When I took the role as Chair of Great British Energy, in July 2024 I knew that I would be doing so at a time when comfort of policy consensus in energy was starting to fracture. It has now become a major fault line, and at the front line of a misinformation battle. It is therefore incumbent, indeed a necessary precondition of leadership, to take the case for renewable energy to the public – and, setting the record straight about the challenges and
opportunities.
Great British Energy has been set up to help provide renewable publicly owned power to as
many people as possible by 2030. The public is right to want cheaper bills, British jobs and energy independence. Getting to this will require an all system, and an all-energy approach.
Renewable power and cheaper bills are not mutually exclusive. And I want to explain this – and why it is important that the energy industry and civil society push back on forces that would seek the easy ‘maybe later’ options. We’ve got far too good at delaying critically needed infrastructure decisions for many decades, and this is not a time to make the same
mistake.
Transforming our energy system is, bluntly, a major overhaul. It was built decades ago for a different world — a world powered by coal, with a handful of large power stations dominating Britain. This system needed overhauling anyway, so whilst we are at it, we might as well design it for the future. To support multiple, distributed sources of clean generation — from offshore wind to rooftop solar — all feeding into a grid that is being transformed. Sadly, we aren’t quite there yet, which has led to inefficiencies like curtailment costs – £1 billion a year — because clean electricity can’t get to where it’s needed.
Critics are right to say this is expensive.
Meanwhile, others are powering ahead. China connected over 230 GW of new solar capacity in 2023 alone — more than the entire installed capacity of the United States — and is building 50,000 km of ultra-high-voltage transmission lines to move that clean power across the country. That’s the scale of ambition we’re competing with.
But what they don’t say is that this is precisely why we need a national effort to rewire Britain’s grid faster — to fix this problem once and for all and to enable the true advantage of the opportunity created by this new, smarter, and more decentralised energy system.
In this future system, every household, factory, and cluster of industrial sites can act as a small power station — generating, storing, and sharing clean energy locally. With solar, batteries, and automated energy control, homes could see bills fall by as much as 90%, and energy use drop by up to 40%. Across the economy, the electrification of everything is already saving around £2 billion a year and could reach an astonishing £33 billion annually by 2050. The truth is that a renewable, electrified energy system is significantly more efficient, and none of this is possible under a centralised fossil-fuel model. Every delay in the energy transition pushes those savings further into the future.
Some argue that gas remains cheaper. It’s true that prices have fallen from the crisis peak — but they’re still 75% higher than before the war in Ukraine. At the height of that crisis, the UK spent £100 billion subsidising household bills as prices spiked 400%. Imagine if we would have invested this in our energy system instead, then we wouldn’t even be having this
debate.
Even today, solar and onshore wind deliver cheaper wholesale power than gas. Offshore wind costs have risen from below £40/MWh to around £100/MWh due to global supply chain shocks — yet they remain highly competitive. And what we don’t hear is that even if we were to build more gas fired power stations, their costs would have gone up significantly also – three times in fact according to SSE, the company that built the last UK gas fire powered
station.
Slowing down the energy transition doesn’t just raise costs and volatility — it undermines jobs too. Britain’s green economy already supports 273,000 jobs, with 400,000 more expected in the next five years.
That’s why Great British Energy will strengthen domestic supply chains too. The UK has the
potential to be a clean energy superpower, but we must act now to secure our share of a global market that’s expected to grow from $1.5 trillion in 2024 to nearly $4.9 trillion by 2033. The Clean Power 2030 target — delivering 43 GW of offshore wind by 2030, equivalent to a turbine a day — is central to that effort. It will require 60,000 additional roles, 65% of which are at NVQ5+ skill levels already present in our workforce. This is a national reindustrialisation opportunity as well as a cheap and clean power opportunity.
Rewiring Britain is about more than cables and pylons. It is about building a fairer, more
resilient economy — one powered by British innovation, skills, and clean energy. It means
freeing ourselves from the price shocks of imported gas, lowering bills permanently, and creating new industrial strength across every region of the country.
Britain has done this before. We led the world into the industrial age with coal and steel. We can lead it again — this time with clean power and engineering excellence. The task ahead is immense, but so is the opportunity. The time for “maybe later” has passed. The future will be built by those who build now
This Oped written by myself, first appeared in The Observer on 29th October 2025.