Prime Minister Andy Burnham’s proposal to create a new Great British Grid has put a spotlight on one of the UK’s biggest energy challenges: connection queues. But building a larger grid to accommodate renewable energy is only half the problem. Britain also needs to get better at using electricity when it is abundant and cheap.
Across the country, renewable energy projects, industrial developments and electrification schemes are waiting years to connect to the electricity network. Great British Grid will be a new publicly owned body, intended to accelerate investment and coordination to reduce these delays and connect projects more quickly. These delays have become a major bottleneck for economic growth and low-carbon energy, and a stronger coordinating role for government may be exactly what is needed to get projects moving.
For years, energy policy has focused on getting consumers to reduce demand at peak times through smart tariffs, energy efficiency incentives and other measures.
That logic still matters. But as wind and solar generation continue to expand, the system is beginning to face the opposite problem more often: periods when there is more renewable electricity available than the network or market can absorb.
In 2024-25, around 13% of potential wind generation was curtailed, meaning turbines were instructed to produce less electricity than they could have because the system could not accommodate the power.
Up to now, the solution has been to build more storage or curtail generation. Both approaches can work, but both can also be expensive.
The alternative is both simple and radical: pay people to use more electricity.
This idea, known as “demand turn-up”, rewards consumers for increasing demand when renewable generation is abundant.
For households, this could mean charging an electric vehicle, heating water or running appliances when there is surplus renewable power on the system. For businesses, it could involve scheduling electricity-intensive activities to coincide with periods of high wind and solar generation.
At first glance, paying consumers to use more energy may sound counterintuitive. But demand turn-up is not about wasting electricity. It is about using electricity when it is plentiful rather than throwing it away.
Lost energy
Wind and solar farms are capital-intensive assets with very low operating costs once they are built. When output is available but cannot be used, the economic loss is real.
Demand turn-up has the potential to make better use of renewable assets, reducing curtailment, and lowering overall system costs. In that sense, it complements the goals of GB Grid. Building new infrastructure is important, but extracting greater value from that infrastructure is equally important.
This is where the grid and demand turn-up come together. Great British Grid would not itself run a demand turn-up scheme. But its investment in new pylons, cables and other infrastructure could work alongside efforts to make electricity demand more flexible, by making it easier to move power to where it is needed, while giving consumers more opportunities to match their electricity use to the availability of renewable generation.
Neso, the government body that operates the energy system, is already expanding its demand flexibility service so businesses and consumers can get rewarded for using electricity at times when it would most help the system.
Who benefits from abundant electricity?
There is also a social dimension.
For much of the history of the electricity system, supply was adjusted to follow demand. Power plants would be cranked up at peak times and wound down overnight. Wind and solar power work differently, as their output depends on the weather. As renewables become a larger part of the system, the new challenge is to make demand flexible too.
This rewards households that already own expensive technologies such as electric vehicles, home batteries or smart heat pumps that can use electricity when it is cheapest. Demand turn-up could potentially be more inclusive. Rather than rewarding those with the greatest ability to invest in flexibility assets, it can create value from everyday electricity uses.
For example, people in social housing could receive lower bills for using flexible heating or hot water systems when local renewable generation is abundant or networks are constrained. As a publicly owned organisation, GB Grid could also help ensure that the benefits of flexibility are shared widely rather than captured exclusively by large commercial users.
That matters because the alternative is not always socially optimal. Data centres, hydrogen production and other large loads can play an important role in absorbing excess renewable generation. But if the benefits flow primarily to a few large consumers, an opportunity will have been missed.
The first test of Great British Grid will be whether it can reduce connection delays and accelerate investment. The second test will be whether it helps create a smarter and fairer electricity system, one in which the value of surplus renewable electricity is reflected not only in corporate balance sheets but also in consumers’ energy bills.
This article was originally published on The Conversation. Read the original article.
