It’s more than two and a half years since I wrote Chickens Are Coming Home to Roost, but many of the issues I touched upon then are becoming ever more problematic now. The Guardian, as is its wont, skirts around the problems with an article headed: “Mapped: the £150bn megaproject that aims to protect Britain from energy shocks”. Perhaps more revealing is the sub-heading: “Thousands of miles of new power lines are needed to deliver climate targets and energy security, but bills will rise in the short term and opponents are mobilising”.

It is worth dissecting the article bit by bit. In many ways it is well-researched and very informative. In others, it is a classic example of the Guardian refusing to acknowledge reality. The opening paragraph is stark:

Britain is embarking on one of the largest overhauls of its electricity grid in generations – a megaproject in which five times more infrastructure will be built by 2030 than was constructed during the previous three decades.

Please pause to let that sink in. Five times more electricity grid infrastructure is to be constructed in the space of four or five years than was constructed during the previous thirty. Why? Because new pylons, subsea cables and converter stations are needed to move electricity from the far-flung locations where wind and solar farms have been, are being, and will be constructed, remote from the demand centres for the electricity they (intermittently) generate. The Guardian tries to claim that this is about energy security, and trots out the hoary old chestnut that the price of electricity in the UK (which it acknowledges has “surged” – its word – in recent years) only because gas-fired generation sets the price for most of the time. Yet it immediately undermines that claim, which it justifies by an embedded link to another Guardian article from around six months ago. This shows a graph to the effect that gas set the price of electricity in the UK for 97% of the time in 2021. But the article also says that gas set the price of energy (I imagine they mean electricity) only 85% of the time in 2024. In other words, the price of electricity has surged during the three years between 2021 and 2024 at the very time when it saw it set the price of electricity decline by 12%. Going yet further, the earlier Guardian article ends with a claim that “Renewables have already cut the amount of time gas sets the wholesale price of electricity in Britain by about a third since the early 2020s…”. If true, that would seem to undermine still further the claim that it is gas prices that are driving high electricity prices. Of course it could be argued that the price of gas has increased during this time, and that this explains the apparent discrepancy in the numbers and the Guardian’s claims around them. Or it could be that blaming high electricity prices on gas is simply a convenient – but untrue – excuse.

For instance, a very recent article in the Independent (“Mapped: How UK energy bills compare to the rest of Europe – UK customers paid more than France, Sweden and Netherlands for their electricity in 2025”) tells us:

Gas prices in the UK were 34 per cent below the EU average and electricity prices 18 per cent above the EU average in the second half of 2025.

That might suggest that the explanation lies not in the price of gas, but elsewhere. As the Independent notes:

In a new report, the National Audit Office (NAO) highlighted that a typical household paid £44 towards grid construction and maintenance in 2025/2026. This expenditure is projected to increase to £104 per household by March 2031.

But that’s not the half of it. As David Turver points out:

Official forecasts shows that subsidies and grid integration costs are set to rise by over £20bn by 2030/31 from the 2024/25 baseline, further increasing electricity costs. This increase in costs amounts to the equivalent of £700 per household. The claims from Octopus and E.On that bills are going up regardless of what happens to gas prices can be seen to be true.

I am a regular visitor to the excellent iamkate website, which allows visitors to see, in close to real time, how electricity in the UK is being generated and how much it is costing. I have witnessed prices north of £300 per MWh and also slightly negative prices, and everything in-between, and the common factor was that gas was, in each case, being relied on to generate electricity, and presumably to set the price. Given those wide variations in price, something else must be going on. And that seems to be that the system has been developed to dictate how it will work (e.g. by giving renewables priority on the grid) whilst preserving a facade of open market pricing. Presumably then good old supply and demand is what drives high and low prices at different times. And it’s fair to say that prices tend to be low when renewables are generating loads of electricity and to be high when renewables let us down. And yes, the price at which gas generators are prepared to step in to prevent the lights going out might well be very high at times of acute shortages of supply. But that’s because priority is given to renewables, so that gas generators are forced to sit idle much of the time, even though maintenance costs and other overheads are fixed. If they are to make money they must make hay when the sun shines (or, in reality, to make profits when the sun doesn’t shine and when the wind doesn’t blow). But the problem here isn’t the price of gas per se – it’s down to the way the system was designed and down to the inherent unreliability of renewable energy. And also to all the other full-system costs associated with renewables that renewables enthusiasts ignore when claiming that they are cheaper than fossil fuels.

