Too often, the infrastructure that investors and developers stand ready to build is stymied by bottlenecks – whether in planning, regulation, or coordination.
Recent global volatility has underscored the vulnerability of our communities to fossil fuel price swings. For four years, households and businesses have faced uncertainty – often at immense personal and social cost.
Looking to the future, the global instability currently affecting gas prices is highly unlikely to go away. The answer to this worrying volatility is building our own energy infrastructure – locally developed and resilient – that puts affordability and reliability first.
If we implement this successfully, communities can receive low-carbon energy at a price competitive with gas, which is secured for them over the long term – removing risk and doubt for industry and individuals alike.
Communities that have been blighted by global fossil fuel market volatility over the last four years can be protected from these commodity swings which they have no control over. Through a combination of mission-led government and focused industry leadership, the UK can unlock the potential of local energy systems that reduce bills, create jobs, and attract the investment we need to build a low-carbon economy.
Effective coordination between developers and government will together be able to grow heat networks, from providing heat to 3 per cent of the UK in 2023, to meeting the government’s 2050 target of 20 per cent.
At the moment, local heat and power networks remain undervalued in policy terms. They are not yet recognised as strategic infrastructure, or even regulated as a utility. We need to change this illogical approach. The government must establish a national framework that accelerates approvals for projects delivering decarbonised heat and power to UK towns and cities.
Permitted development rights for heat networks and city energy schemes would speed up delivery dramatically, letting developers focus on quality and innovation rather than bureaucracy associated with heat zone monopolies.
We can empower new institutions like the National Wealth Fund to work with private investors and local authorities to identify and support investable projects. Thriving competition must be maintained at the level of cities and zones within cities, ensuring the most commercially viable projects are used to build up UK capability in heat networks.
In the rapidly changing landscape of UK energy, few moments offer real opportunities for transformative progress. But 2025 can be a turning point for the government’s mission to provide clean, affordable energy for millions of people across the UK.
If we get this right, families, schools, and businesses will be able to access low-carbon energy at prices competitive with gas – secure over the long term and protected from international volatility. Communities will finally gain control over a vital part of their local economies.
At Gren, we believe we have a competitive blueprint for positively different energy – a template we’re implementing through our Energy on Clyde project in Glasgow. First, we own the generation. That means taking local waste that would otherwise go to landfill, and turning it into heat and power: an abundant high-temperature, low-carbon heat and power source at the heart of the network.
Second, we own the infrastructure. We lay all the pipes in the ground to create one system that delivers energy across the city.
Third, we find the pioneers – the institutional partners who help us get it all started. We’re experts at building relationships, connecting universities, hospitals, major industrial sites, schools, housing associations and local businesses with one another, and back to Gren.
This blueprint can act as a platform for a broader collective progress: modular, adaptable, and ready for deployment, wherever local leadership steps up.
Our whole-systems approach, backed by robust, future-ready physical infrastructure, delivers energy around the clock with a replicable model adaptable to cities facing high fuel poverty, inefficient building stock, and complex retrofit challenges.
Recognising energy infrastructure as foundational is both a technical fix, and a vision for inclusive growth. Indeed, reporting from the Climate Change Committee indicates that the energy transition could drive growth in areas with historically low employment, as well as diversifying the workforce of core net zero sectors such as energy infrastructure, heavy industry, and construction.
Projects such as Energy on Clyde show how this can be done, creating local jobs to support the installation, construction and operation of energy networks that will span the city.
The UK’s low-carbon economy will be built from the regions outwards – with key cities, local authorities, the investment community and the national government all contributing to the creation of systems that can rise to the challenges of today and into the future.
Gren, with its vision of positively different energy – and its blueprint for affordable, reliable, low-carbon infrastructure – is ready to help lead the way.
The coming year offers a chance not to simply debate the future, but to build it: giving UK cities and their communities the energy security and economic opportunity they rightly deserve for the next 100 years.
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