A MONTAGE OF FAILED IDEOLOGY

Britain was promised cheaper energy, secure power and a green industrial revolution. Instead we are paying through higher bills, higher food prices, lost industry and an electricity system requiring hundreds of billions more simply to make it work.

For nearly two decades, successive British governments have followed essentially the same direction of travel. Prime Ministers changed, ministers changed and political slogans changed, but the underlying programme continued: legally binding carbon budgets, accelerated electrification, renewable deployment, carbon pricing, the retirement of conventional generating capacity and an enormous reconstruction of Britain’s electricity network.

The public was told this transformation would bring cheaper electricity, greater energy independence, hundreds of thousands of new green jobs and an industrial renaissance. We were assured that technological progress would make the transition increasingly inexpensive and that Britain would emerge as a world leader in the industries of the future.

It is time to stop judging those promises by the number of wind turbines installed, solar farms consented or government strategies published.

The proper measure is what has happened to the country beneath the targets: what families are paying for energy and food, whether British factories can compete, how much industrial capacity has disappeared and whether the electricity infrastructure required by the policy is actually being delivered on time.

The picture is becoming increasingly difficult to defend.

The political era that carried climate-target policy from international advocacy through successive British governments and into today’s Clean Power 2030 programme.

THE GREEN INDUSTRIAL REVOLUTION THAT NEVER ARRIVED

This week another famous British manufacturing site fell silent. Production at Kellogg’s Trafford Park factory ended after 88 years, with 360 jobs disappearing as production was consolidated elsewhere in Britain.

Nobody needs to pretend that Net Zero personally closed Kellogg’s to understand the significance of what has happened.

The significance is that yet another historic manufacturing site has gone at precisely the time politicians continue to tell us Britain is experiencing an industrial renaissance.

Kraft Heinz provides another warning. In 2021 it announced a £140 million investment in its Wigan operation that would have returned additional sauce production to Britain. Ministers celebrated the proposal as a major vote of confidence in UK manufacturing. The investment did not happen.

The additional production capacity was subsequently directed to Spain and Poland instead.Again, every corporate investment decision has its own commercial circumstances. The serious argument is not that one government minister personally instructed Heinz to move an investment overseas. It is that businesses make these decisions within a national economic environment, and Britain’s energy environment has become extraordinarily difficult for manufacturers.

The Government itself now accepts that problem.

Its own industrial competitiveness material acknowledges that UK industrial electricity prices in 2024 were the highest among countries reporting comparable figures to the International Energy Agency. For large and very large industrial consumers, electricity prices were more than twice the EU-14 plus UK median.That is not a statistic invented by opponents of Net Zero. It is the British Government describing Britain’s industrial electricity disadvantage.

WHEN ENERGY BECOMES EXPENSIVE, INDUSTRY EVENTUALLY LEAVES

Energy is not a minor overhead for an industrial economy. It is one of its foundations. Steel, chemicals, fertiliser, glass, ceramics, cement, paper, food processing, engineering, plastics and countless other industries depend upon large quantities of affordable and reliable electricity or gas.

A country that consistently makes those inputs more expensive than its competitors should not be surprised when investment is redirected, production contracts and imports take the place of domestic manufacture.

The Office for National Statistics has already measured the scale of what has happened.

Between the first quarter of 2021 and the final quarter of 2024, real output from Britain’s principal energy-intensive manufacturing sectors fell by 33.6 per cent.

Paper and paper products fell 28.9 per cent.

Petrochemicals fell 30.2 per cent.

Glass, ceramics, cement and related industries fell 30.6 per cent.

Basic metals and castings fell an extraordinary 46.5 per cent.

By the end of 2024, the combined output of these industries had fallen to its lowest level since the ONS series began in 1990.

That is not a forecast of possible deindustrialisation in some distant future. It is a contraction that has already taken place.

No serious analysis should claim energy policy caused every percentage point. The pandemic, Russia’s invasion of Ukraine, international gas prices, interest rates, labour costs, taxation and weak economic growth all played roles.

But it is equally unserious to pretend that energy prices are incidental when the industries contracting most severely are precisely those that consume large quantities of energy.

Britain was supposed to be rebuilding its productive economy. Instead, some of its most important industrial sectors have been hollowed out.

