Moving from trading to a think-tank

After 13 years as an electricity analyst at a big German energy company, I made the transition to Sandbag, a small climate think tank, which is now rebranded as Ember, where I have worked for 7 years, also as an electricity analyst.

When I left E.ON, I still enjoyed the job. Every day, energy markets would throw a curveball, and you had to work out what to do, with the help of many super clever people around you, which was a constant buzz for 13 years and never got dull.

But I had got to the point in my “corporate job” (as I call it now) where I was bored of just making (or, ahem, sometimes losing) money. And my feelings ran deeper. I was disenfranchised with the trader greed, and with a rigged system that even a trained monkey could get himself a six-figure bonus every year. I never really cared too much about money, and I never wanted to be a trader. It just all felt a bit pointless. Money for who? To what end?

So I left in 2013, with no plan in mind.

I always had an interest in climate change. I thought the best way to influence would be in a big energy company. I tried to influence where I could, and even had two 121’s with the CEO to protest over Kingsnorth, a new coal power plant. But I spent my bullets: there’s only some many times you can go out on a limb. Anyway, E.ON only interested in making small climate steps, not the revolutionary jumps I wanted to see.

I’d convinced myself that the quickest win to curb climate change was to stop generating electricity from coal. I knew about coal power plants in Europe, surely I could help out 0.0001% of the way to phase-out coal?! I’d secretly met Sandbag’s brilliant founder, Baroness Bryony Worthington, back in 2005 to talk about Kingsnorth. I approached her again in 2013, and after a surreal interview in the House of Lords bar next to a table of drunken bishops, I joined Sandbag.

My first task was to write a report “Europe’s Failure to Tackle Coal”. The learning curve was immense – especially around how policy works. In trading when you get an idea, you just hit the buy or sell button. But in policy, it has taken years to understand even a little bit of how decisions are made, by whom, and how to influence them.

The good news is, even as an analyst I feel now I can have a (very) small influence in decisions. That change is about arming people with the right facts. An example happening right now is I’ve presented some coal data analysis on methane leaks from Europe’s coal mines to the European Commission ahead of their upcoming methane strategy, to try to influence them to implement strict controls on coal mines. I will rarely know if I ever helped to swing a decision. Sometimes I yearn for a daily P&L report, at least then you know whether you’ve done a good job or not. You need a strong belief in yourself.

And the buzz is a different kind now. Less immediate, but still analysing relevant day-to-day issues. And it’s amazing the networks of talented people we work with. We work with some cool data: for example, two years ago I was on European Space Agency accelerator programme to map air pollution. Our objectives are little more than “do what you can to speed the transition out of coal”, so we generate our own ideas of what will work, with very little bureaucracy. We also don’t progress with irrelevant projects: on day 1 of lockdown, we reconfigured all our work to be relevant in a Covid world.

I still check gas, coal and carbon prices daily.

But do I miss corporate life? No, not once have I wanted to swap back jobs.