The Circuit Breaker
The new Prime Minister has chosen his metaphor. He should take it literally.
“The difficulty lies, not in the new ideas, but in escaping from the old ones, which ramify, for those brought up as most of us have been, into every corner of our minds.”
- John Maynard Keynes, The General Theory (1936)
“We will make this moment a circuit breaker for Britain,” Prime Minister Andy Burnham said on the steps of Downing Street on 20 July, “bringing forward the biggest changes in the last 40 years.”
He was speaking politically. The phrase deserves to be taken technically.
A circuit breaker is a device with one job. When the current running through a system exceeds what the system was designed to carry, it interrupts the flow before the fault destroys the machine. It does not apportion blame. It does not care how the wiring got that way, or who owned it, or which party was in power when the insulation began to perish. It recognises that the load has changed and that the old configuration can no longer carry it safely.
Historians are trained to ask two questions of any moment: why, and so what? Why does Britain, of all countries, need its breaker tripped? And so what should a government that has reached for this metaphor actually do? The answers matter more than the politics, because the fault in Britain’s system is architectural, not ideological. So, mercifully, is much of the fix.
Why: the fault is in the architecture
Britain built one of the world’s earliest centralised energy systems, and it was the right engineering for its century. The first public power station anywhere lit Holborn Viaduct in 1882. Commercial operation of the national 132kV grid began in 1935, creating the world’s first integrated national grid. It took generation to the coal seams and the estuaries, captured vast economies of scale, and delivered electricity to every postcode through one synchronised system. Ownership changed hands over the decades, from private pioneers to state monopoly to privatised utilities and regulated markets, and the argument about which of those was best has filled forty years of politics. The architecture outlasted every one of them: large, remote generation; long wires; passive consumers at the far end.
The load has changed. The architecture has not.
Consider what the old configuration is now asked to carry. By one useful-energy accounting, roughly two-thirds of primary energy can be lost before it provides an energy service: in conversion and generation, in networks and in inefficient end use. The Edge, the book from which this Substack takes its name, made the case that the world fights over the very resources it then throws away; nowhere is that truer than in an economy which paid the highest industrial electricity price in the IEA in 2024 while wasting much of what it buys. Every factory, foundry and data centre that might locate in Britain reads those prices first. Britain’s pre-reform connections queue exceeded 700GW and could leave projects waiting up to ten years; NESO has since reordered the pipeline and begun issuing earlier offers to shovel-ready projects. Meanwhile a crisis four thousand miles away lands directly on British doorsteps: Ofgem raised the household price cap by 13 per cent in July, attributing the increase to higher wholesale gas prices driven by conflict in the Middle East. Domestic drilling would not insulate consumers from internationally traded oil and gas prices.
There is a precedent for thinking clearly about this. After Russia annexed Crimea in 2014, the European Commission estimated that every additional 1 per cent of EU energy savings would cut gas imports by 2.6 per cent. The leverage sits on the demand side, close to use, and it always has.
An engineer surveying Britain’s system would not ask whose fault it is. The fault current exceeds the rating. Trip the breaker. Reconfigure.
The fit
It is timely to set the Prime Minister’s stated objectives, in his own words, against what the efficient, decentralised generation of energy actually does. No view is required on the wider programme, and none is offered here. This is a matter of reading the specification and checking it against the physics.
“Some breathing space now, some help with the cost of living.” The first instalment arrived on day two: VAT on electricity cut from October, worth about £45 a year to a typical household, funded by cancelling a digital identity scheme. The instinct is right, and the sum is the argument for going further. Efficiency is among the fastest and cheapest levers available. The cheapest, cleanest, most secure megawatt remains the one never generated because it was never wasted. Major new supply and network infrastructure often takes years; many efficiency measures can be installed within months and pay back in under two years. It is an energy policy that can deliver within a Parliament, sometimes within a news cycle.
“Life’s essentials back under stronger public control, to make them affordable to you again.” Affordability is the operative word, and decentralisation can deliver it more directly than a change of ownership alone. A megawatt generated and consumed behind the meter, on the roof or in the basement or at the factory, does not pass through the wholesale electricity market or the public network. It can therefore reduce exposure to traded prices and network charges, though backup supply, financing and fuel costs remain. Whoever holds the equity, that is a powerful form of control over price, and it often requires no new act of Parliament.
“We will take power out of here and carry it into every postcode in the land.” He meant political power. Remove the metaphor and the sentence still stands. Generation, storage and efficiency deployed postcode by postcode is devolution expressed in copper and silicon. The Mayoral Strategic Authorities created by this year’s devolution act are the natural delivery vehicles, ready to do for heat, power and building fabric what Greater Manchester did for its buses.
“Re-industrialising Britain, using public procurement to back British industry.” The retrofit of the national building stock (heat pumps, controls, batteries, local networks) is manufacturing and skilled installation work spread across every constituency, in a broadly defined net zero economy estimated to support more than a million jobs directly and through its supply chains. Attach apprenticeships to the procurement, as the government intends, and the result is an industrial strategy that cannot be offshored. The buildings cannot be.
