Welcome to Zero. I am Akshad Rati. And I'm Oscar Boyd. Actually, last year, you, along with several of your Bloomberg

Green colleagues, wrote a big series of articles called Bottlenecks, and we made several episodes

about that series for the podcast as well. For those of our listeners who haven't yet heard

those episodes, do you want to just give a quick reminder of the overarching theme of that series and some of the topics you covered?

Yeah, I mean, this is a constant ongoing struggle these days, that countries aren't able to

build all the electricity, generation capacity and distribution that is necessary for all the

demand that is coming from electric cars, heat pumps, but also AI.

And what we wanted to do was to look at why is that happening? And in rich countries, we found these bottlenecks.

Things that are supply chain issues, and we had plenty of those after the pandemic, but these specific

ones have yet not been resolved.

And what are some of the specific issues that are causing botanics?

These are like instruments most people don't think about, things like transformers and cables,

even engineers and their skills to just be able to build out all that we need.

And especially in Europe and in North America, these equipment and people bottlenecks

is what is really making the build out of electricity very expensive, making it import

dependent because it's not like China doesn't have a

surplus of capacity to make those things, and making it, well, not self-sufficient if you're

going to commit to using so much electricity in the energy system.

And you highlight North America and Europe as kind of the problem zones there.

Why is it particularly bad in those countries and why have China and India, for example,

escaped this problem so far?

Well, historically, in North America and Europe, there has not been, at least for the last

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