Reactive Statement: Tony Blair Institute report on UK electricity strategy
Net Zero Watch welcomes the Tony Blair Institute’s recognition that Britain’s electricity system is failing to deliver affordability, reliability or competitiveness. Their new report is a serious contribution to the debate and, crucially, a body blow to Ed Miliband’s claim that Clean Power 2030 will mean cheaper energy. The report confirms what households and businesses already know: costs are spiralling, bills remain punishingly high, and the economic risks are severe.
Where it falls short is in its prescription. It treats electrification as the route to abundance rather than the outcome of it, focusing on technical market tweaks and “flexibility” while ignoring the physical foundations of any affordable system - density and reliability.
The first and second laws of thermodynamics are not policy choices. Replacing dense, controllable sources like gas, coal and nuclear with diffuse, intermittent ones such as wind and solar increases entropy across the system — more infrastructure, more storage, more loss. The result of the renewables-based grid the TBI assumes is a structurally higher-cost, lower-efficiency system. Since 2005, when Britain’s generation peaked, firm power has fallen from 95 per cent to less than half. In two decades, we have de-densified our grid and made the supply of electricity more volatile.
The consequences are clear: soaring policy and systems costs (which total £17 billion today), collapsing industrial competitiveness, and stagnant productivity. No amount of flexibility or subsidy can offset low energy density. Neither cheaper finance nor higher gas prices will alter that physical reality.
The goal of energy policy should be to maximise the productive surplus of usable energy — to make power abundant, stable and cheap. That means anchoring the grid in dense, reliable generation — nuclear, hydro and efficient thermal. Renewables can act as supplements, but not substitutes.
The challenge facing Britain today is not speed or scale, but direction. If we are serious about growth, resilience and abundance, we must start from the physics. Anything else is wishful accounting.
The government’s Clean Power 2030 plan will add new subsidy and system costs to the burden borne by consumers and businesses. This will explode to £32 billion (assuming delivery by 2030). The TBI’s calls for a delay will reduce this burden, but will not reduce bills. It is merely boiling the frog.
As such, the Conservatives and Reform are right to demand the government cancels Clean Power 2030, including immediately halting the AR7 and AR8 auctions.
ENDS
To read the Tony Blair Institute’s report in full - please click here