FROM FERTILISER TO STEEL: WE STILL NEED THE PRODUCTS, WE JUST IMPORT THEM

The closure of domestic production does not mean Britain stops needing what those factories made. It often means we buy the same essential products from somebody else.

CF Industries permanently ended ammonia production at Billingham after citing high UK natural-gas prices relative to other regions and carbon costs. That matters because ammonia is fundamental to fertiliser production, fertiliser is fundamental to agriculture and agriculture is fundamental to national food security.

Britain did not stop needing ammonia. We became more dependent on imported ammonia.

At Port Talbot, traditional blast-furnace steelmaking ended. Britain did not stop needing steel. During the transition to the replacement electric-arc furnace, imported slab and hot-rolled coil have been used to support downstream production.

At Grangemouth, Scotland’s only oil refinery ceased refining crude and the site became an import terminal.

Britain did not stop requiring petrol, diesel, aviation fuel and other petroleum products.

We became more reliant on imported finished fuels.

This is the point that should worry anyone concerned about national resilience.

If domestic production becomes uneconomic, demand does not disappear.

The jobs disappear. The investment disappears. The tax revenues disappear. The industrial skills begin to disappear. But the physical requirement remains, so imports rise.Calling that decarbonisation does not make Britain more sovereign.

THE ENERGY CRISIS DID NOT END WHEN THE INFLATION RATE FELL

Politicians like to quote the annual inflation rate because it sounds reassuring when the number comes down. Families live in the real economy, where previous price increases remain embedded in what they pay every week.

At the end of the first quarter of 2026, domestic energy debt and arrears stood at approximately £4.79 billion, around 15 per cent higher than a year earlier. Nearly five billion pounds owed to energy suppliers is not the mark of an affordable energy system. It is evidence that a large number of households have been unable to absorb the enormous increase in the cost of basic energy.

The official price indices illustrate what has happened more clearly than any political slogan.

By July 2026, the ONS electricity-price index stood around 59 per cent above its January 2021 level. The corresponding gas index was approximately 105 per cent higher.That means the household gas-price index had more than doubled from its early-2021 level.

Inflation slowing does not reverse those increases.

A bill that rose dramatically during the crisis does not return to its previous level because the annual inflation rate subsequently falls. The new, higher price becomes the starting point from which future increases are measured.That is why millions of people do not recognise the claim that the cost-of-living crisis is over.

EXPENSIVE ENERGY DOES NOT STOP AT THE METER — IT REACHES THE SUPERMARKET

The connection between energy and food inflation is fundamental.Farmers require fuel, machinery and fertiliser. Dairies require refrigeration. Bakeries require heat. Meat-processing plants need refrigeration and continuous electricity. Frozen food has to remain frozen throughout the supply chain. Packaging requires paper, steel, aluminium, plastics and glass. Warehouses consume electricity. Supermarkets operate enormous refrigeration systems. Lorries move ingredients and finished products around the country.Every one of those activities contains an energy cost.

The Food and Drink Federation reported in September 2026 that the cost of food has risen by almost 40 per cent since 2020. Its comparison could hardly be clearer: a grocery shop costing £100 in January 2020 costs approximately £138.60 today.

The Federation is also warning of renewed food-price pressure, forecasting that the same basket could approach £147.50 by next summer if its latest inflation projection proves correct.

This is where the consequences of expensive energy move directly from the power station to the kitchen table. When electricity, gas, transport, fertiliser, packaging and regulation become more expensive, manufacturers have only a limited number of choices. They can absorb the increase and sacrifice margins and investment, reduce employment and production, or pass part of the cost to the customer.

Usually some combination of all three occurs.

So households are not simply paying for high energy costs through their own gas and electricity bills. They pay again through food, transport, manufactured goods and services.

THE GRID PROBLEM IS NOW NATIONAL — AND THE BILL IS ENORMOUS

The next stage of the story is perhaps even more serious because Britain is now being asked to spend vast sums correcting a fundamental sequencing problem.

Renewable generation has been accelerated faster than the transmission infrastructure required to move all of its electricity.

Today’s Telegraph investigation brings the scale of that problem into sharp focus. Its analysis reports that the wider electricity-grid transformation could involve more than £200 billion of investment between 2026 and 2040 across transmission, distribution and interconnection, including around £68 billion associated with transmission infrastructure.