“A new economic model.” Of which more below, because it is the heart of the matter.
The fit requires no political agreement of any kind. These are the things an investor’s due diligence would list: often-rapid payback, reduced price exposure, local delivery, domestic labour content, commercial returns. After all, if it’s not commercial, it’s not sustainable. The strength of this programme is precisely that it does not need believers.
None of this is speculative, and none of it required inventing a market. Santander’s nationwide LED financing package refitted more than 800 branches and offices with some 90,000 lamps, alongside building-management and HVAC optimisation; it was arranged a decade ago, under the rules as they stood. United Utilities’ sites host solar, wind and mini-hydro generation built and run behind the meter. Both were assets owned by SDCL’s own listed efficiency trust. The disclosure is relevant: this Substack argues for the asset class its author invests in, and the contracted returns are precisely why. Islington warms 1,350 homes, two leisure centres and a school with heat recovered from the London Underground, a world first that runs beneath City Road. Manchester heats its civic quarter, with the Town Hall and Bridgewater Hall among the customers, from a single modern energy centre. Small pictures individually. Together they are the new architecture in miniature: each one built inside the prevailing rulebook. The question is not whether the model works. It is why, twenty years in, so few of these opportunities have been taken.
So what: the reset
Here the argument must go further than the framework so far announced. Not because the direction is wrong; because the distance is short.
Everything signalled to date (franchising models, public oversight, a VAT cut on bills) changes who governs the system, or what it charges. Perhaps necessary. But governance reform layered onto the same centralised architecture inherits that architecture’s limits: the waste, the queue, the exposure to the marginal barrel. Franchised buses still needed roads worth driving on. A circuit breaker that trips and then reconnects the same faulty circuit has produced a moment of silence, and nothing else.
The genuine reset is architectural: a deliberate national transformation from centralised to decentralised. Efficiency first, always, because waste cannot usefully be decentralised and because reducing the size of the problem is the precondition for solving it. Then generation close to load, storage close to load, and buildings designed so that a low bill is a property of the asset rather than a promise of a regulator. The government’s council-housebuilding drive could become a national efficiency-first demonstration if low energy costs are designed into every home from day one. And the demand side of the new economy should be built the same way. As artificial intelligence evolves from training to inference (which Deloitte forecasts at roughly two-thirds of AI compute this year), demand is accelerating: the IEA expects electricity use by AI-focused data centres to more than triple between 2025 and 2030. Britain’s opportunity is the distributed tier of that infrastructure: regional and enterprise-scale facilities designed around efficient power, behind-the-meter supply where viable, and useful heat for neighbouring buildings, reducing or avoiding long waits for network reinforcement.
Why call this the growth strategy rather than one candidate among many? Because energy is not a sector. It is the input cost of every sector, and everyone and everything depends on it. Productivity is output per unit of input; Britain currently runs its economy through a system that wastes much of what it buys at prices its competitors do not pay. No programme of skills, planning or tax reform can outrun that arithmetic, however well designed. The countries that deliver the cheapest, most reliable energy to the point of use will decide where the next generation of industry locates, in compute, in advanced manufacturing, in life sciences. On the timescale that matters, decentralised solutions are among the few routes Britain can deploy without waiting for every upstream constraint to clear. Cheap delivered energy is upstream of productive, competitive, innovating, leading and growing. It is not a fifth ambition to sit alongside those words in a speech. It is their precondition: the sine qua non.
What Britain can do about it
The subtitle of The Edge promised something about what we can do about it, and being realistic about the starting position comes first. Britain is an energy importer and will remain one. Net import dependency was 43.5 per cent in 2025; oil and gas production was already 75 per cent below its 1999 peak in 2024. The North Sea Transition Authority reports that 47.7 billion barrels of oil equivalent had been produced by the end of 2024, with 2.9 billion barrels of proved and probable reserves plus contingent and prospective resources whose recovery is uncertain. The condition is not unique. Japan’s energy self-sufficiency was just 16.4 per cent in the 2024 fiscal year, yet it has built one of the most sophisticated industrial economies on earth around that fact. But the condition is sharpening. The United States remained the world’s largest crude-oil and natural-gas producer in 2025 and was the largest exporter of liquefied natural gas in 2024; in 2024 it supplied more than a third of Britain’s imported crude. The EU, meanwhile, met 57 per cent of its 2024 energy needs through net imports and is bidding for many of the same cargoes. Between energy abundance on one side of the Atlantic and energy deficit on the other, an importer that also wastes much of what it buys, at exceptionally high industrial electricity prices, has placed itself at the wrong end of every queue.
