
The Week in Energy — 15 August 2026
The week the state found three new places to put the price of its energy policy — and none of them is a cut.
Checking the arithmetic behind Britain's energy bet — and the political economy around it. Physics first, tribe never.
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The week the state found three new places to put the price of its energy policy — and none of them is a cut.

The moon is now a load-management event.

The week ‘consumer-led flexibility’ came to mean a licence to switch your appliances off.

Britain’s 2050 electricity system has been modelled, costed and legislated around. Nobody has tested whether it runs. It doesn't.

£45 off your bill. Nothing off the cost. — A VAT cut that moves money from your bill to your taxes, a storage programme still 'being demonstrated', and a flexibility case DESNZ admits it can't price.

On 23 June, the grid ran hotter than any official statement has admitted. The body now investigating itself is the one that ran it.

Part three of a weekly series taking the UK’s energy subsidies apart, one scheme at a time, using the Subsidy Clock. This week: the Renewables Obligation — the biggest bill of all.

Part two of a weekly series taking the UK’s energy subsidies apart, one scheme at a time, using the Subsidy Clock. This week: Contracts for Difference.

I've built a deterministic simulator of the British electricity system. It replays the last forty years of real weather, half-hour by half-hour, against any grid you care to describe.

Part one of a weekly series taking the UK's energy subsidies apart, one scheme at a time, using the Subsidy Clock. We begin with the strangest of them: the money we pay wind farms to stop generating.