The Tony Blair Institute for Global Change (TBI) has questioned the Governments’s decision to crackdown on North Sea oil production.

In a think piece entitled Why Britain Needs an Energy-Strategy Reset, the Institute argues that reaching net-zero by 2050 requires building an energy system that is affordable, reliable and capable of supporting electrification at scale.

Critically it states that: “Energy policy is not an objective in itself: it is an example of infrastructure policy” and notes that the current policies measure success “in gigawatts contracted and projects approved, with progress measured against a headline delivery target”.

This framing, it believes, restricts the definition of success and “has lost sight of whether it is cheap, secure and capable of powering a modern economy”.

All of which is pretty damning, bur even more so in the detail, as the Clean Power 2030 treats cost as a downstream issue, rather than considering a bigger picture where if energy becomes too expensive, everything else comes under strain: electrification stalls, industry relocates, households resist and climate ambition collapses under political pressure. In fact, pretty much the same thing as happened with over taxation.

TBI advances the concept of cheaper power 2030 as an organising objective of electricity policy, through market reform, planning reform and strategic grid development, and, critically, ensuring that any renewable capacity supported by the Government demonstrably lowers electricity bills.

One example of this reset would be exploiting the North Sea basin to underpin energy security and create revenue. After all, surely it is a reduction in oil used by the UK that matters, not where it is drilled? Especially if the UK has higher environmental standards than elsewhere.

The paper also argues that the global landscape has changed, assumptions on growth and trade have vanished and, in another detailed example, that Allocation Round 7 saw offshore-wind projects secure contracts at strike prices of about £90/MWh in 2024 prices, reduced due to the five-year extension of the contracts awarded to those projects, meaning that offshore-wind costs have risen materially from their 2019 low, reversing the assumption that scale alone would continue to drive prices down.

Another example would be a grid being built to help integrate renewables where they stand, without consideration of how to minimise grid buildout by placing supply closer to demand.

In summary, the paper notes that the UK will not out-compete China in wind turbines or batteries, but it can lead in the areas that underpin energy abundance: firm low-carbon power, system optimisation, digital-energy management, market design and frontier technologies that scale over decades, not election cycles. Or, in short, Clean Power 2030 is leading the UK in the wrong direction.

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