18 Aug 2026

Keynote Panel: Powering the Future: Scaling Clean Energy for a Net Zero World

Keynote Panel: Powering the Future: Scaling Clean Energy for a Net Zero World
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🏠 | Blog | Keynote Panel: Powering the Future: Scaling Clean Energy for a Net Zero World

 

Quick Read Summary

Two years into the UK’s clean power mission, the obstacles to delivery are no longer strategic. This Reset Connect London 2026 keynote panel put the constraints somewhere much less glamorous: planning consent, access to a live electricity network, and whether enough new demand arrives to spread the system’s fixed costs.

That shift matters because the commissioning phase is largely complete. Government has locked in the generation and transmission it wants through long-term contracts, and the second half of this parliament is about building what has already been signed. The risk has moved into execution.

You will come away with a clear view of what the grid connection queue reform actually changed, why contracts rather than promises are what give investors certainty, and the panel’s argument that rising electricity demand is the quickest route to lower household bills.

 

 

Policy Is Largely Settled and Planning Consent Is Now the Constraint

Wafa Jafri, UK Head of Energy Strategy and Global Lead for Energy Transition at KPMG UK, opened by asking what is genuinely slowing delivery two years in. Neither answer was about policy.

Carl Trowell, President of UK Strategic Infrastructure at National Grid, named two things that keep him awake. The first is outages, meaning access to a live network everyone relies on, which can only be shut down at certain times to connect a project or upgrade a line. The second is planning and consenting, where he credited real recent progress but called it an obstacle at the scale the network, offshore wind and onshore renewables are all building at once. "We’ve got an ecosystem that’s all trying to do the same thing at the same time," he said.

Chris Stark, Head of the UK’s Mission for Clean Power at the Department for Energy Security and Net Zero, agreed almost entirely. Energy transition debate happens at the level of high-level policy, he said, while the real hold-ups are operational detail of a kind that never reaches a cabinet discussion.

For a commercial reader, this matters because it tells you where slippage will come from. Project risk in 2026 sits in consent timelines and network access windows rather than in whether the target survives.

 

Britain Has Deliberately Commissioned a Power System Bigger Than It Currently Needs

Stark was open that the system now being built is oversized for present demand, and that this was deliberate. Electricity demand is expected to grow through the 2030s, driven first by transport, then heating and cooling, then industrial electrification. On the pathway to net zero across the whole economy, he said, the power system will need to be roughly double the size it is today.

The unusual part is the sequencing. The measured approach would upgrade the transmission network first, then connect new generation to a grid that is ready for it. Instead both are happening at once, which Stark acknowledged carries real risk: "we don’t have time to wait for that." The consequence is the connection dysfunction the industry lives with today, and what he wants now is demand to mop up power that would otherwise go unused.

For a commercial reader, this matters because it inverts the usual assumption. Britain has an emerging surplus of clean generation capacity looking for load, which is a different commercial environment to one where power is scarce.

 

Reordering the Grid Connection Queue Was the Most Radical Thing Government Did

Asked what has moved the needle most, Stark pointed to the connections queue rather than to any headline target. The generation and storage the country needs was already sitting in the queue waiting to connect. The intervention was to reorder it, promoting projects strategically aligned with 2030 and pushing down those that are not aligned or not ready. Known as connections reform, it replaced a first come, first served model with one that prioritises projects that are both ready and needed.

He did not present it as painless. It required legislation and "that’s incredibly controversial", he said, adding that government will have to keep doing difficult things of that kind to move at pace. Permitting, he noted, is the same obstacle in every country he looks at.

Commissioning is only the first step. Many projects now holding connection agreements are not yet through the planning regime, and Stark was clear there will be wrinkles.

For a commercial reader, this matters because queue position is now a strategic judgement rather than an administrative one. Alignment with national need, and demonstrable readiness, are what determine whether a project connects this decade.

 

Investor Certainty Comes From Contracts, Because No Government Can Bind the Next One

Jafri put the awkward question directly: policy cycles and investment horizons do not align, so how can investors trust that what is agreed now survives beyond 2030? Stark did not pretend otherwise. "It’s not possible to fetter future government," he said.

The answer is contractual rather than political. National Grid operates under a regulatory settlement running over decades, in which consumers repay the cost of transmission upgrades. Generation projects are backed by contracts for difference, a mechanism guaranteeing a project a fixed price for its power, with the term now extended to 20 years, up from 15. Critically the counterparty is not government but an independent body, which makes the contract very difficult to unpick.

Trowell endorsed the logic from the delivery side. Clear, unchanging direction is what lets National Grid cascade commitments through its own systems and supply chain. "What doesn’t work, I would argue, is lots of stop start," he said.

For a commercial reader, this matters because it identifies what actually de-risks a project here. Not a manifesto or a target, but a long-duration contract with a counterparty that sits outside government.

 

Growing Electricity Demand Is the Fastest Route to Lower Bills

Jafri raised the criticism levelled at the clean power mission most often: demand has flatlined or fallen while fixed costs rise, making the UK less competitive. Stark accepted the framing and argued the answer sits inside it.

