Paking Institute

Executive Summary

The most effective contribution that the United Kingdom can make to tackling climate change is to reset its energy strategy. This is not a departure from the UK’s commitment to reach net zero by 2050, but a recognition that delivering it will depend on building an energy system that is affordable, reliable and capable of supporting electrification at scale.

Energy policy is not an objective in itself: it is an example of infrastructure policy. Its purpose is to provide the power needed for homes, industry, transport, digital infrastructure and the next generation of energy-intensive technologies, from AI to advanced manufacturing. And it needs to be available at a cost that households and businesses can afford, with the level of reliability that society expects.

As it stands, a single organising mission sits at the heart of government strategy: Clean Power 2030. The objective is to decarbonise the electricity system as far and as fast as possible within this decade. Success is being measured in gigawatts contracted and projects approved, with progress measured against a headline delivery target.

That framing makes the strategy legible and mobilising, of course – but it also restricts the definition of success. This narrow focus on whether power is clean means the system has lost sight of whether it is cheap, secure and capable of powering a modern economy.

There is no question that Clean Power 2030 has been implemented with discipline and consistency; the problem comes down to what the system is being asked to optimise for. Policy success is measured by proxies rather than the outcome that ultimately matters: abundant, affordable electricity that sustains growth, enables electrification and maintains public consent for climate action.

Clean Power 2030 implicitly treats cost as a downstream issue: something that will take care of itself once enough clean capacity has been created. Yet the reality is that if energy becomes too expensive, everything else comes under strain: electrification stalls, industry relocates, households resist and climate ambition collapses under political pressure.

The consequences extend beyond how the UK generates power: they shape how energy security is managed, how domestic resources are treated and how the fiscal foundations of the transition are built. Again and again, energy is being approached as a subset of climate policy, rather than a central pillar of prosperity, innovation and national power.

If Clean Power 2030 was ever fit for purpose, that is no longer the case: the world has changed economically, technologically and geopolitically. The UK’s energy framework has not adapted to these new circumstances and as a result, policy is drifting away from the fundamentals that it must serve.

The UK needs a reset. Not to take it away from climate ambitions (the Net Zero by 2050 target must stand firm), but to implement the approach that will make those ambitions a reality: an energy strategy grounded in economics, system performance and political durability.

The reset has to begin with recasting what the system is optimising for: Cheaper Power 2030 should become the organising objective of electricity policy. This means a relentless focus on making the system work – through market reform, planning reform and strategic grid development – and ensuring that any renewable capacity supported by the government demonstrably lowers electricity bills based on realistic assumptions. This is what will ultimately unlock the electrification that is needed to deliver net zero between now and 2050.

Once the revised objective has been set, the rest of energy policy must follow. For example, the UK should create an investible North Sea basin to underpin energy security, fiscal strength and a managed transition. And it should place innovation, not deployment targets, at the centre of long-term energy strategy.

The focus has to be on the technologies and system capabilities that can deliver abundance over time.