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Hello and welcome to Coffee House Shots, the spectators' daily politics podcast.

I'm Cindy you and I'm joined by James Asaif and Katie Boss.

Now James, today the National Grid has given a warning that quite a few number of households

will be facing blackouts or could be facing blackouts that come this winter. Can you tell us about that?

Yes, they've said that they think that it should be fine. There should be a 6% margin.

There shouldn't be blackouts, but the danger is if the UK cannot import energy,

there is a risk of households being subject to three hour blackouts.

I think when we come to this risk, the risk is essentially that as we saw with COVID,

when countries aren't confident they have enough supply to deal with their own needs,

exports can end up being curtailed as countries put their own interests first.

That is the risk this winter. There is also an issue in the UK,

which is the UK has suffers from grid congestion, which means that it finds it difficult,

it's going lots of renewables, lots of offshore wind,

but it's finding difficult to connect those to the grid and move that about the grid.

I mean, this is one of the really big things that we have got wrong in this context.

Is that because of old infrastructure?

Old infrastructure. Basically up in Aberdeen and Peterhead, for example,

they are creating these floating offshore wind turbines. It should be fantastic for the UK's energy needs,

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