The Grid We Did Fix

Coal to nowt in fourteen years

Kate Morley’s National Grid dashboard lets you set the window and watch the numbers move.¹ The dataset starts in 2012, which happens to be peak coal, so the all-time column is the whole clean-up in one figure.

Wind is now the biggest single source of electricity in Great Britain. 34.8% across a full year, against gas on 27% and nuclear on 12%. Not on a good day. Twelve months.

Coal is zero. Not low. Zero, for a year. The last station shut on 30 September 2024, a hundred and forty two years after the world’s first one opened in London in January 1882, which means this country invented coal power and then spent the better part of a century and a half getting round to switching it off again.¹ Carbon intensity has halved against the fourteen-year average, 251 down to 124. Half, in fourteen years.

The demand that went missing

Look at the demand row again. 32.6 GW on the long average, 30.9 over the past year. It has been falling for twenty years, about 5 TWh a year since 2005.

Households dropped 33 TWh over that stretch while the country plugged in a million and a half electric cars and a quarter of a million heat pumps.² EU Ecodesign rules did much of that work; the lighting regulations alone saved 81 TWh across the EU in 2020.³ Efficiency didn’t just absorb the electric cars, it swamped them.

Two caveats, because this one gets overclaimed. Industrial demand fell as well, 117 TWh to 86, and that is mostly factories closing rather than factories getting clever. And the decline is over. 2024 was the first year in nearly two decades that demand went back up.²

The cars that were supposed to break it

Here is the fleet the grid absorbed, straight off the DVLA licensing tables. Battery electric vehicles licensed in Great Britain at the end of each year.⁴

Cars are up eighty three fold in ten years, the whole fleet sixty nine fold. The millionth electric vehicle landed at the end of 2023 on 1,000,092, which is about as close to the nose as a statistic ever gets. Nobody planned that.

Three things in that table you don’t see in a headline.

Lorries have barely started. 1,472 electric HGVs in the whole of Great Britain, and the number actually fell between 2015 and 2020, down to 253. Cars were always the easy bit. This is the hard bit and it has not really begun.

Electric motorcycles are going backwards. 14,142 in 2023, then 14,039, now 13,460. Two years of decline, the only category shrinking while everything else compounds.

The percentages are slowing and the metal is not. Car growth was 114% in 2020 and 35% in 2025. But 2025 put 442,000 cars on the road against 2024’s 350,000. A falling percentage of a big number still beats a big percentage of a small one.

For where this goes, NESO’s 2025 Future Energy Scenarios put Great Britain at 31 million electric vehicles by 2050 under Holistic Transition, 33.4 million under Electric Engagement and 36.1 million under Hydrogen Evolution.⁵ Today’s 1.84 million is about six per cent of the way there.

One detail worth noting from those scenarios: the flexibility available from smart charging fell this year, 16 GW down to 10 GW. Bigger batteries mean fewer, longer charges, and less to shuffle about.⁵

The demand that never showed up at all

There’s a second thing pushing demand down, mind, and it isn’t efficiency.

Two million solar installations in the UK now, 22.3 GW between them, and better than 30% of new systems go in with a battery against 10% five years ago.⁶ Put storage behind the panels and most of what the roof makes never crosses the meter.

That energy isn’t saved. It has just stopped being counted. The meter is the only thing that changed.

Sixfold in five years, and the shape tells you why. 2021 and 2022 were flat. Then the bills landed, people did the arithmetic, and solar stopped being an environmental choice and became a financial one.

Our house is in that table somewhere. Nine kilowatts on the roof, thirty kilowatt hours of battery under it, two cars and the aircon drinking the daytime generation. From National Grid’s point of view this address has been quietly shrinking for years. From a physics point of view it hasn’t. The energy just stopped appearing on anybody’s chart.

The war on the thing that worked

None of the above happened by accident, and there’s a live effort to stop the rest of it.

Reform took ten English councils in May 2025 and said they would use “every lever” to block new wind, solar and battery projects. Carbon Brief put the figure at risk at about 6 GW: 5,076 MW of battery schemes, 786 MW of solar and 56 MW of wind sitting in those ten areas.⁷ The party’s energy spokesman wrote to developers in Lincolnshire to tell them “this is war”, and sent formal notice to the chief executives of SSE Renewables, Octopus Energy, Centrica and Equinor that a Reform government would tear up their deals.⁷

Testing the farmland claim

The stated reason is farmland and food security. That claim is testable, so let’s test it.

