Net Zero Transition: Consumer-led Flexibility

Martin Wrigley Excerpts

Tuesday 9th December 2025 Westminster Hall

[Martin Wrigley (Newton Abbot) (LD)]

It is a pleasure to serve under your chairmanship, Mr Vickers. My hon. Friend the Member for Thornbury and Yate (Claire Young) has made the case extremely well. I think I have heard unanimous opinion around the Chamber that we should not only do this, but do it now with some urgency. Flexibility first is the way to go. I will go one level further than the hon. Member for Strangford (Jim Shannon), who called this a “win-win”: I would call this a win-win-win. We can shave £1.3 billion off infrastructure costs through actions like this, which will be reflected in every single person’s bill. That is a massive win. It is also a win for producers because it is easier to balance production and consumption, and it is a win for individual consumers who will reduce their individual prices. It is three wins in one. Why would we not want to do that?

I absolutely agree with the hon. Member for Leeds Central and Headingley (Alex Sobel)—we should have done this yesterday. The best time to plant a tree was 10 years ago; the second best time is now. We are at the point of the second best time, but let us use this time and make sure that it happens. I join my hon. Friend the Member for Thornbury and Yate in pushing the Government to take action urgently.

When preparing for this debate, I remembered a geography school trip I went on where we looked at last-century solutions for balancing the grid. We went to visit Dinorwig, which is a pumped storage system—or was; I am not sure it is still going—in the hills in Wales. During the night, it pumps the water from the lake at the bottom of the hill up into a corrie at the top—aptly, as it turns out. As was quoted in the ad break in the middle of “Coronation Street”, when people switched on their kettles and created a power surge, that system could switch on in 30 seconds and provide significant amounts of power into the grid. It was a very good solution, but it is last century’s solution. What we need is an information-based solution, an individually empowering solution, such as we are talking about here, with consumer flexibility coming first.

[Ms Julie Minns (Carlisle) (Lab)]

The hon. Member makes a point about a modern solution. I have felt for some time that our supermarkets, with the installation of bi-directional chargers, could offer consumers the opportunity to bring their mobile energy source—their EV—as a power supply during peak times for supermarkets; in return, consumers could be offered a discount on their shopping for that hour. When the Minister makes his comments, I would welcome his thoughts on whether we need to go further with bi-directional chargers in supermarkets.

[Martin Wrigley]

That had not occurred to me, but it is an amazing idea; people taking their mobile power source with them—fantastic.

That brings me on to other solutions that we should be looking at, particularly community energy generation, community networks and community power consortia, as well as business inclusion—businesses that can generate more electricity during the day than they are using. We should be encouraging those things to happen, moving away from the centralised model of the past and towards the distributed and inclusive model of the future.

While flexibility is an excellent step, it will obviously not solve all the issues. We still need to fundamentally change energy generation contracts to de-link the cost of electricity from the price of gas. That will need to be done as well, but all these things are largely contractual issues, not technical ones. We do not need to reinvent something humongously different; we simply need to get the contracts right and change the energy market. I say “simply”—I understand that these changes have their complexities, but they are achievable. We know what we need to do.

The other massive energy issue is home insulation, which must not be forgotten. It is the single most important thing we need to do to reduce our fuel usage. The district council that I led demonstrated that very well—I draw hon. Members attention to my entry in the Register of Members’ Financial Interests, which notes that I am still a councillor on Teignbridge district council—when it started building council houses for the first time in 30 years. The first pair of semi-detached houses that we built are well insulated, with solar panels on the roof and air source heat pumps. At the height of the gas price crisis, the power bill for that home was just £500. We can do that with modern insulation and modern efficiencies.

Flexibility is one extra piece that we need to further reduce the cost. It is all part of a journey, and we are going in the right direction. I urge the Government to take faster action and to do everything they can to make it happen. As we have heard, industry is already looking for it. Let us make it happen.

[Greg Smith (Mid Buckinghamshire) (Con)]

As ever, Mr Vickers, it is a pleasure to serve under your chairmanship. The Opposition have a deep and growing concern about the direction in which Ministers of this Government are taking our energy system. It is a direction that depends increasingly on the weather, and I do not believe that anyone in this House should pretend that such dependence makes our country more secure. I have battled with this in my own constituency of Mid Buckinghamshire, where large-scale solar development projects threaten to consume vast areas of productive farmland and countryside while adding yet more intermittent generation to an already fragile system.

