{"id":184485,"date":"2025-10-08T03:14:07","date_gmt":"2025-10-08T03:14:07","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/184485\/"},"modified":"2025-10-08T03:14:07","modified_gmt":"2025-10-08T03:14:07","slug":"the-most-important-person-in-britain-youve-never-heard-of-politico","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/184485\/","title":{"rendered":"The most important person in Britain you\u2019ve never heard of \u2013 POLITICO"},"content":{"rendered":"<p>That would hand him sweeping legal powers to control national supply and demand of gas, with which gas companies would be legally required to comply, powers that can be over-ruled only on the say-so of the king \u2014 a responsibility Butterworth acknowledged with a nod, saying, \u201cI\u2019ve always found that quite fascinating myself.\u201d\u00a0<\/p>\n<p>The NEC position has existed since the 1990s. Butterworth has held it since 2022. Since the invasion of Ukraine, he has been \u201cmore cognizant of\u201d potential scenarios involving \u201closs of supply from the North Sea,\u201d he said \u2014 as might be caused by a <a href=\"https:\/\/www.politico.eu\/article\/germany-arrests-ukrainian-suspect-in-nord-stream-sabotage-case\/\" data-type=\"link\" data-id=\"https:\/\/www.politico.eu\/article\/germany-arrests-ukrainian-suspect-in-nord-stream-sabotage-case\/\" rel=\"nofollow noopener\" target=\"_blank\">Nord Stream-style attack<\/a> on a pipeline.\u00a0<\/p>\n<p>For years, National Gas has held annual wargame-style exercises to practise for an emergency. The next takes place later this month, involving 50 organizations \u2014\u00a0including the government \u2014\u00a0and 400 people. \u00a0<\/p>\n<p>The scenario is different each year. To trigger Butterworth&#8217;s emergency powers a combination of things would likely have to go wrong: a pipeline failure, for example, combined with a reduction in LNG supply and cold weather driving up demand.\u00a0<\/p>\n<p>The Chris Whitty of energy\u00a0<\/p>\n<p>In a network emergency \u2014\u00a0something Britain has never experienced and which remains \u201chighly unlikely,\u201d Butterworth stresses \u2014 to preserve gas for those that need it most, like hospitals, he could make public appeals for reduced gas use, require large gas users like power stations and factories to shut down or, in the most extreme cases, cut off gas to potentially large numbers of homes.<\/p>\n<p>Such a step would be taken to maintain the safety of the wider pipeline system. At all costs, the goal would be to avoid an unplanned loss of pressure somewhere in the network \u2014 a highly dangerous situation that can lead to gas leaks into homes or explosions.\u00a0<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"That would hand him sweeping legal powers to control national supply and demand of gas, with which gas&hellip;\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":184486,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[3],"tags":[12577,5704,140,1344,3712,8731,72384,309,2982,3360,59,57,58,555,464,2984,2985,467,151,50,2798,4160,2987,78088,9215,154,471,1351,557,56,157,54,158,55,1220],"class_list":{"0":"post-184485","1":"post","2":"type-post","3":"status-publish","4":"format-standard","5":"has-post-thumbnail","7":"category-united-kingdom","8":"tag-coal","9":"tag-conflict","10":"tag-defense","11":"tag-energy","12":"tag-energy-infrastructure","13":"tag-energy-security","14":"tag-energy-supply","15":"tag-england","16":"tag-fossil-fuels","17":"tag-fuels","18":"tag-gb","19":"tag-great-britain","20":"tag-greatbritain","21":"tag-industry","22":"tag-infrastructure","23":"tag-liquefied-natural-gas","24":"tag-lng","25":"tag-markets","26":"tag-military","27":"tag-news","28":"tag-north-sea","29":"tag-norway","30":"tag-oil","31":"tag-pipelines","32":"tag-resilience","33":"tag-russia","34":"tag-safety","35":"tag-security","36":"tag-transport","37":"tag-uk","38":"tag-ukraine","39":"tag-united-kingdom","40":"tag-united-states","41":"tag-unitedkingdom","42":"tag-wales"},"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/184485","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=184485"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/184485\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/184486"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=184485"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=184485"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=184485"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}