Globe reporter Erin Ailworth recently spoke with STEVE HOLLIDAY, chief executive of NATIONAL GRID PLC, one of the state’s biggest utilities. Here’s what she found out:
“Over a third of the business is in the United States,” said Holliday, “so arguably it should be a week-and-a-half a month, and I’d probably have a problem with my family if that was the case.”
“It’s a privilege to operate parts of the system that I believe rather facetiously should be in a museum. But we do. In upstate New York we have a line that was built by Thomas Edison. It’s an amazing, amazing compliment to the engineers that put that in place. When they built that, they had no idea that in 2013 it would still be operating.”
“[It’s] expected by 2020 that almost 30 percent of the capacity that’s installed on the system [in the UK] will be wind . . . It’s two-thirds offshore, a third onshore, roughly.”
“I often very sarcastically say to my team, ‘If we can do that much in two weeks, just talk me through how long it takes to build some of these systems normally?’ Joking aside, extreme weather is here to stay.”
“The longest serving [has] 62 years.”
“Interestingly the owner of the Red Sox, John Henry, is the owner of my favorite football team in the UK, which is Liverpool . . . . I’m not a big soccer fan actually, I’m a rugby fan, but Liverpool is my favorite soccer club.” [Henry also owns The Boston Globe.]
“I had a job that I worked every Thursday and Friday evening, and all day Saturday, in a butcher shop, behind the scenes. Look, some little scars on my fingers from all the nicks that were made from my knife. I was a schoolboy then; I was trying to earn some money to buy a decent pair of jeans to go out at night.”
Erin Ailworth can be reached at eailworth@globe.com. Follow her on Twitter @ailworth.