Expanding weather-dependent capacity without addressing firm power needs not only strains local communities, but further undermines the resilience of our national grid. We are also moving towards a system in which electricity supply must follow the wind rather than meeting the needs of households and businesses. This is being presented as modern, progressive and resilient. In truth, it is none of those things. It is a system built on hope rather than reliability, which is not what this country needs.

The National Energy System Operator has already set out that the future system will require a very large amount of what it calls flexible demand to prevent power shortages and to keep the lights on. “Flexible demand” is a polite phrase. What it means is encouraging or requiring people to use electricity at times when they might not want to use it. It means shifting everyday life around the weather to accommodate low output from wind power. That is not energy security; it is energy insecurity by design.

As the economist Sir Dieter Helm has put it, such arrangements amount to voluntary power cuts, because they rely on people reducing their demand whenever renewable output falls. Sir Dieter has also warned that wind and solar do not provide firm power and that without enough firm capacity, the system simply cannot function reliably.

The facts support Sir Dieter. A recent study of wind patterns found that extended periods of very low wind are surprisingly common and can last a week or more. These wind lulls occur at times, and for durations that exceed the capability of storage and interconnectors to compensate. In those conditions, families, hospitals and industry cannot simply wait for the breeze to return, yet that is exactly what the current strategy risks requiring them to do.

Consumers are already paying the price for an energy system that prioritises intermittency over reliability. According to the Nuclear Industry Association, balancing costs, which are the payments needed to bring dispatchable power online when renewable output is too low, reached £2.1 billion between January and September this year. That represents a 25% increase on the previous year. These costs add nothing to the strength of the system; they simply mask its weakness and push bills upwards.

NESO’s winter outlook for 2025-26 forecasts an operational margin of 6.1 GW. Although this is the highest margin since 2019, the operator warns that there will still be tighter periods, when further interventions may be needed. In other words, even now, with relatively healthy margins, the system is fragile. As more dispatchable plants retire and more intermittent generation comes online, that fragility will only deepen. That point leads me to the most pressing issue underpinning this debate.

At the end of this decade, the United Kingdom faces a firm capacity crunch. Older baseload and dispatchable plants are closing, and they are not being replaced at the required scale. Nuclear projects are delayed, investment in new gas capacity has slowed, and Government strategy appears to assume that flexibility and good fortune will fill the gap. My right hon. Friend the Member for East Surrey (Claire Coutinho) has called for greater private investment in gas power stations to provide the security of supply that only firm capacity can deliver, yet the Government persist in placing their hopes in demand shifting and in a growing share of intermittent power. That is not a credible energy strategy for a modern industrial economy. Other major economies are not taking this gamble; they are investing in firm, reliable power generation, because they understand that energy security is the foundation of economic strength and national resilience.

I ask all Members to consider what this would mean in a time of national emergency or war. In such circumstances, our productive capacity would need to run at full speed, continuously and without interruption. A system that is built around weather-dependent electricity and consumer demand shifting simply could not meet that requirement. We should not resign ourselves to an energy future in which households are constantly asked to postpone cooking, heating or charging appliances during peak times purely to compensate for low wind output, nor should business be expected to halt operations because the breeze has dropped. Innovations that give consumers the option to save money or lower bills are welcome. Where demand flexibility is voluntary and genuinely benefits consumers it should be encouraged, but it must never become the cornerstone of our national energy strategy. Flexibility should support the system, not prop up its structural weakness.

Our ambition as a country should be far higher. We should aim for an energy system that provides cheap, reliable and abundant electricity at all times of day and in all seasons; a system that does not depend on weather patterns and does not require consumers to become the balancing mechanism; a system with enough firm capacity built in that the lights remain on, even in the stillest winter week.

[Martin Wrigley]

May I draw to the hon. Member’s attention the analogy with off-peak train tickets? That is a similar way of using flexibility and offering consumers cheaper tickets when the trains are empty. He would have us believe that that is not a good thing, but it is exactly the same with offering flexibility in electricity consumption.

[Greg Smith]

I am grateful for the hon. Gentleman’s intervention, but the trains will continue to run 24/7, whereas we are talking about a system in which if renewable sources drop and the wind does not blow or the sun does not shine, the electricity is not there. I am not sure that his analogy is necessarily a helpful one, but I hear the point that he makes.

Ministers are creating a system that depends on the weather, while claiming that it makes us more secure. It simply does not. It papers over a capacity crisis that is approaching fast, and it risks burdening families and businesses with the consequences of that miscalculation. True energy security requires firm power, serious planning, serious investment and, above all, a willingness to confront reality rather than wishing it away. I urge the Government to rethink their approach and pursue a strategy based on reliability first and flexibility second. The country deserves nothing less.