The apprentice revolution
On Thursday night I went to Clean Power: the Road to 2030 at the University of Edinburgh Business School. The energy minister, Michael Shanks, gave the keynote. Then a panel, including Keith Anderson, the chief executive of ScottishPower, took questions on the grid, investment, bills and planning.
I expected to come home thinking about wind farms. Instead I came home thinking about one number.
Roughly a million young people in the UK aren’t in work, education or training. The latest ONS figure is 981,000 for April to June 2026, and earlier in the year it went over a million for the first time since 2013. Keith Anderson called it a disgrace. His point was that if nobody reaches these young people by 23 or 24, many of them are lost to work for life, and the research on men’s pay goes some of the way with him: a spell of unemployment when young still showed as a 12 to 15 per cent wage gap at 42. The minister added a story from a colleague who had visited a job centre in Bellshill and been told 40 per cent of the young people on its books were unable to work. He called that nonsense, and so do I. I don’t believe anyone is untrainable.
Now put that number next to everything else said in the room. The minister called this the biggest upgrade of Britain’s electricity network since the 1950s. If you’re a welder, he said, you can get a job anywhere you like. Companies complain they can’t find people while a million young people sit outside the system. Those two problems should be solving each other.
There’s a purpose story here too. People like being part of building something bigger than themselves, and power drives everything. It isn’t only for AI. It’s for boiling the kettle.
That’s worth saying, because in my corner of the internet the energy conversation has become a conversation about data centres. They matter, but the bigger shift is electrification. My own flat is heated by gas. If everyone with a gas boiler bought plug-in heaters tomorrow, the grid simply couldn’t supply them. Getting off gas means building a much bigger grid, and building it means people. The panel also made a point I hadn’t considered: data centres placed near wind farms can soak up power that we currently pay to switch off. Sited well, they could be part of the answer rather than the scapegoat.
The grid didn’t fall behind through anyone being villainous. Anderson explained that regulators wanted proof the wind farms were coming before they let anyone build the wires. Then renewables arrived faster than anyone planned, and the network has been playing catch-up ever since.
The bit that gave me hope was where the jobs will be. Oil and gas work clustered around a few places. Grid and renewables work is spread across the whole country. Then there’s community ownership. The minister mentioned places like Eigg and the Western Isles, where communities own part of the infrastructure and spend the income however they choose. Anyone who has visited the Scottish islands knows how welcoming they are. I’d love to see those communities financially secure enough to put money back into cafés, tourism and the things that make a place good to live in.
Then apprenticeships, which I’ve always believed in. I spent four years studying at Edinburgh and learnt plenty, some of it in ways I still don’t notice. But I suspect I could have become the developer I am without the degree. Everything I know about DIY I learnt by watching someone, having a go, getting it wrong and trying again. You learn to build infrastructure by building it, next to someone who already knows how. The minister said colleges and apprenticeships have been undervalued for too long, and I agree. A lot of people are worried about AI taking their jobs. There’s a vast amount of real, physical work waiting to be done here.
Finally, the tinkerer in me. There’s a lot of talk about running the washing machine overnight when power is cheap. Fine, but I’d forget to empty it in the morning, and nobody should lose sleep over a spin cycle. The better answer is storage, plus homes that do the remembering for you. Someone at the event said our homes are smart but not clever. Mine runs Home Assistant, and it’s a little bit clever. I’d love it to know an electric car is at 30 per cent, check tomorrow’s plans, and pick the cheapest window to charge, even if part of it has to be peak time. That’s what smart meters are really for. They aren’t there to make you feel guilty about the kettle. They’re there so your house can use power when the wind is blowing.
The minister said hitting 2030 isn’t a binary thing, because every turbine switched on makes a difference. I think the same is true of that million. Every young person taken on as an apprentice is progress, and the country needs every pair of hands it can get.