SOMETHING UNUSUAL HAPPENED in the energy news this week: the government kept saying the quiet part aloud. The machinery the net-zero plan leans on — priced flexibility, mature storage, falling bills — was contradicted three times in seven days, and in each case the contradiction came from the department’s own publications.
The new Prime Minister’s first energy act was to zero-rate VAT on domestic electricity from October — about £45 off the typical annual bill, at a cost of roughly £850m to the Exchequer, funded by cancelling the Digital ID programme. It is worth being precise about what this does to the cost of electricity: nothing. It is the same electricity, generated the same way, at the same cost; £850m of it has simply moved from your bill, where you can see it, to your taxes, where you can’t. The announcement says nothing about why electricity is dear in the first place — the policy levies loaded onto power but not gas, an asymmetry that undermines the very electrification the government says it wants. The funding runs to the end of the financial year. The price will still be waiting in January.
Quietly, on Saturday morning, DESNZ closed out its flagship long-duration storage programme. The arithmetic deserves a wider audience than a departmental web page: five years, roughly £70m, two funding streams — and of the twenty-four projects funded, about eight reached a build-and-commission phase. The rest produced feasibility studies. Long-duration storage is not a footnote in the net-zero plan; it is the assumed answer to the windless week, the thing that is supposed to make a weather-dependent grid firm. The plan treats multi-day storage as mature technology. The government’s own demonstrator, at close-out, says it is experimental. That gap — between the grid the plan assumes and the hardware that actually exists — is the machinery The Energy Trap walks through.
The IEA’s mid-year electricity update produced the week’s most-quoted headline: renewables overtake coal in 2026. Now read the rest of the report. Coal generation is rising, as high gas prices push Asia and Europe back onto it. Gas is flat for a third year. Power-sector emissions go up 1% this year. Global demand is accelerating — 3.6% growth this year, 3.8% next — and wind and solar, growing at better than 8% a year, still cannot cover the increment. ‘Overtaking coal’ and ‘burning more coal’ sit in the same document; only one of them made the headlines. The system is getting bigger, not cleaner — which is the core arithmetic of The Energy Trap, playing out in the IEA’s own tables.
Across the Channel, John Kemp flags that Europe’s gas stores are about 54% full — the second-lowest for the date on record, by his reckoning — against a 90%-by-November refill target he judges to be slipping out of reach. Note the response: rather than filling the stores faster, Brussels now advises that 80% will do. A target you relax when you miss it is not a target; it is a forecast. Britain sits downstream of all this. Our winter power price is set by gas plant, and our gas price is set by the continental balance. If the refill stays soft, January will do the arithmetic for us.
The Clean Flexibility Roadmap update is the sort of document nobody reads, which is a pity, because it contains an admission worth reading. The department has pushed its modelling of what flexibility is actually worth to 2027, moved the battery-regulation consultation to the summer after, and concedes that households are not turning demand down at anything like the assumed rate. Flexibility is load-bearing in every net-zero cost model — it is the assumed substitute for building firm capacity. The department now says it cannot yet price its own case. The cost claims resting on that case remain, for the moment, unfunded assertions.
And heat pumps are now subsidised at both ends. A £90m accelerator will grant-fund the factories — up to £30m per project, bids in by 5 August — while the Boiler Upgrade Scheme grant for off-gas homes rose to £9,000 a few days earlier. Subsidising both ends of a supply chain tells you something about whether either end stands alone. The economics of the product still hinge on the ratio of electricity to gas prices — the same asymmetry the VAT announcement declined to mention. The two stories are one story.
Six items, one pattern: the plan’s arithmetic keeps being corrected by the people responsible for it. I’ll be watching next week too — subscribe and the watching comes to you, every Saturday.
The Energy Trap: Why the Renewable Energy Transition Can’t Work — And What Can is published by Swift Press in September.
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