £3.5bn subsea cable that will funnel geothermal power from the hot springs of Iceland to the UK.
Such interconnectors – cables that enable the exchange of electricity between neighbouring countries – 'are vital' in the fight against the type of blackouts that unfolded across Spain and Portugal last month, Truell said.
The precise cause of the Continent's biggest power cut in living memory is yet to be determined, but Truell believes it can be traced back to the failure of the Viking Link interconnector between the UK and Denmark, which occurred just hours before the incident.
Truell, a former adviser to Boris Johnson when he was mayor of London, described a devastating cascade effect that swept across Europe before the lights went out.
Surplus power should have been diverted from neighbouring France, but it had already had to step in with back-up supplies to help smooth the outage at Viking, leaving the country with insufficient capacity to rescue the Iberian peninsula.
'They needed gigawatts from France, but the French didn't have them,' he said.
With Truell's Icelandic project up and running, it could have supported an existing interconnector between Britain and Norway to provide another 4,000 megawatts, Truell said, 'which would have then freed up French power to free up Spain's'.
Truell expects construction to begin on his Atlantic Superconnection (ASC) scheme before the end of the year. The link will bring enough geothermal and hydroelectric electricity to the UK to power around 2m homes, while also pumping excess wind energy generated in the UK back to Iceland.
'It's what the National Grid calls 'flexible base load' – it's always there,' Truell said. 'Depending on the time of day, you get between nine and 15pc of Britain's electricity pretty much guaranteed always on.
'It also saves the taxpayer a lot of money, because instead of turning the wind turbines off when it's blowing too much, you can whizz the surplus electricity up to Iceland and store it. It makes much more sense.'
It is one of several power links in the works that promise to bolster Britain's energy reserves by tapping into inexhaustible overseas renewable sources. Former Tesco boss Dave Lewis is spearheading the Xlinks scheme, which aims to bring solar and wind power from Morocco to the UK via a 4,000-mile-long subsea cable.
Australian mining billionaire Andrew Forrest is working on a competing proposal that would send clean energy generated from North African solar farms through Europe to the UK.
Truell's project is being financed through a mixture of his own capital, backing from private investors and money raised in the debt markets. He said a 'major investment bank' stands ready to provide the entire £3.5bn funding in case of any snags.
It follows a protracted decade-long process in which he was forced to go it alone after failing to persuade successive UK governments to get behind his grand plans.
At one stage, Truell was led to believe by Theresa May's government that he had secured the blessing of ministers in the form of a long-term inflation-linked contract that would guarantee his project could sell its electricity at a fixed price to British households, he said.
'I was told it was 'in the post',' he said. But Truell's long-awaited Whitehall approval never came. 'I was basically lied to,' he said.
The current government had been more supportive, but in other crucial areas was proving to be 'catastrophically useless', he said.
He described Labour's energy policy under net-zero evangelist Ed Miliband as 'very muddled'. 'I don't think the investments are being made in the right place,' Truell added.
He pointed to the £22bn that has been set aside to invest in various carbon capture projects in the North West and North East of England, with three quarters of the outlay expected to be recovered via customer bills.
'You could have six or seven interconnectors to Iceland for that, and it would save a hell of a lot more carbon than sticking it underground,' he said. 'So I think that is just bonkers.'
Truell estimates that seven new interconnectors would bring around 12GW of power into the UK - equivalent to between 20pc and 25pc of Britain's electricity usage.
Truell is also concerned about the impact that some types of renewables are having on the landscape and rural areas.
'I love the countryside. Carpeting it with solar panels made in China, and overhead pylons, is just retrograde,' Truell said. Cables are cheaper and because they are generally buried underground, 'you don't spoil the countryside,' he said.
His criticism relates to Labour's plans to build thousands of new pylons in rural areas to help meet its ambitious clean power targets.
Miliband has called the intended rollout of new pylons, alongside wind turbines and solar panels, a matter of 'national security' as the Government seeks to make the energy grid carbon neutral by the end of the decade.
The Energy Secretary has also promised to 'take on the blockers, the delayers, the obstructionists'. But the proposals have been met with widespread dismay by affected communities.
Campaigners have accused the Government of using 'bullying tactics' to impose new green projects on local communities.
Truell called on ministers to change tack and adopt the approach taken in Switzerland, where he owns hotels and property, and spends much of his time.
'In Switzerland ... there is no building on greenfield [land] – none, zero, nought,' he said. 'Don't even apply because you're not going to get it. The Swiss are very straightforward about it: 'What part of no don't you understand?''
When it comes to land that has already been developed, the opposite stance is needed, he argued.
'Derogate planning permission for brownfield – you want to put a solar panel on your roof, just put it on. You don't want to apply for planning – just get on with it, take all that planning cost out. Every new house should have solar panels on it,' he said.
In an attack on the Chancellor's tax raid, Truell said the super-wealthy are 'fleeing Rachel Reeves'. 'It just seems so self-destructive. They're being driven out, mainly by changes in the tax regime. It's class envy, putting a tax on private schools and doubling taxes on second homes. The whole mood music is 'we don't want people',' he said.
Similarly, over-zealous regulation is forcing businesses to abandon the City, he claims. Though a longstanding problem, the failure to tackle it is particularly short-sighted in the context of Donald Trump's trade war, he said.
Truell is a serial entrepreneur who made his fortune as the founder of private equity house Duke Street Capital, before setting up several pension buyout vehicles.
'We've got a golden opportunity because financial services are not subject to tariffs and Britain's got the biggest trade surplus in the world on financial services – about £77bn the year before last, which is bigger than anybody. We're really doing extremely well,' he complained.
'But the Government, whether it's this one or the last one, just keeps allowing the regulators to again drive business away,' Truell added.
Truell is able to speak from experience after mothballing one of his more recent ventures amid accusations of regulatory dithering.
In 2023, he decided to wind down his Pension SuperFund – a consolidator of company pension schemes – blaming the regulator, government and the insurance industry for making the business model 'uninvestable'.
Despite all the promises the Chancellor made to rip up red tape in her maiden Mansion House speech in the autumn, regulation is at risk of becoming more burdensome, not less, he said.
'I did a lot of work behind the scenes on the Mansion House reforms and it's all great until you actually go to talk to the FCA [Financial Conduct Authority] or the Pension Regulator or the PRA [Prudential Regulation Authority].
'My God, it's almost worse rather than better, because they're now thinking of ways to block the changes,' he said.
He almost gave up on his Icelandic power link, too, in the face of ministerial foot-dragging.
'I felt very depressed,' he said. But in the absence of government backing, Truell vowed to finance the entire venture privately.
Yet even now he can't quite escape the dead hand of officialdom.
All major infrastructure projects in Britain require the blessing of Angela Rayner, the Housing Secretary, in the form of a Development Consent Order.
Meanwhile, his plans to build a giant factory at the Port of Tyne to provide the hundreds of miles of cable needed for the scheme must pass an environmental assessment 'in case there are newts on the quayside' or 'a colony of badgers', he joked.
Strip out 'old-fashioned bureaucracy' and you would speed up the process by 16 to 17 months, he estimated. Truell called on the Government to ask itself a simple question: 'Do you want critical national infrastructure or not?'
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