Team size: 190 (c.50 lawyers) 

Centrica is a leading energy services and solutions company which is unique among energy companies in the UK and Ireland in operating across the entire energy value chain: investing in energy infrastructure; serving our retail energy customers; and optimising through global energy trading and route-to-market services. Our legal teams (based in the UK, Ireland, Denmark, Germany and the USA) work across all of these markets, at the forefront of supporting the Group with its green-focused investment strategy to boost energy security and accelerate the transition to net zero. 

What significant projects or deals has the legal team worked on in the past year?  Can you provide examples of successful outcomes or major accomplishments?    

In a recent significant accomplishment, legal business partners to our Centrica Energy and Power business units demonstrated collaboration, commerciality and resilience across 18 months of negotiations, which led to Centrica investing GBP£70m in a GBP£300m fund to enable Highview Enterprise – at the forefront of developing new Liquid Air Energy Storage (LAES) technology – to build a first-of-its-kind commercial-scale LAES facility in Manchester. Drawing on internal M&A, projects and finance expertise, our teams managed parallel but intertwined equity/debt tracks to support Centrica’s investment as a shareholder in Highview’s parent company, alongside debt as a project finance lender. 

Cross-team collaboration also enabled Centrica to quickly mobilise its own Meter Asset Provider (MAP) business at the end of last year. The roll out of smart meters is an essential tool in the transition to net zero and our commercial, privacy and competition legal teams worked with regulatory affairs and secretariat to enable metering manufacturing contracts to be signed with a new MAP legal entity within months of its inception.  

Other notable deals include advising on the acquisition of two clean energy projects, adding 32MW of capacity (enough to power 7,800 homes per year) to Centrica’s renewable energy portfolio; and the team’s completion last year of a long-term Sale and Purchase Agreement worth $8bn with Delfin Midstream Inc. for enough LNG to heat 5% of UK homes for 15 years, building further resilience in the UK’s energy security.    

In Ireland, our Bord Gais legal team has been providing full service legal support – encompassing supply chain, construction, regulated capacity contracts, and operation and maintenance arrangements – for the construction of two 100MW hydrogen-ready gas peaking power plants. These are critical to Ireland’s security of supply in a constrained power market and will help Irish energy consumers at a time when the transition to renewable technology presents a challenge. 

Our regulatory affairs team has been persistently advocating for change to aspects of the UK’s energy transition regulatory system, collaborating with external stakeholders and investors with an interest in the development of future policy to influence and drive change. In response to the energy crisis, the team advocated for the introduction of a new financial resilience framework for the UK retail energy market which is now due to be introduced in 2025 and, more recently, their activity contributed to a regulatory framework change which will enable an acceleration of the deployment of renewable and low carbon infrastructure and flexible assets.  

Can you sum up the team culture/ethos in one sentence? Giving some information afterwards about how this is developed. 

Our LRECS culture is centred around collaboration, creativity and inclusivity.  

We call this our ‘Golden Thread’ and we have identified relationship building, growth mindset and commerciality as the key behavioural capabilities underpinning this. Building strong relationships with our business stakeholders has enabled us to develop a deep understanding of the needs of Centrica, its customers and the markets in which it operates. Our teams are challenged to deliver commercial solutions at pace in an energy transition environment which is complex and continually developing. Thinking creatively about how we can do things differently in the future positions us to deliver more effectively on Centrica’s growth ambitions. To help drive this, we have an Innovation Working Group formed by our ‘Innovation Ambassadors’ who bring together expertise from across LRECS to stimulate creativity and innovation. This includes championing the use of new technology and generative AI to improve efficiency and delivery across our teams. 

We also have cross-team committees focused on professional development, wellbeing, net zero and DE&I. The latter drives our initiatives focused on inclusivity. We have several ongoing social mobility initiatives, including partnering with Flex Legal to hire our next legal apprentice; Aspiring Solicitors to provide legal career support via mentoring; and the Access Project, all organisations which support young people from under-represented backgrounds.