Solar covers about a tenth of one per cent of this country. Golf covers roughly five times as much, and in all the years anybody has been worrying aloud about British food security nobody has once written to a golf club to declare war on it. Not one letter.

There is a real argument buried under the noise, and it deserves saying plainly. CPRE found 59% of England’s largest solar farms sit on productive farmland, and 31% of that area is classed best and most versatile.¹¹ Land quality is a fair point. Land quantity is not, and it is the quantity argument being made.

And look again at what is actually in that 6 GW. Solar is 786 MW of it. Batteries are 5,076 MW, better than four fifths of the capacity being fought over.⁷ The farmland argument is aimed at the smaller number. Storage is the real target, and storage doesn’t grow owt.

Testing the fire claim

Battery schemes get refused on fire risk. Not everywhere Reform runs, to be fair. This one is broad local opposition rather than one party’s campaign, and it is working. More than 900 objections to a scheme near Allerton Bywater in Leeds. A greenbelt site near Eaglesham thrown out over lithium fire fears after 250 objections. A 49.9 MW project in Devon refused against the planning officer’s own recommendation.¹²

So put the fires next to the objections.

One planning application in Leeds attracted more objections than there have been recorded grid battery fires anywhere on earth since 2011. Three in this country, ever. One of those was a site still under construction.¹³

And 27 of the 30 incidents worldwide across 2018 and 2019 were in South Korea. One national cluster, bad enough to halt their storage market, and the reason the database exists at all.¹⁴ Strip those out and the global record is thinner still.

Meanwhile the rate has collapsed. Failures per year have stayed roughly flat while deployment went from 11 GWh in 2018 to over 300 GWh in 2024. That is a 99% fall in failure rate per unit installed, because the standards caught up.¹⁴ In 2024, 0.3% of projects had a failure that led to a fire with safety concerns.¹⁴ I went through that, and the Moss Landing fire everybody cites, in the piece on rejected energy.

Then there’s why they fail, which is the bit that ought to end the argument.

89% of incidents don’t start with the battery at all.¹⁵ Only three in the whole database trace back to a cell or module defect. What actually goes wrong is the balance of system: DC and AC wiring, the HVAC, the fire suppression kit itself. And 72% of failures happen during construction, commissioning, or inside the first two years.¹⁵

So it isn’t the chemistry. It’s the fitting. Sub-standard assembly, corners cut on installation, commissioning done with the monitoring not yet live so a leak or an isolation fault has time to cascade into something that needs a fire engine before a single alarm has gone off anywhere a human being can hear it. Bad workmanship, in other words.

That matters because it changes what the answer is. If lithium were inherently prone to going up, you’d be right to keep it away from the village. It isn’t. This is a trade quality and inspection problem, which is the sort of thing we already know how to fix. Same as any other bit of electrical installation: proper standards, proper sign-off, somebody competent checking the work.

Which brings it back to the planning rules, where there is a genuine gap worth fixing. Councils have no legal obligation to consult the fire service on a BESS application, so some demand a full fire management plan and others treat safety as outside planning altogether.¹²

The objection is “these things catch fire”. The data says badly-installed things catch fire. One of those is an argument for refusing permission. The other is an argument for inspecting the build. Fix the gap and you remove the argument. Leave it broken and it keeps working as one.

Worth saying none of it has worked especially well so far. A year on, those councils have found that blocking large solar is easier said in a press release than done in a planning committee, and several schemes went through anyway.⁷

Follow the money

As for where the script comes from, the funding is a matter of record.

Heartland is an American climate denial outfit that opened a UK branch, with Nigel Farage as guest of honour at the launch.¹⁶ The Global Warming Policy Foundation campaigns here as Net Zero Watch, a registered charity running its campaigns through a private company.¹⁷

American fossil money, American talking points, a British party repeating them at a technology this country is demonstrably good at. I’ll let you join the dots on that one.

The talking points arrive with a president attached.

That last one is worth dwelling on, because it inverts cleanly. Wind has the smallest carbon footprint of any generating technology the US Department of Energy measures.¹⁹ The IPCC medians put onshore wind at 11 g/kWh and coal at 820. I set those out in the piece on rejected energy. The thing being accused of making pollution is the thing that makes the least of it.

