Energy reform misses the point. We must put people over pylons
11 March 2025, 14:03
We’ve taken the scale of change needed to reform our creaking energy system for granted for far too long.
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Today’s announcement that communities will have lower bills in exchange for hosting energy infrastructure in their local area and that the cost of this will be borne by energy consumers across the country highlights a stark reality: that we’ve taken the scale of change needed to reform our creaking energy system for granted for far too long.
Are new pylons needed? Yes, but not just for renewable energy, but to support the doubling of electricity demand we’ll see in the coming decades. Should communities hosting energy infrastructure be at the heart of this changing landscape? Absolutely, and the moves by the Government are a positive step in this direction.
Will new infrastructure help lower bills in the long-term? For sure, but we are missing the point on what can be done now: paying consumers to use abundant renewable energy and avoiding use when the system is overburdened.
Homes and businesses are already paying for our lack of investment in a future-proof energy system – the price tag for resolving traffic jams on pylon wires has skyrocketed from £170m in 2010 to over £1.4bn in 22/23, and could reach £3bn per year by the end of the decade, almost 20 times what it cost 20 years earlier. In the first two months of 2025 alone, consumers paid £250m to turn off renewable energy simply because we couldn’t transport it from where it was generated to where it was needed.
Reducing bills must be done through markets, not just copper and steel and insulators. With a poll last week showing that 87% of respondents agreed it is good to give customers more control over their place in the energy market and 84% willing to use energy flexibly if it meant lower bills, it begs the question: why aren’t we moving as swiftly on energy market reform as we are on planning reform?
We should be ripping up rules written to benefit fossil fuel generators and speed up the ways consumers can be rewarded for their part in the energy transition, rather than continuing to pay renewables to switch off and gas giants to switch on.
It’s far past time we looked to a future where reforming the energy system isn’t about building for building’s sake but is built around consumers, with their potential at its heart.
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Sarah Honan is Head of Policy at the Association for Decentralised Energy.
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