The State of Britain by Richard Lyon

On the afternoon of 28 April 2025, the lights went out across Spain and Portugal for ten hours. Eight people died during the event. A study published two months later by Imperial College and Spain’s Instituto de Salud Carlos III, using the country’s official mortality surveillance system, found a further 147 excess deaths over the three days from 28 April — a 4.2% rise over expected mortality, concentrated among women aged 85 and over. The 95% confidence interval ran t​o 330.

This week on the Subsidy Clock we are looking at the scheme with the dullest name and the largest bill: the Renewables Obligation. It stands at over £92 billion. That makes it the largest subsidy on Britain’s electricity market, and the quietest. THE RENEWABLES OBLIGATION does not sound like money. It sounds like a regulation — a target, a box to tick. It is all of those things. It is also the largest single subsidy on your electricity bill that almost nobody has heard of.

THIS WEEK ON the Subsidy Clock we are looking at the direct subsidy: Contracts for Difference. It stands at £14.7 billion. What that number means, and where it is heading, is the subject of this essay. The occasion is an auction. In January the government held the largest offshore wind round in Europe’s history and called it a triumph, and by one measure it was: a record amount of wind, bought in a single sitting.

AS MY BOOK “The Energy Trap” heads towards publication, I’m starting work on its followup. This one will be called “The Grid: A User’s Manual”. It will be an explanation, in the jargon-free style of “The Energy Trap”, of how our electricity grid works — and increasingly malfunctions. The books are natural companions. “The Energy Trap” describes in general terms why weather-driven electrical grids can’t work physically, technically, or economically. “The Grid” describes why for this particular one.

A few weeks ago I switched on the Subsidy Clock: a single, live figure for what the energy transition has cost us, every pound traced back to an official source. But a total is only as useful as our grasp of what sits behind it — and the Clock is built from a dozen separate schemes and charges, most of them designed to be hard to follow. So over the coming weeks I’m going to take them apart, one at a time: what each one is, how it reaches your wallet, and what it comes to.

ON THE evening of 23 June, with a heatwave settling over Britain and much of Europe, the National Energy System Operator did something it had never done in summer before. It issued an Electricity Margin Notice: a formal signal to the market that it might be short of power the following evening, between seven and ten o’clock, by something like 1,900 megawatts. The lights stayed on. The notice was withdrawn by Wednesday afternoon, the market answered, and an EMN is not a warning of power cuts.

THIS WEEKEND Professor Jan Rosenow published a piece arguing that Europe’s best defence against the next energy price shock is the energy it has already learned not to use. Efficiency, he writes, has quietly saved the continent a third of its energy since 2000. Electrification will save more, because electric machines waste less than the ones they replace.

FOR SOME YEARS NOW, David Turver has been doing a job that properly belongs to the state. Month after month, on his Eigen Values Substack, he takes the published settlement data and reconstructs what the energy transition actually costs us: the Feed-in Tariffs, the hidden network and balancing charges, the subsidies that never quite make it into the headline figure. Forensic, sourced, and relentless.

Dear Greg, Thank you for your email of 15 June, in which you let me know that the developed world’s most expensive electricity is about to cost me 13% more. I was grateful, too, for the explanation that came with it: that the remedy for expensive electricity is to do more of the things that made it expensive. I read it closely. You make three arguments. None of them survives contact with the data your own industry publishes. Your first argument is that gas has let us down.

Photo by Planet Volumes on Unsplash First published in the Daily Sceptic. The closure of the Strait of Hormuz is the largest oil supply shock in history. The calm around it is the most dangerous thing about it. What is coming is a spike in the oil price, a shortage of the diesel that runs the economy and, behind them, a global financial crash on the 2008 model — this time with the rescue levers already spent. It will be read as the case for leaving fossil fuels faster.