The decades-long fall in demand reflects both lost industrial load and genuine efficiency gains, though he sees signs of an increase now, led by electric vehicles. The cost problem is partly self-inflicted. Britain chose over the past 15 years or so to recover transition costs through levies on electricity bills rather than through the tax system as the United States did, a decision Stark said he would call wrong. Two corrections are underway: spreading costs over longer periods, and moving levies off bills, with last November’s budget shifting most legacy renewables obligation costs onto the exchequer.

The bigger lever is demand itself. Spread the same fixed costs across a larger demand base and unit prices fall. On current electric vehicle and heat pump trajectories, Stark suggested that alone might take around a quarter off the unit price of electricity within 10 years.

Trowell supplied the scale. National Grid expects to connect over 10 gigawatts of new industrial demand within five years, against a network typically running at 40 to 50 gigawatts on a normal day. A single new substation in north-west London will connect around 14 data centres at 1.8 gigawatts, which he compared to adding another Birmingham to the system.

For a commercial reader, this matters because it reverses a familiar assumption. In Britain, rising electricity demand is now associated with falling unit costs rather than rising ones.

 

The Consumer Half of the Story Is Flexibility and Convenience

The system is moving to a model where demand flexes to meet supply rather than the other way around. The more demand can move, the lower the peak, and the cheaper the system for everyone. Stark was candid that the industry has a language problem here: "It’s not a mainstream term, but it’s really important to the system design."

His stated priority is that flexibility benefits reach the households that need them most, not only those who can afford the technology. The most price-sensitive consumers stand to gain most and are likely to be the most responsive to a price signal, which makes the whole system work better.

On electric vehicles he was equally practical. Average prices have passed the point where an electric car costs less than a petrol equivalent, so cost is no longer the barrier. Convenience is. Stark lives in a flat in Glasgow, finds charging the family car genuinely hard, and pays far more than a household with a driveway.

For a commercial reader, this matters because the remaining barriers are experiential rather than economic. "We shouldn’t have to win that argument," Stark said of electrification, and the panel’s view was that technocratic language is part of why it still has to be won.

 

 

Practical Application, How to Turn Clean Power 2030 Delivery Into Decisions

 

The panel described a delivery phase rather than a design phase, which changes what is worth watching and what is worth worrying about.

 

 

Questions to ask

  • - Is our project strategically aligned and demonstrably ready, or is it relying on its old queue position?
  • - Have we modelled consent timelines and network access windows as the primary schedule risk?
  • - If our business case assumes scarce, expensive electricity, does it survive a scenario where demand growth lowers unit costs?

Signals to watch

  • - Connection offers moving through the reformed queue and how quickly consent follows
  • - Industrial and data centre load connecting at scale, which is what spreads fixed system costs
  • - Policy signals pushing electrified devices, and how flexibility reaches lower income households

Traps to avoid

  • - Treating outage access as an operational footnote when it is the binding long-term resource constraint
  • - Reading political noise as investment risk when the underlying protection is a 20-year contract
  • - Communicating electrification in system language that no consumer uses

What good looks like, on this panel’s account, is a project that is aligned, consented, contracted and connected in that order, with a demand story attached to it rather than a generation story alone.

 

 

Key Takeaways

This was a delivery panel rather than an ambition panel, and unusually specific for a Main Stage keynote. Both speakers argued the strategic questions are largely answered and the difficulty now lies in sequencing, consent and consumer experience.

  • - The binding constraints on clean power 2030 delivery are planning consent and access to a live network, not policy design
  • - Britain has deliberately commissioned more clean generation than current demand requires, expecting the power system to roughly double in size
  • - Reordering the grid connection queue by strategic alignment and readiness required legislation and remains the mission’s most contested intervention
  • - Investor certainty rests on 20-year contracts for difference held by a counterparty independent of government, not on political commitments
  • - Rising electricity demand spreads fixed system costs, which is why more demand in Britain points towards lower unit prices rather than higher ones

 

 

Quote of the Session

"we’ve largely locked in that 2030 future now"

Chris Stark, Head of UK’s Mission for Clean Power, UK Department for Energy Security and Net Zero

 

 

Final Thoughts

The underlying message was that the clean power mission has passed the point where argument is the hard part. Contracts are signed, capacity is commissioned and the remaining work is unglamorous: outage windows, planning consents, supply chain capacity and getting new load connected. That is a good problem to have and a harder one to hold public attention on.

What is at stake is whether the consumer half of the story lands. Both panellists made the case that electrification lowers costs and that the benefits should reach the households least able to afford their bills first. If that argument is lost in system language, the infrastructure will still get built, but the support for building it becomes harder to sustain.

 

 

Speakers

Wafa Jafri, UK Head of Energy Strategy & Global Lead for Energy Transition - KPMG UK (moderator). Wafa advises major energy companies on transition strategy, partnerships and deals, and previously worked on energy policy at the Department of Energy and Climate Change and in corporate strategy at RWE.

Chris Stark, Head of UK’s Mission for Clean Power - UK Department for Energy Security and Net Zero. Chris was previously Chief Executive of the Climate Change Committee and of the Carbon Trust, and has held senior roles across the UK and Scottish governments over the last 20 years.

Carl Trowell, President of UK Strategic Infrastructure - National Grid. Carl has held senior leadership roles across the energy services sector, including CEO positions, and has over 25 years of experience in engineering, services and complex project delivery.

 

 

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