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Prime Minister Andy Burnham’s proposal to create a new Great British Grid has put a spotlight on one of Britain’s biggest energy challenges: interconnection queues. But building a bigger grid to accommodate renewable energy is only half the problem. Britain also needs to get better at using electricity when it is plentiful and cheap.
Across the country, renewable energy projects, industrial developments and electrification schemes are waiting years to connect to the electricity grid. Great British Grid will be a new public property, 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 carbon energy, and a stronger coordinating role for government may be exactly what is needed to move projects along.
For years, energy policy has focused on helping consumers reduce peak demand through smart tariffs, energy efficiency incentives and other measures.
That logic is still important. But as wind and solar generation continue to expand, the system will begin to face the opposite problem more often: periods when there is more renewable electricity available than the grid or market can absorb.
In 2024-2025, about 13% of the potential wind generation was cut, meaning that the turbines were asked to produce less electricity than they could have, because the system could not absorb the power.
Until now, the solution has been to build more storage or reduce generation. Both approaches can work, but both can also be expensive.
The alternative is simple and radical: pay people to use more electricity.
William Barton / Alamy
This idea, known as “demand turn-up”, rewards consumers for increasing demand when renewable generation is plentiful.
For households, this could mean charging an electric vehicle, heating water or running appliances when there is excess renewable power on the system. For businesses, it could be a schedule of electricity-intensive activities to coincide with periods of high wind and solar generation.
At first glance, charging consumers to use more energy may sound counterintuitive. But the demand turn-up is not about power wastage. It’s about using electricity when there’s plenty of it instead of throwing it away.
Energy lost
Wind and solar farms are capital intensive assets with very low operating costs once built. If the output is available but cannot be used, the economic loss is real.
The demand turn-up has the potential to make better use of renewable assets, reduce curtailment and lower overall system costs. In that sense, it complements the goals of the GB Grid. Building new infrastructure is important, but extracting more value from this infrastructure is equally important.
This is where the grid and demand turn-up come together. Great British Grid would not make a claim plan itself. 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’s needed, while giving consumers more options to match their electricity use with the availability of renewable generation.
Neso, the government body that runs the energy system, is already expanding its demand flexibility service so that businesses and consumers can be rewarded for using electricity at times when it would help the system the most.
Who benefits from a lot of electricity?
There is also a social dimension.
For much of the history of the electricity system, supply was adjusted to follow demand. The power plants would be lifted at peak times and dismantled overnight. Wind and solar energy work differently because their output depends on the weather. As renewable energies become a large part of the system, the new challenge is also to make demand flexible.
This rewards households that already own expensive technologies, such as electric vehicles, home batteries or smart heat pumps, which 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 use.
For example, people in social housing may 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 widely shared rather than captured exclusively by large commercial users.
This is important because the alternative is not always socially optimal. Data centers, hydrogen production and other large loads can play an important role in absorbing excess renewable generation. But if the benefits flow mainly to a few large consumers, an opportunity is 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, in which the value of abundant renewable electricity is reflected not only in companies’ balance sheets, but also in consumers’ energy bills.
