Britain’s Energy Blind Spot Is going to Fail ts Citizens

The United Kingdom is failing its citizens by treating energy security as a political talking point rather than a strategic requirement. For years, policymakers have offered the public a comforting fiction: that the green revolution alone can guarantee affordability, resilience, and independence. It cannot.

Energy security is not ideological. It is foundational. Without reliable, scalable baseload energy, economies stagnate, inflation rises, and households bear the cost. Britain’s experience since 2021 should have ended the debate. Price caps collapsed, subsidies ballooned, and consumers were forced to absorb volatility driven by supply shortages and geopolitical shocks.

The failure was not the pursuit of decarbonisation. It was the refusal to confront reality. Wind and solar are intermittent by design. They reduce emissions when conditions cooperate, but they do not anchor a system. Storage at scale remains uneconomic, and interconnectors merely shift dependence rather than eliminate it.

Ironically, the UK’s energy security may now depend less on domestic policy and more on France. Expanded undersea electricity interconnectors linking the French nuclear grid to Britain’s shores are increasingly being positioned as a solution to Britain’s power shortfall. In effect, the UK risks outsourcing energy security to a neighbouring state rather than securing it at home.

This is not resilience. It is vulnerability by another name. Grid connectivity can complement a system, but it cannot substitute for sovereign energy capacity. When Britain relies on foreign baseload generation delivered through underwater transmission lines, it replaces one form of exposure with another — political, technical, and geopolitical.

And here lies the deeper irony. Brexit was sold, in part, as a restoration of sovereignty and control. Yet without a coherent energy security strategy, the UK risks emerging from Brexit more dependent on European energy systems than before — not through treaties, but through cables, contracts, and crisis-driven necessity.

The UK dismantled domestic gas production and long-term contracting under the assumption that global markets would remain benign and plentiful. When Russia weaponised energy and shipping routes fractured, Britain discovered that climate ambition without security is not leadership — it is negligence.

Natural gas, particularly LNG sourced from stable, transparent producers, is not a betrayal of climate goals. It is the bridge that makes them achievable. It underwrites grid stability, industrial competitiveness, and household affordability while enabling coal displacement and emissions reduction.

Energy security must be treated as national infrastructure, not a campaign slogan. That means long-term supply contracts, resilient import capacity, and a willingness to invest in energy systems that work in all seasons — not just in press releases.

The green transition will succeed only if citizens can afford it and trust it. Without energy security at its core, Britain’s promise of a cleaner future risks becoming an expensive illusion — one that leaves the country more exposed, not less, to the very dependencies Brexit was meant to escape.