The UK needs to think bottoms up this Christmas, not more top down.

I read the Great British Energy strategy paper this week — what a disaster.

It’s big, top-down, 20th-century, communist-era thinking on energy. Whenever a government says it wants to “shape markets” and “respond to market failures”, allow me to translate: “subsidise uneconomic energy with taxpayers’ money” and “waste billions we don’t have”.

Solar and storage are already the lowest-cost solutions, but stupid bureaucracy is holding them back. The UK should focus on bottom-up solutions to create a digital, distributed grid with millions of smart devices — funded privately, without government capital.

Why doesn’t the government ask small, local installer businesses..the sparkies, plumbers, tradies..what’s actually holding them back, and then fix the real problems that don’t require capital?

For example:

1. Remove the paperwork and cost of maintaining certifications and training requirements that block tens of thousands of businesses from selling more solar and heat pumps.

   
   

2. Standardise and make visible what consumers are allowed to plug into the grid.

   
   

3. Ensure standardisation of technology protocols, warranties and standards for heat pumps, EV charging and batteries.

   
   

4. Ensure the quality of EV chargers: create a level playing field, proper standards, and a one-tap payment standard for public chargers. Right now, there’s no standard, setup is painful, and half of them don’t work.

   
   

5. Provide access to grid-service revenues and flexibility markets to make the economics work for battery owners and lower the cost of grid upgrades (some progress here at last, I’m happy to report).

   
   

6. Ensure low-income homes have access to financing to pay for systems.

   
   

   Instead, big government wants big headlines: 15 GW of capital into projects the market won’t fund in wind and infrastructure, and tens of billions in subsidies for nuclear.

   These are the same top-down mistakes made over and over again...drunk on debt and digging us ever deeper into the hole of big, subsidised energy.