Short-term measures can provide welcome relief from high energy bills, but they cannot fix the infrastructure problems adding cost to Britain's electricity system. Here, Jimish Patel, co-founder of AirPlus Renewables, explains why generating more electricity closer to the point of use needs to be part of the longer-term solution.
Energy bills are firmly back on the political agenda. The government’s temporary VAT relief for qualifying domestic electricity in Great Britain, running from 1 October 2026 to 31 March 2027, offers some relief to households. But short-term measures do not resolve the longer-term challenges facing the electricity system.
That tells us something important about the problem we face. There are measures government can take to reduce the immediate burden on households, but making electricity genuinely cheaper over the long-term means looking at how our energy system works and, increasingly, where our electricity is generated.
When clean energy has nowhere to go
The UK is producing an increasing amount of renewable power, but we still regularly find ourselves in the strange position of paying wind farms to stop generating it.
The problem isn't that the UK has too much wind power. It's that the network doesn't always have enough capacity to move that electricity from where it is generated to where it is needed.
A significant proportion of the UK’s wind generation is located in Scotland and other areas relatively far from major centres of demand. When transmission routes reach their limits, the National Energy System Operator (NESO) has to balance the network, which can mean reducing output from wind farms and increasing generation elsewhere.
The cost of managing those constraints ultimately becomes part of the cost of running our electricity system. As renewable generation expands, network capacity and the timing of demand both matter to how efficiently that electricity can be used.
NESO is already looking at other ways to tackle the issue. Its Local Constraints Market, for example, has allowed consumers and businesses to increase electricity use when renewable supply is abundant in constrained areas, reducing the need to pay generators to stop producing. That approach is now being expanded nationally.
Building our way out
The obvious answer is to build more grid infrastructure, and the UK unquestionably needs to do that.
In its December 2025 announcement, Ofgem approved an initial £28 billion of investment in the UK’s gas and electricity networks, expected to grow to around £90 billion by 2031. It argues that expanding the electricity grid will ultimately reduce bills by allowing more renewable power to reach consumers and reducing constraint costs.
However, somebody has to pay for that infrastructure. Ofgem acknowledges that consumers ultimately fund network investment, while its latest price-control work is explicitly trying to prevent unnecessary upgrades being recovered prematurely through bills.
This is why I don't think the debate should be limited to how quickly we can build more pylons, cables and substations. We should also be asking how much electricity needs to travel across that infrastructure in the first place.
Generate it where you need it
Producing electricity closer to where it is consumed would have the biggest impact on the UK’s energy landscape. A factory, warehouse, hospital or commercial building generating part of its own electricity reduces the amount it needs to draw from elsewhere. Multiply that across thousands of sites and decentralised generation can complement grid expansion by reducing some of the pressure being placed on the network.
Solar has already started to make this possible. Rooftops that previously served no energy purpose can now produce electricity for the buildings beneath them. Wind has the potential to extend the principle further, particularly because it can generate electricity at times when solar generation may be less abundant.
This is the thinking behind the EDGEWIND™ Tech we have developed at AirPlus Renewables. Rather than requiring the open, uninterrupted airflow associated with conventional wind turbines, it is designed to use turbulent and non-turbulent airflow around buildings and infrastructure.
Our XEVA® system applies that technology in a compact, modular format, allowing organisations to harness wind energy closer to the point of use and complement technologies such as rooftop solar.
Reducing VAT, changing the price cap or providing targeted support can all make a difference to what people pay today. But, they don't alter the fundamental challenge of producing renewable electricity in one part of the country and then relying on an increasingly stretched network to transport it somewhere else.
If the UK wants lower-cost, more resilient electricity in the long term, we need both modernised grid infrastructure and fewer reasons to rely on it for every unit of power we consume. Generating more electricity closer to the point of use is one practical way to start doing that.
Want to reduce your reliance on the grid? Find out how XEVA® is bringing wind generation closer to the point of use on the XEVA product page.
