Britain was not forced to choose an energy system this exposed to international shocks. We could have renewed the grid, rebuilt strategic gas storage, maintained domestic production and developed firm replacement generation before reducing our existing energy base. Instead, successive governments made Net Zero targets the organising principle of energy policy. We are now beginning to see the real cost.
Bloomberg Economics is warning that the typical household energy bill could rise by around 25 per cent in January, adding approximately £427 and taking the annual figure to around £2,150 if current wholesale conditions persist. The forecast follows another increase in October and comes as international gas and electricity markets are being driven higher by the conflict in Iran. Bloomberg’s analysis suggests the resulting energy shock could also push UK inflation back above 4 per cent.
Nobody can credibly blame Net Zero policy for a war in the Middle East. But that misses the real issue. Governments cannot control wars, shipping disruption or international commodity markets; what they can control is how vulnerable Britain is when those shocks occur. After nearly two decades of energy policy dominated by legally imposed carbon targets, Britain remains dependent on gas, increasingly dependent on imports, short of strategic storage, burdened by some of the developed world’s highest industrial electricity prices and committed to an electricity-system reconstruction costing tens of billions of pounds every year.
That is not energy security. It is the consequence of putting the destination before the engineering.
The road Britain did not take
Imagine if energy policy after the Climate Change Act had begun with a different question. Instead of asking how quickly Britain could meet a politically determined emissions trajectory, government could have asked: what infrastructure does Britain need to guarantee affordable, secure energy for the next fifty years?
The ageing electricity network could have been systematically renewed and reinforced before attempting mass electrification of heating, transport and industry. New nuclear stations could have been commissioned earlier and sequentially, rather than allowing much of Britain’s existing nuclear fleet to approach retirement before replacements were ready. Domestic gas production could have been managed down gradually as demand actually fell, rather than restricting supply while the country remained heavily reliant on the fuel. Most importantly in the context of today’s crisis, Britain could have treated gas storage as strategic national infrastructure.
The Government’s own figures show Great Britain has just 3.2 billion cubic metres of gas-storage capacity, equivalent to only around 13 days of average winter demand. The Government acknowledges that geological storage provides valuable resilience during colder periods and supply disruption.
Yet Rough, our only large-scale seasonal storage facility, is now in an extraordinary position. Centrica says it provides around half Britain’s total storage capacity but is presently practically empty because the market does not make filling it commercially viable. The company says a regulatory framework could unlock around £2 billion of investment to preserve and redevelop the facility.
Consider the scale of that number. Britain is pursuing a Clean Power 2030 programme requiring approximately £40 billion of investment every year between 2025 and 2030, including roughly £30 billion annually in generation and around £10 billion in transmission infrastructure under the Government’s technical assessment.
Yet an asset central to Britain’s ability to store the gas we still require has been allowed to reach the point where its future is uncertain over an investment measured in low single-digit billions.
That is not principally a shortage of money. It is a question of priorities.
We rebuilt the system around a target rather than resilience
The Government itself now admits that Britain’s network suffers from decades of underinvestment. Yet instead of first completing a strategic programme to renew the core system and increase resilience, Britain is now trying simultaneously to repair old infrastructure, connect vast quantities of intermittent generation, electrify new demand and construct a transmission system designed around Clean Power 2030.
The scale is enormous. Government says achieving its 2030 objective requires four times as much new transmission infrastructure by 2030 as Britain built during the previous decade. Clean Power 2030 itself still anticipates retaining around 35GW of unabated gas generation reserve capacity to maintain security of supply.
That should stop us in our tracks.
After billions spent subsidising renewable generation and tens of billions more being mobilised for generation and networks, the official plan still requires an enormous fleet of gas-fired power stations for security. Those power stations require fuel. Homes still require gas. Industry still requires gas. The Government’s own regulator expects Britain to remain dependent on imported hydrocarbons for decades.
So why did policy allow domestic supply and strategic storage to weaken before the replacement system was ready?
That is the central failure.
We could have been in a very different position
There is no credible argument that Britain could have insulated itself completely from today’s international price shock. Oil and gas are internationally traded commodities, and even a far more self-sufficient Britain would have felt the effects.
But we could have entered this crisis from a fundamentally stronger position.
We could have had substantially greater seasonal gas storage, bought and stored when markets were favourable. We could have maintained more domestic North Sea production while Britain still required gas. We could have progressed nuclear replacement faster. We could have directed network investment first towards resilience, capacity, ageing assets and genuine demand requirements rather than forcing the grid to chase politically imposed deployment dates.
The North Sea industry now says fiscal and regulatory reform could unlock 111 projects and around £50 billion of investment. That is an industry estimate and should be treated as such, but it nevertheless exposes the scale of the opportunity Britain is debating while simultaneously worrying about growing import dependence.
At the same time, British industry is already paying an extraordinary price for electricity. The Government’s own 2026 industrial competitiveness consultation states that UK industrial electricity prices in 2024 were the highest of every country included in its IEA comparison, and more than twice the EU-14 plus UK median for large and very large industrial consumers.
This is the real cost of the experiment. It appears not only in a household direct debit, but in factories that become uncompetitive, investments that go elsewhere, goods that cost more to manufacture and jobs that disappear with them.
Net Zero put the transition in the wrong order
Britain did need an energy transition. Our nuclear fleet was ageing. The North Sea is a mature basin. The electricity grid required major investment. New technologies offered genuine opportunities.
But the rational sequence should have been obvious: build the replacement before deliberately weakening what it replaces.
Secure the gas supply while gas is still required. Build sufficient storage. Renew the grid. Construct nuclear and other dependable capacity. Then allow gas use and production to decline together as reliable alternatives physically come online.
Instead, Britain attempted to accelerate the decline of the existing system while much of the replacement remained on planning documents, connection queues and political targets.
That is why the coming winter matters.
If Bloomberg Economics is correct and the January price cap approaches £2,150, ministers will once again tell households that Britain has been hit by events overseas. They will be right about the immediate cause.
But they should then answer a more uncomfortable question.
After nearly twenty years of pursuing Net Zero, why is one of the world’s major energy-producing nations still this exposed to an international gas shock?
Britain had another path available. We could have rebuilt our ageing electricity infrastructure, expanded strategic storage, retained domestic gas while it was still needed, accelerated firm nuclear replacement and then moved towards a lower-carbon system from a position of strength.
Instead, we chose targets first and resilience second.
The tragedy is not simply that energy is becoming expensive.
It is that we have spent extraordinary sums transforming the energy system and still ended up with expensive energy, insufficient storage, import exposure and an electricity grid requiring unprecedented further investment.
That is the real cost of pursuing Net Zero as an ideology rather than designing an energy system around Britain’s physical needs.
Shane Oxer. Campaigner for fairer and affordable energy
SAY NO TO THE DESTRUCTION OF OUR LAND 
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