Last year, the Climate Change Committee (CCC) delivered its emissions reduction progress report to parliament. In it, the CCC said that “the cost of key low-carbon technologies is falling, creating an opportunity for the UK to boost investment, reclaim global climate leadership and enhance energy security by accelerating take-up. British-based renewable energy is the cheapest and fastest way to reduce vulnerability to volatile global fossil fuel markets. The faster we get off fossil fuels, the more secure we become.”
It’s a statement that underpins the formation of the UK’s first publicly owned energy company in over 70 years, Great British Energy. Since 1986 when the gas sector was privatised, with the electricity sector following in 1990, virtually all the components of the UK’s electricity generation, transmission and distribution were placed into private hands. It’s for this reason that when polling was conducted in 2024 by More in Common, 63 per cent of Britons thought that GB Energy was a good idea.
While Great British Energy is at the beginning of its journey, we are quickly taking the first steps towards unlocking the scale and size needed to make a real impact to homes and businesses. To achieve clean power by 2030, according to the National System Energy Operator, the government will need to need to contract as much offshore wind capacity in the coming one to two years as it did in the last six years combined.
It will need to scale and operationalise carbon capture, usage and storage and hydrogen across the UK, and it will need to build all planned transmission networks on time, which involves twice as much in the next five years as was built in total over the past decade.
Great British Energy has a role to play here, and while the size of the task seems great, the British public should be under no illusion as to the huge opportunities ahead. One of our first jobs is to create a vision and yearly plan that the public can get behind. We need to show where the public’s money will be invested and the tangible return it can make, either in job creation or community energy projects.
We have an opportunity to lead in new, novel areas like floating offshore wind. For each gigawatt of offshore wind installed the sector contributes about £2bn-£3bn of gross value add to the UK. This is where we can create the long and enduring supply chains, moving the British workforce into a new era of manufacturing assets, rather than simply operating them.
As the CBI said in its recent Future Is Green report, “The net zero economy has become a powerhouse of job creation and economic expansion,” supporting 951,000 jobs in both core and wider supply chain net zero work.
Great British Energy has big ambitions. We have already appointed a brilliant start-up board with huge experience in industry, government and the trade union movement, as well as announcing our headquarters in Aberdeen. Plus, we have formed our first partnerships with the Crown Estate, the Scottish government and now hundreds of schools and hospitals with the mass deployment of solar panels, helping them to save thousands of pounds.
Great British Energy will be an enduring energy company and national institution far beyond 2030, generating ongoing wealth for Britain. For the first time in decades, we have an energy company that is owned by the British people and delivering for the British people, with clean energy at its heart.
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