Recent global events have thrown into stark relief just how exposed the UK remains to energy markets it cannot control. Russia’s invasion of Ukraine sent gas prices surging across Europe. Now, with US and Israeli military action against Iran, oil prices spiked by over 40% in days – briefly hitting their highest level in nearly four years – before partially retreating on diplomatic signals. Whatever one’s political persuasion, the lesson is the same: when the UK’s energy supply depends on globally traded fossil fuels, events thousands of miles away land directly on British bills. The solution isn’t to find friendlier suppliers – it’s to need fewer of them.
Some politicians argue that drilling more North Sea oil would protect British consumers from global energy shocks. It wouldn’t. North Sea crude is sold on global markets at global prices – it doesn’t stay in the UK, and it doesn’t make petrol cheaper. UK refineries are largely built for a different grade of oil anyway, so we export most of what we drill and import what we actually need regardless. Oil is a globally traded commodity, and when conflict disrupts supply in the Middle East, the price rises everywhere at once.
There are three ways to build genuine resilience. The first is to increase the share of renewable, British energy on the grid – predominantly solar and wind, combined with a baseline of nuclear. The numbers illustrate the point: if renewables make up 25% of grid electricity, a 40% increase in gas prices drives energy costs up by around 30%. At 75% renewables, the same shock produces only a 10% increase. There is, however, a caveat: the UK’s wholesale electricity market uses marginal pricing, meaning a gas price spike transmits across the entire bill regardless of how much renewable capacity is online. Decoupling renewable electricity prices from the gas price – through market reform and variable tariffs – is therefore an essential companion to grid decarbonisation. Without it, British consumers remain exposed to global commodity markets even as the turbines turn overhead.
The second is storage. Nuclear, wind, and solar do not generate on demand, and neither aligns neatly with peaks in national consumption. One underutilised solution is thermal storage applied to heat demand. Heating accounts for around 40% of UK energy consumption and is largely still met by gas. Pairing electrified heat sources – heat pumps, electric boilers, and heat networks – with thermal stores that absorb cheap, surplus renewable electricity during periods of high generation effectively removes a large slab of flexible demand from the grid at peak times. The grid does not need to store electricity if the heat it would have generated is already sitting in a well-insulated tank.
The third is interconnection. The subsea cables linking the UK to France, Belgium, the Netherlands, Norway, and Ireland are not a vulnerability – they are a resilience mechanism. When domestic generation falls short, the ability to draw on surplus renewable capacity from continental Europe or Norwegian hydro is a genuine buffer. This requires sustained investment in interconnector capacity and in the diplomatic relationships that make cross-border electricity trading possible. Energy security and foreign policy are not separate conversations.
The UK has a genuine opportunity to build an energy system that is structurally resistant to the geopolitical turbulence that has repeatedly punished consumers over the past decade. That means more renewables, more storage, smarter markets, and stronger international connections – not as isolated initiatives, but as a coherent national strategy. None of this happens without political will, and none of it is served by the false comfort of North Sea drilling. The cheapest, most secure unit of energy is one whose price cannot be set in a foreign capital.