Those figures matter because grid investment is not free simply because much of it is undertaken by private network companies. The infrastructure earns regulated returns.

Ultimately the costs enter the electricity system and are recovered from customers.

The same investigation reports that, of roughly 90 projects regarded as important to the clean-power programme, 64 have delivery dates beyond 2030. Some infrastructure identified as being required around 2029 is associated with delivery dates stretching into 2035 and 2036.

That is not a small programme slipping by a few months. It raises a fundamental question about whether the political timetable and the engineering timetable have become detached from one another.

The Government itself has previously acknowledged that Britain needs to deliver approximately four times as much new transmission network by 2030 as was built during the previous decade.

That requirement alone should demonstrate the scale of what politicians have committed the country to.

Major transmission infrastructure requires planning permission, land agreements, specialist steel, transformers, switchgear, converter stations, cables, construction teams, substations and years of engineering.

Governments can legislate a target date.They cannot legislate a transformer into existence.Physics does not obey political deadlines.

SCOTLAND IS THE WARNING OF WHAT HAPPENS WHEN GENERATION OUTRUNS TRANSMISSION

Scotland demonstrates the problem more clearly than almost anywhere else in Britain.

It has enormous wind resources and has developed very large quantities of renewable generation. But producing electricity is only half of an electricity system. The power must also be transported to the places where it is needed.

The House of Commons Scottish Affairs Committee reported that approximately 96 per cent of Britain’s curtailed renewable electricity in 2025 occurred in Scotland. The underlying problem is straightforward: at times Scotland can generate more renewable electricity than the existing transmission network can economically move south.

When that happens, some wind generation has to be turned down. Constraint payments may be made. Other generation elsewhere may then have to be increased to maintain the balance of the system.

Consumers therefore face an extraordinary combination of costs. They help finance the generating assets, they pay for the network needed to connect them, they pay for the enormous reinforcements required to transport their output, they can pay for generation to be constrained when the network cannot carry it, and they may pay for replacement generation somewhere else.

This is happening while another vast transmission programme is being constructed to alleviate precisely these bottlenecks.

The Scottish Affairs Committee also heard evidence that roughly another 10GW of transfer capability is required across the Scotland-England boundary.

Today’s Telegraph analysis highlights another major concern: cost escalation. It reports substantial projected increases across several Scottish transmission schemes, including very large increases on individual reinforcement projects, while the combined cost of Eastern Green Link 1 and 2 is now reported at around £6.8 billion compared with earlier figures around £3.4 billion.These figures should change the way politicians discuss the supposed cheapness of individual renewable technologies.

A wind turbine is not an electricity system.

A solar panel is not an electricity system.

The true economic comparison must include the generation, transmission, distribution, substations, converter stations, balancing, constraint management, storage, reserve generation, interconnection and financing required to provide dependable electricity to consumers when they need it.

Until those costs are counted together, arguments based solely upon the construction price of renewable generation tell us very little about the true cost of the complete system.

WEATHER CANNOT BE LEGISLATED AWAY

There is another fundamental engineering issue that political targets cannot change.Wind turbines generate according to weather conditions. Solar panels generate according to sunlight. Neither can be instructed to produce its rated output simply because British consumers require more electricity.

That is why electricity security is determined during difficult periods rather than by annual averages.

On 8 January 2025, during very cold conditions, NESO issued an Electricity Margin Notice after identifying a shortfall of approximately 1,700MW against the operating margin it wanted. Wind forecasts had fallen by about 2GW and around 3GW of Continental European interconnector capacity was unavailable.

The lights remained on, but not because the problem did not exist. They remained on because the system operator successfully managed it using the tools available to it.

In June 2026, NESO again issued an Electricity Margin Notice when unusually high temperatures coincided with lower-than-expected wind generation and reduced gas-generation availability.

Once again the system remained secure, but once again the episode showed the importance of firm generation, reserve capacity, interconnection, demand flexibility and active system management.

Nobody needs to claim that Britain is certain to experience blackouts this winter to recognise the risk.

The more serious question is whether Britain is increasing its dependence upon electricity for heating, transport, industry and data centres faster than it is increasing the dependable capacity and network resilience required to support that dependence during adverse conditions.

That is a national security question, not an ideological one.

