Prime Minister Andy Burnham’s proposal to create a new Great British Grid has put a spotlight on one of the UK’s biggest energy challenges: connection queues. But building a larger grid to accommodate renewable energy is only half the problem. Britain also needs to get better at using electricity when it is abundant and cheap.

Across the country, renewable energy projects, industrial developments and electrification schemes are waiting years to connect to the electricity network. Great British Grid will be a new publicly owned body, intended to accelerate investment and coordination to reduce these delays and connect projects more quickly. These delays have become a major bottleneck for economic growth and low-carbon energy, and a stronger coordinating role for government may be exactly what is needed to get projects moving.

For years, energy policy has focused on getting consumers to reduce demand at peak times through smart tariffs, energy efficiency incentives and other measures.

That logic still matters. But as wind and solar generation continue to expand, the system is beginning to face the opposite problem more often: periods when there is more renewable electricity available than the network or market can absorb.

In 2024-25, around 13% of potential wind generation was........

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