The bird one at least starts from something true, so put it against the other things that kill birds.

Turbines account for something like one bird in six thousand. Nobody has ever been on the telly about cats. Cats are fine, apparently.

And the animal-welfare line didn’t come from anyone who watches birds. It was coordinated by a conservative think tank funded by an industry group backed by ExxonMobil, Chevron and Marathon Oil.¹⁸ Same money as the table above, different delivery.

Which is the third channel. Think tanks write it, newspapers print it, and it gets moved at volume online. A Brown University study found bot accounts responsible for close to 40% of tweets calling climate science fake.²⁰ I’d not claim to know who runs them, and that study is about climate denial generally rather than British solar in particular. But the pattern holds whichever end you pick it up from: the claims are wrong, they’re old, and they were paid for.

Speaking the same language

Here’s the bit I think gets missed. Ask why Heartland opened a branch in London and not Lyon or Leipzig.

Because it works here as written. No translation, no localisation, no adapting the argument to a country that measures things in metric and heats its homes off a district network. The press release lands in English and runs the same day.

There is a mapped structure behind it, not just a shared vocabulary.

Climate deniers turned up in numbers at the Reform conference in September 2025.²¹ None of that required a single word to be translated.

And the traffic runs both ways. UK far-right Telegram channels have been documented amplifying disinformation about American election integrity. The same pipe, pointed the other direction.²² Researchers describe English-language publications setting narratives that then get picked up and repeated by media in other languages, which puts us first in the queue rather than last.²²

A French or German reader gets a delay and a translator, and translation is a filter. Somebody has to decide the claim is worth carrying, and check it enough to put their own name on it. We get it raw, at the speed of a retweet, from a media market forty times our size that we already consume for entertainment.

That is the actual vulnerability. Not that Americans are arguing about their own grid. They can do as they like with it. It’s that we hear every word of it, in our own language, about our grid, from people who have never seen it.

Cheap carbon, dear leccy

One thing hasn’t improved. Electricity averaged £92.77/MWh over the past year against £70.13 across the whole dataset. About a third dearer, while the carbon halved.¹

You will have read that renewables are why. You will have read it a lot.

So cost is the argument. Not birds, not landscape, not intermittency. Cost, in seven out of eight.

The dashboard settles that one, because it publishes price and mix together every half hour. Here is 20 September 2026, from teatime onwards.¹

The sun went down. Gas tripled, 2.85 GW to 8.87. And the price went from minus nineteen quid to nearly two hundred in three and a half hours. Plus £57 in the half hour to half four, another £65 by five, another £41 by six. Carbon intensity more than doubled while it happened.

Take the whole day rather than the interesting bit of it, and the relationship holds across all forty eight settlement periods.

Nought point nine three, on one day, with the gas contracts fixed. And for nine hours of it Great Britain was paying people to take electricity off its hands. Gas down at 7.4%, solar getting on for 10 GW, price below zero.

Then the sun set and it cost £195.65. Same wires. Same wind farms. Same country.

The mechanism is marginal pricing. The wholesale price is set by the running cost of the most expensive plant needed that half hour, and that is nearly always gas. During the crisis gas set the price 98% of the time while supplying around 40% of the electricity; in 2021, 97% of the time on 37% of generation.²⁴ Highest proportion of any country in Europe.

Be honest about one thing in that data, mind, because somebody will spot it. The all-time average is £70.13/MWh on a dirtier mix than today’s, cheaper than the past year’s £92.77. That’s not wind putting prices up. That’s 2012 to 2020 being years of cheap gas. Across eras the gas price dominates; within a single day the weather does. Both of those point at the same culprit.

So a quarter of the mix prices all of it. Wind could be free at the point of generation, and much of it effectively is, and the number on your bill would not move, because the last gas plant on the stack still sets the rate.

That is not renewables making power expensive. That is a market design from the 1990s meeting a grid that no longer looks like the 1990s.

The counterfactual seals it. Take one gas price spike, of the sort we have already lived through, and model it against two different grids.²⁴

Same spike. Same gas. The only difference is how much wind and solar is sat there not caring what gas costs. More renewables, smaller hit. By a factor of five and a half.