But back to the slippery and disingenuous Guardian article:

Yet that green drive is now being limited by Britain’s ageing grid, which, after decades of underinvestment, is often unable to transmit the new energy being generated.

This makes it seem (presumably deliberately so) that the current problem is due to underinvestment in the grid in the past. And it may be true that those charged with maintaining the grid have perhaps not being so diligent as they might have been, but I have yet to see a link to any source of information to justify that claim. More to the point, whatever underinvestment issues there might be, far and away the biggest (and most expensive) problem is that the existing grid was designed to move electricity from power stations to the nearby sources of demand. Nobody anticipated that in the future planners would be stupid enough to see electricity generated in numerous diverse locations many hundreds of miles away from the demand centres. And it is this (not years of underinvestment) which means that we must now construct “over 4,000 miles of new power lines by 2041, alongside significant improvements to cables already in place…”, as the Guardian puts it. More specifically, the Guardian graphic says we will need 4,200 miles of new lines, both onshore and offshore, and 2,200 miles of upgrades to increase existing line capacity. That doesn’t come cheap, and somebody has to pay for it. Back to the Guardian:

Britain’s National Energy System Operator (Neso) recently estimated that £64bn of investment will be needed for transmission projects by 2030 and a further £89bn beyond that – more than £150bn, which will be largely paid for by surcharges on household bills.

Allegedly, when these grid enhancements are in place, reducing (but certainly not eliminating) our reliance on gas, they will eventually have the effect of reducing consumer bills. “Eventually” is the word used by the Guardian, and it’s a far cry from the claims made by Mr Miliband before the general election a little over two years ago to the effect that on his watch, if Labour was elected, we would see our energy bills fall by £300 per annum.

This is laid bare in a graphic well into the Guardian article which shows that in 2025/6 a representative annual domestic electricity bill comprises £320 in wholesale prices; £209 in network costs; £187 in generation subsidies; and £230 in “miscellaneous” costs with a small (and unspecified) proportion comprising “new levies”. Five years on, the projection for 2030/1 shows wholesale prices falling to £269; generation subsidies falling to £169 (in your dreams); but network costs will be adding £341 to bills; with “miscellaneous” costs rising to £242; and the unspecified “new levies” being considerably larger.

Another graphic (“forecasts taken from Neso’s Future Energy Scenarios 2025 report. The scenario with a full decarbonisation is described as the ‘hollistic transition’ pathway, where net zero targets are met through a mix of electrification and hydrogen. The scenario with a limited decarbonisation is described as the ‘falling behind’ pathway, where some decarbonisation is undergone but not enough to meet net zero targets. Cost figures includes spending on energy-using assets including vehicles and heating systems”) shows energy costs as a proportion of GDP being consistently higher, due to net zero, amid investment to build out capacity than the alternative scenario with limited decarbonisation, all the way out to 2045. In other words, for the next 20 years we will face higher electricity costs due to net zero than if we hadn’t bothered with net zero. They really did mean “eventually” when they said we would benefit from lower prices eventually. But in reality we can’t even celebrate in 2045. Unless the cheaper prices we are putatively to enjoy from 2045 are cheaper by a greater amount than the more expensive prices we are to suffer for the next 20 years (and which we have been suffering for at least five years already), then we won’t be breaking even in terms of our electricity bills until somewhere around 2065-2070. Only beyond that date will someone, paying bills from 2020-2025 onwards, finally be better off – assuming everything goes according to plan, which it almost certainly won’t, if HS2 is anything to go by.