THE CONTRADICTION THEY CANNOT EXPLAIN AWAY

Perhaps the most revealing fact in the entire Clean Power programme is what Britain still needs after all the investment.

After the wind farms, the solar farms, batteries, interconnectors, new transmission lines, converter stations and substations, Government planning still expects Britain to retain roughly 35GW of unabated gas generation capacity around 2030 to protect security of supply.

That should tell us something profound about the difference between installed capacity and dependable capacity.

Britain still requires electricity when there is little wind.

It requires electricity after sunset.

It requires electricity during winter anticyclonic weather.

It requires electricity when interconnectors are constrained.

It requires electricity when demand suddenly increases.And it requires generating capacity that can be called upon when the system operator needs it.

That is why gas remains central to security even as politicians describe it as something Britain is supposedly leaving behind.

The country is therefore being asked to finance an enormous weather-dependent generation fleet, finance the transmission network required to connect it, finance the balancing and constraint costs arising from its geography and variability, and simultaneously retain enough dispatchable plant to provide security when renewable output falls.

That is the economic contradiction at the heart of the strategy.

WE WERE PROMISED ONE THING. THE RESULTS TELL ANOTHER STORY.

Britain was promised cheaper energy. Household energy debt has climbed to approximately £4.79 billion, while household electricity and gas prices remain dramatically above their early-2021 levels.Britain was promised a green industrial revolution. Instead, output from its principal energy-intensive industries fell by one third between 2021 and 2024, with basic metals and castings down almost half.

Britain was promised greater international competitiveness. Instead, the Government’s own figures show industrial electricity prices at the top of the IEA comparison.

Britain was promised greater prosperity. Instead, the £100 grocery shop of January 2020 now costs almost £139 and the food industry is warning of further increases.

Britain was promised a modern, efficient electricity network. Instead, the country now faces a grid reconstruction potentially running into hundreds of billions of pounds, while critical projects required for the political timetable have delivery dates stretching well into the 2030s.

Britain was promised that renewable energy would make electricity cheap. Scotland is already demonstrating the enormous whole-system costs that arise when generation is built faster than the network capable of transporting its output.And Britain was promised energy security.

Yet the system remains dependent upon gas-fired generation, interconnectors, reserves and demand-management measures when weather and plant availability tighten electricity margins.

None of these facts proves that every industrial closure, every increase in food prices or every energy bill has a single cause called Net Zero.

That would be too simplistic.

But taken together they expose something much more important.

Britain has constructed an energy policy in which meeting a predetermined political target has repeatedly taken precedence over asking what energy system the country actually needs for affordability, industrial competitiveness and security.

THIS IS WHY THE MONTAGE MATTERS

The people in this montage did not all make the same decisions. They did not all hold office at the same time and they cannot individually be blamed for every consequence described here.

The montage represents something larger: continuity.

Successive governments accepted the same basic framework. Carbon targets were strengthened. Institutions were created to deliver them. Renewable deployment accelerated. Electrification expanded. Conventional capacity was progressively displaced.

The grid was then required to catch up with a transformation already under way.

The mistake was the order in which the questions were asked.Britain should first have asked:

what does the country physically require to keep homes warm, factories operating, food affordable and electricity available during the most difficult winter conditions?

It should then have designed the lowest-cost secure system capable of meeting those requirements.

Instead, too often the target came first and the engineering, infrastructure and cost followed afterwards.

We are now discovering the price of that decision.

Historic factories are closing. Investment has moved elsewhere. Energy-intensive industry has contracted severely. Household energy debt is approaching £5 billion. Food prices are almost 40 per cent above 2020 levels. Industrial electricity remains internationally uncompetitive.

The transmission programme is struggling to match the political timetable.

Scotland is curtailing large quantities of renewable generation because sufficient grid capacity does not yet exist. And Britain still requires tens of gigawatts of gas generation to maintain security when weather-dependent generation cannot deliver.

This is not the green industrial revolution Britain was promised.

It is the consequence of allowing ideology to outrun engineering and economics.

THIS DID NOT HAPPEN BY ACCIDENT.

It is the accumulated result of decisions made across successive governments over nearly two decades.The politicians changed. The governments changed. The slogans changed.The policy continued.And now Britain is paying the price.

Shane Oxer. Campaigner for fairer and affordable energy