So the wind farms are the reason the last crisis was survivable, not the reason it happened. Three separate tests, one answer: within a day the price tracks the wind inversely, across eras it tracks the gas price, and in the modelling the renewables are what blunt the spike. Gas is the cause. It isn’t close, and it isn’t really arguable.

The thing that would have fixed that evening

Now hold that next to the eighteen half hours earlier the same day when the price sat below zero. That is the precise shape of problem a battery solves. Charge it while the grid is paying people to take power off its hands, push it back out into the teatime peak, and the last gas plant on the stack never gets called. The spread on 20 September was £214.68 a megawatt hour. Batteries exist to eat spreads like that.

Which brings us back to those 5,076 MW of battery schemes sitting in ten councils, and the party that promised every lever against them. Blocking storage doesn’t merely postpone some carbon reduction. It protects the gas margin, half hour by half hour, on precisely the evenings when gas is worth the most.

Whether that’s the intention, follow the money. It’s the effect either way, and the funding behind the argument, per the table further up, belongs to the industry that collects the difference.

The levies, and who checked the numbers

And the levies, since they get quoted as the smoking gun:

Seventeen per cent, and from April 2026 the government took 75% of the Renewables Obligation off bills and onto general taxation, about £92 a year of the £150 average cut.²⁵ Real money, worth arguing about, and nowhere near the main event. The main event is the 27% of generation that prices the other 73%.

I’m not going to tell you how many of those 42 editorials were lies, because proving intent isn’t something I can do from a desk. What can be shown is the error rate, and it’s poor. A complaint against one Daily Mail piece identified fifteen factual errors; the regulator required one correction.²⁶ The Mail on Sunday and The Times both reported that NESO had found the cost of net zero would be £4.5 trillion by 2050. NESO found nothing of the sort, and it was the third time papers had misrepresented that same body.²⁶

Before anybody quotes the low number of upheld complaints at me: IPSO’s complaints committee contains no professional scientists and does not consult experts on technical subjects, and it routinely treats a wrong number as an opinion.²⁶ One upheld complaint out of fifteen errors measures the regulator, not the article.

Draw your own conclusion. Mine is that the most-repeated argument against renewables in the British press is the one that collapses fastest when you put it next to the grid’s own meter.

And we don’t set the gas price

Here is what actually happened to gas, on the European TTF benchmark.²⁷

Seventeen times the normal rate at the peak. And look at that last row. Gas went to €83 this month on supply and storage worries, which is exactly why a still Sunday evening on the GB grid priced at £179.70/MWh. The chain is short: European gas market moves, gas sets the British price, your bill follows.

Note also that “back to normal” isn’t. Today’s €35–45 floor is still double pre-crisis, and it spikes on a rumour.

None of those decisions are made here, and our exposure is growing.²⁸

North Sea output is falling 12–13% a year and is projected down 78% by 2035 against 2025.²⁸ The gap gets filled by tankers from Qatar and the United States, bought on a global spot market against buyers in Asia who can outbid us on any cold morning they like.

So the argument that we should keep the grid on gas for the sake of the bills has it backwards. Gas is the bit we don’t control, priced by events we don’t influence, from fields that are running out. Wind and sun are the bit that happens here for nowt once the kit is up.

What it costs and what it’s priced at

There is a difference between what a thing costs and what you are charged for it, and this whole business sits in that gap.

The cost of running this grid has fallen. Half the carbon, no coal, a third of the generation now coming off weather that arrives for free and sends no invoice. That is the cost. The price went the other way, because we kept a rule from the 1990s that lets the most expensive plant on the system set the rate for everything else on it, and then imported the fuel for that plant from a market where a cold snap in Asia moves what a pensioner in Barnsley pays to keep warm.

Nobody is hiding that. It is written down, in half-hourly settlement data, free, on a website one woman maintains.

What I keep coming back to is who benefits from the confusion. Because the people telling you the wind farms did this are, when you follow the money back, funded by the thing that actually did. That is not a coincidence and it is not incompetence. It is the oldest trick there is: get the public angry at the cheapest part of the system so nobody looks at the dearest.

And the bit under attack is the only bit we own outright. A gas turbine needs a tanker from Qatar and a price set in Rotterdam. A wind farm off the Humber needs maintaining. One of those is sovereignty and the other is a standing order, and we appear to be about to argue ourselves out of the first to protect the second.

We built the thing. It works. Somebody should tell people.

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