UK & USA Locking in High Cost Energy

What a strange world we live in. The UK and US, long-time bastions of the free market, are now pulling the strings, dictating the energy mix from upon high, setting the supply dial for years to come. In a world of rapidly falling solar and storage costs, that has grave consequences for the future of these economies.

Solar with storage is already today the lowest cost energy in the world. The falling cost of these mass-manufactured technologies continue to destroy projections, collapsing every year, again and again.  

And yet, with polar opposite motivations - one well intentioned and one corrupt - these two democracies are united in demanding their citizens lock in to energy from high cost nuclear and fossil fuels for years to come.  The Brits are driven by climate change, dictating big nuclear and big grid investments for wind, championed by the well-meaning Ed Millband. The Americans are driven by Trump, who accepted $445m in fossil fuel donations during his election campaign, so stateside its drill baby drill.  Burn baby burn.  

Both leaders are combusting their competitiveness, driving their market economies into the grave.

Starting with the latest news in the UK this week. In a move straight out of the soviet playbook, only this time justified by “net zero”, the Brits are nationalising another decade of big energy.  Seemingly chuffed with their ill-fated and incomplete attempt at a v1 on the west coast (Hinkley Point C Nuclear Power Plant, 2.5x over budget and still not generating a single unit of electricity), this week Miliband approved the funding for its exact replica on the east coast.

Sizewell C was expected to cost £20bn just a couple years ago, but it’s now been announced that the cost has risen to £38bn (cue the beginning of a decade of steady inflation in ‘estimated cost’ adjustments, as we are sucked into the real bill piecemeal).  

I used to visit my dad at home a mile away from Sizewell in his last few months here on Earth. I remember the placards on most of the local homes “No to Sizewell” & “Nuclear is not green”.  

Why does big government force this economic and societal disaster down from above?   The public and the market are not asking for it.

Already 2x budget before it’s even started construction, no investor will write a check at market prices, so the undeserving public will underwrite the whole thing.

We, the Brits will be on the hook for £1 per household, every month, for the next ten years. Not to keep the lights on. Not to cut emissions. But to guarantee risk-free returns for private equity firms and utility investors. That’s not policy, that’s outrageous. Positioned as ‘just’ a pound a month, that’s a tax on household wealth of £3.4bn over 10 years - before the costs double and double again and we’re forced to ‘finish job off’ with more subsidies (think HS2). All this to deliver electricity that’s twice as expensive as solar and storage today.  

Now let’s imagine what £3.4bn could do for healthcare, education and defence…

A UK business, X-links had offered to deliver over 3GW of solar power with storage, delivering constant baseload power 365 days of the year into the UK grid (via an undersea cable from Morocco) at about half the price of nuclear.  On July 3 this project was disallowed from participating in Miliband’s command-and-control energy economy.

This company had private funding and required no government subsidy (you need a “contract for difference” agreement from the government to sell at this scale into the grid, but public funds would be required).  We already get over 10% of our electricity from interconnectors in the UK, another source would further de-risk supply. But no, the civil ‘servants’ call the shots in modern Britain, not the public, not the open, free market.

What’s even more troubling is that we won’t get a single electron from Sizewell C for another 10-15 years (X-links could be built and live in 3 years and small scale solar is anywhere from 4 hours to a few days to go live).  The government handily avoided providing a target date, having learned their mistake from Hinkley, which was supposed to be live by now, but is expected sometime around 2030 (they don’t know yet!).  This matters to you, your household and your country’s competitiveness - because the world of energy is changing quickly before our eyes.

The declining cost of solar and storage makes nuclear obsolete before it’s even begun construction.

Last month, Ember found that solar and storage could now deliver 24-hour power for just 10 cents a kilowatt-hour. Coal came in at 12. Nuclear? 18. Why? Because solar and battery tech has taken a giant leap. Big battery units doubled their output in the same container size, and costs dropped 40 percent in 2024. That trend has only picked up in 2025. Solar and storage costs fell 22 percent last year, and they’re still dropping while performance climbs. Those numbers are already out of date!

In a world like this, locking a country into coal or nuclear for the next decade isn't a strategy. It’s economic suicide.

China, India, the Middle East, Australia, are all-in on solar and storage. They are fast becoming the leading “electro-states” who are on a path now to huge abundance of low cost energy - the foundation of a competitive economy.  How will the British economy look in 2040 with 18-30c nuclear power (with the expensive grid upgrades required for huge centralised wind power investments), when China and other electrostates are at 3c?  (Tenders are already below 2c for utility scale solar in sunny regions)

The market - which is to say, the plethora of consumers, technologists, commercial businesses owners, managers, academics, and investors - but ultimately consumers - collectively knows that locking into one technology like this is madness - that’s why the market hasn’t ever invested in nuclear and certainly wouldn’t now. So why should we let the opinions of Miliband and Trump dictate the outcome?

Let’s look across the pond, the Trump administration just took the axe to solar and wind with the BBB rated bill. Right at the time when their economy needs a ton more electricity supply, to power its attempts to win in AI and power economic growth - the government has hiked tariffs and removed subsidies on the only technology that can deliver power within 5 years. Of course they kept the subsidies for nuclear and fossil fuels.   

You’ll wait 5 years for a gas turbine in America today and as we’ve seen nuclear is 15 years out if you’re lucky.  So that can only mean rapidly rising electricity prices - bad for USA inc and consumers alike.  The current US government is determined for the country to lead in fossil fuels, to sell and burn coal, gas and oil.  To be a petrostate at all costs.  The old technology. But with solar and storage now “the lowest cost electricity humanity has ever had” according to the IEA, and now falling in cost at least 10-20% per annum, with the US economic competition leaning in, we have to ask: who’s going to win? 

What does the US economy look like in the 2030’s thanks to 4 years of bad decisions with this administration. As AI chip differentiation reduces (a highly probable outcome), the lowest cost energy state wins the AI race. Who wins the AI race?

It’s UK/USA centrally-controlled old tech VS the learning curve of solar and storage and the electro-state economies leaning in hard. Who’s going to win?The maths seems obvious to me.  

It’s time to change course immediately in the UK & USA:

• Initiate the Electric Protocol in both countries to enable instant grid access with automated permitting to all energy assets, with equal compensation for energy and grid services provided.  There is 3,000GW in the queue already globally, and permitting alone doubles the cost of home solar in the USA.

• Remove all subsidies to all energy assets and let the market allocate capital and resources (the government cannot be as good as the market at solving for low-cost energy and climate)

• Embrace Open Pricing - Initiate collaborative and supportive policies to ensure diverse supply chains and remove all tariffs on clean tech.

American and British entrepreneurs and customers will do the rest.