Imagine you run a company supplying electricity and gas to households up and down the country. What would you do if, in the grip of a particularly cold winter, some of your most vulnerable customers couldn’t pay? I would expect most decent people, or companies, would do all they could to help. Perhaps with a…
British Gas has abandoned its long-standing opposition to the energy price cap and admitted that “price regulation has helped the consumer”. Chris O’Shea, the boss of Britain’s biggest energy supplier, also blamed the smaller companies that are going bust for their own demise and warned that households faced a bill of hundreds of millions of…
Eight-year-old Yahya sits in the front room of his family home in Leyton, east London, working through an English paper under the watchful eye of his mother. Later that afternoon they will visit a local museum exhibition. Mathematics revision is planned the following morning, followed by a walk in the park. But this is no…
If “emotional intelligence” was a person it would be nearly 30 years old by now, first conceived as a popular concept back in 1995 and now fully matured and influencing everywhere I look. From the irritating robotic apology for train delays, to the cutesy advertising on the side of smoothie bottles, to the endless corporate…
Royal Dutch Shell hopes to boost the profits it makes from offshore wind farms by using surplus electricity to produce hydrogen and to charge batteries at sea. The oil company claims that using such technologies to store energy, as well as installing floating solar panels next to the turbines, should enable it to offer “a…
In late 2014, the price of iron ore was sagging. Ivan Glasenberg, Glencore’s boss, was none too pleased. The commodities giant was developing an expensive iron mine in Mauritania whose economics looked worse with each tick down of the price. He called a meeting with the project team. “Why are we doing this?” he asked…