So the answer cannot be to imitate the endowments of others. Britain will not drill its way to Texan abundance; the geology has already cast its vote. What an importer can do is need less, and earn more from what it needs. Efficiency is the one energy resource distributed in proportion to waste, which means Britain is unusually rich in it. The programme, then: a shift to efficiency, competitiveness, profitability, resilience and security, executed at a speed that outpaces every G7 peer. Speed is the point, not a flourish. Each G7 economy faces its own version of the same arithmetic, and the prize goes to whichever converts first. Britain has form. It was the first G7 country to halve its emissions against 1990. The same pace, applied this time to the demand side and to generation close to load, would do for cost, competitiveness and security what the last three decades did for carbon; and it is the one race in which an importer starts level with the superpowers.
Starting level also brings a rarer advantage: the chance to learn from those who went first, at their expense rather than ours. The world’s data centre buildout has begun to generate its own weather. In July, New York imposed the first statewide moratorium on new hyperscale data centres, pausing certain environmental permits for up to one year while standards are written. Ireland has moved on from Dublin’s grid bottleneck to a connection policy requiring new data centres to match their import demand with generation or storage and to source at least 80 per cent of annual demand from additional Irish renewables. In Loudoun County, Virginia, the environmental regulator estimated in 2023 that data centres had more than 4,000 diesel backup generators; Virginia has since created a separate large-load tariff to reduce cost-shifting to other customers. The pattern repeats because the sequence repeats: the economic development benefits are real, but when energy, water, environmental and community questions are left until last, moratoria, connection restrictions and tougher tariffs follow. Britain can run that film in reverse. Settle the energy first, efficient and behind the meter where viable and close to load. Settle the water and the waste heat first, with cooling designed for a crowded island and heat sold to the neighbours rather than vented at the sky. Settle the community terms first, with jobs, apprenticeships and lower local bills written into the consent rather than promised after it. Address those considerations at the start, not the end, and the country can compete, and win, on the axes that will decide where the next industrial generation locates: cost, reliability, security, environmental footprint, scale and speed.
The ten-year plan is the blueprint
The Prime Minister has promised “a new plan for Britain” later this year, a ten-year path. That plan is where the metaphor becomes an engineering document, or remains a speech.
The instruments are already on the bench, which is unusual and worth saying. The National Wealth Fund has £27.8 billion of financial capacity designed to crowd in private investment, with building retrofit explicitly in scope. Great British Energy is funding local and community projects and, by May 2026, had completed solar installations at 225 schools and colleges and 162 NHS sites, with military sites also in the programme: the right idea, awaiting an order of magnitude. Contracts for Difference remain structurally durable. The Mayoral Strategic Authorities stand ready. What is missing is not machinery. It is declared architecture: a plan whose spine is the stated intent to move Britain, measurably, year by year, from centralised to decentralised, with efficiency as the first resort of policy rather than the last.
There is pruning to do as well as planting. This Substack has written before about the green stop: investors pausing over green labels, greenwash and greenlash. There is a second green stop, less discussed, written into the rulebook itself, where machinery erected in the name of good order now mainly stops good projects. The licence exemptions that govern how much power a site may supply to neighbours over a private wire remain rooted in a 2001 Order, sized for a century in which nobody’s roof was a power station; reviewing them could unlock local supply at scale. The connection queue is at last being triaged, with capacity to be reserved or reallocated for strategic demand and a Connections Accelerator Service for AI Growth Zones. The government’s estimate is that its combined AI Growth Zone package could reduce time to power by up to five years and save a 500MW data centre up to £80 million a year in electricity bills: a measure of the economic value of faster connections and lower power costs. Heat network zoning, enabled by the Energy Act 2023 but still awaiting implementing regulations, should become the fastest permission in planning rather than the newest queue. None of this means abandoning a single environmental standard. It means distinguishing the rules that protect outcomes from the rules that merely protect process, and a ten-year plan is exactly the place to draw the line.
Britain has done this before, in the other direction. It built the first public power station and the first integrated national grid, and helped pioneer the energy economy of scale. The engineering, the finance and the science required to lead the decentralised revolution are all resident here, alongside a habit, world-class and wholly unhelpful, of talking about such things rather than doing them. Rewire Britain first, profitably, and then export the playbook to a world that is one urbanising decade behind. Call it Britpower.
We are at the edge, not the end, of history, and an edge is a turning point as well as a limit. Keynes warned that old ideas ramify into every corner of our minds; in Britain’s case they ramify into every corner of the grid. The country does not need to fight its existing model or relitigate the forty years the Prime Minister wants to leave behind. The new idea is the easy part. It needs only to escape the old one, and for once the politics, the technology and the returns all point the same way. The metaphor is exactly right. The invitation is to mean it. Trip the breaker. Reconfigure the circuit. Then watch what the machine can do.
Jonathan Maxwell is the CEO of Sustainable Development Capital LLP and author of The Edge. He writes about energy, climate, finance, and geopolitics.
Views expressed are personal and do not constitute investment advice.
To learn more about energy efficiency, visit the website of SEIT plc, or SDCL Group.