UK’s Net Zero Grid Plans: Ambitious or Harmful?

The UK Government has been very clear in its ambition – they want to shift to a net-zero electricity system by 2030. It’s important to note this target applies only to electricity, not total energy (like heating or transport). Still, it’s ambitious. On various days in January, over 60% of UK electricity was gas-powered. On one memorable day – 22nd January, less than 1% came from wind or solar.

You can read how this is to be achieved in the National Energy System Operator’s (NESO) clean pathways plan: https://www.neso.energy/document/346651/download

To reach net zero by 2030, NESO’s well-meaning experts identify two requirements that have to happen within five years. First, the UK grid’s renewable generating capacity must increase by roughly 81 GW. This means growing onshore wind from 14 GW to 27 GW, offshore wind from 15 GW to 50 GW, and solar from 14 GW to 47 GW.

The second big assumption in the NESO plan is that demand flexibility grows to 12 GW. To put it another way, this is 12,000 MW of consumption that shifts away from peak times to off-peak times. The NESO report excitedly discusses smart technologies and instant consumer reaction to pricing signals. However, it begrudgingly admits this relies on consumers choosing, for instance, to turn off their tumble dryer in the evening. As a result, ‘some commentators think the levels of assumed demand reduction in our pathways are too ambitious”.

I hate to be the one to break this to NESO, but a lot of us in the renewable energy industry think that all of the assumptions underpinning all of the pathways in their plan are too ambitious.

Going back to the generation part of the plan, NESO is assuming 81 GW of new renewable generation by the end of 2030. This equates to roughly 16,200 MW per year, or a more meaningful 44 MW installed per day. This rate is required every day for the next five years, seven days a week, including Christmas and bank holidays. Last year, the rate of installation of renewable energy in the UK was about 2.8 GW or 7.67 MW per day. Historically, it has taken us 20 years to grow from 5 GW to 48 GW, averaging about 5.89 MW per day. NESO’s plan assumes the daily installation rate will somehow grow by a factor of six to 44 MW per day, almost overnight. This growth is attributed mainly to relaxed planning laws and improved grid queuing. They believe this reduction in a pesky bureaucracy is all that’s needed for the UK to suddenly become an enormous building site of wind and solar farms. This seems unlikely at best. Moreover, every day we fall short of that target, the required daily rate for the remaining period until 2030 increases beyond 44 MW.

But why does it matter? Like my weight loss, you may reasonably argue that arbitrary time-based targets for renewable capacity installation aren’t really necessary as long as things are going in the right direction, and even 7 MW of new installs a day adds up in the long run. However, I don’t think we can be that relaxed. Those of us who believe in the energy revolution face two regular challenges when we tell strangers our profession at the pub: ‘global warming isn’t happening’ (yes, it is) and ‘the Chinese are building coal-fired power stations, so what’s the point?’ (they are also world leaders, installing renewables at an astonishing 758 MW per day in 2024). Now, NESO is opening the door to a new challenge: ‘Well, of course, it can’t be done in the West anyway.”

We need to keep doing the right things, but also treat the British public like grown-ups. Promising unachievable outcomes does our industry no favours; it actively undermines what we are trying to achieve. Yes, set ambitious targets, recognising the realities of building infrastructure in the UK. Aim for maybe 10 – 15 MW of installed capacity per day, compared to the 7.67 we achieved in 2023, but seriously, don’t make it 44. Even 20 MW installed every day for the next five years is a delusional fantasy. This rate has never been achieved in any of the last 20 years of trying, despite the Government spending billions on Contracts for Difference, ROCS and FiTs.

Nothing truly bad would have happened if the UK hadn’t set an 81 GW new capacity target by 2030.  Globally, the UK contributes less than 1% of all CO2 emissions. So, a small rainy island off the coast of Europe setting a less ambitious renewable energy target would hardly have moved the global political dial.

But a government setting a very public, high-profile ambitious target, then falling short, matters much more. The UK risks becoming a global case study of green policy failure. It could show politicians in ivory towers having big lofty ideas that don’t survive contact with reality. As the Soviet scientist Valery Legasov said at the Chernobyl trial: ‘Every lie we tell incurs a debt to the truth. Sooner or later this debt is paid.’ This is the proverbial thread in the jumper. If we pull it by misleading the public about the idea of 44 MW versus the reality of 7 MW per day, where does the thread stop unravelling? If we knowingly overstate how much capacity can be installed that quickly, then maybe we are overstating the scale of the climate change problem. We in the industry live and breathe this stuff everyday, but your average voter on the street doesn’t. It comes up occasionally, and they probably don’t engage in the details. If we get to 2030 and, as seems likely, fall far short of a net-zero grid in the UK, global critics may use this as ammunition. They could claim the entire revolution is an unachievable fantasy, a publicly funded chimera. As we’ve seen with Trump, the political wind can turn against renewables very quickly. Once public trust is lost, it’s rarely regained. It’s too late now to put the 81 GW by 2030 genie back in the NESO bottle, but it would be helpful if we were more honest about how truly hard this will be.