Why the net zero transition is not about building more wind turbines
The UK is electrifying faster than it is building the infrastructure to support it. The transition won’t fail because we can’t generate enough power, but because the grid isn’t stable enough to deliver it. says Emma Parkinson
The EV charger story is being treated like a consumer inconvenience – a queueing problem, a pricing problem, a reliability problem. It’s none of those first. It’s an infrastructure and grid stability problem dressed up as a charging debate.
It was reported that this week that the UK has nearly 88,000 charge points, while government estimates suggest we may need 250,000 to 550,000 by 2030. Even the lower end implies a sustained build rate far above what we’ve normalised as “progress”. And it’s not just the number of chargers. A rapid-charging network is a set of high-power loads that arrive in clusters, at peaks and often in precisely the places where the network is weakest. If the grid cannot carry the load, the charger is just a tokenistic screen.
Grid stability is the difference between “renewables are cheap” as a slogan and “renewables can run an economy” as a fact
This is where the UK’s natural wind and tidal potential becomes a dangerous distraction. Yes, the resource is there. But resource is not the same as deliverable power at the right time, in the right place, at the right quality. The transition fails not when you can’t generate enough electricity over a year, but when the system can’t keep frequency and voltage within tolerance on a wet Tuesday evening when demand spikes, wind falls away, and constraints prevent power moving from one region to another. Grid stability is the difference between “renewables are cheap” as a slogan and “renewables can run an economy” as a fact.
Grid stability is already costing billions – and that cost is political
The UK has already crossed the symbolic threshold: renewables produced just over half of UK electricity generation in 2024, with wind taking a record share. This should be a victory lap. Instead, the bill for keeping the system stable is turning into a quiet scandal.
NESO’s own reporting shows overall balancing costs of £2.7bn in 2024/25, up 10 per cent year on year, with thermal constraint costs rising 64 per cent to £1.7bn. The reasons are the real story: congestion, planned outages to upgrade transfer capacity, and high wind output colliding with a network that cannot move that power to where it’s needed.
Ofgem has been unusually direct about what this means for consumers: those balancing costs contributed about 3.5 per cent to electricity bills in 2024-25, around £30 per year for the average domestic consumer. That figure is not catastrophic in isolation. But it is politically lethal because it lands in the one place net zero cannot afford to be seen landing: household bills. If people start to associate renewables with higher costs and an unreliable system, you don’t just lose an argument – you lose the mandate to build.
So, when ministers talk about accelerating EV adoption, or the public talks about whether charging is convenient, the real question is whether we are building a grid that can carry electrification without pricing it into public resentment. At the moment, we are not.
The arctic is a warning
There’s another reason the “just build more wind turbines” narrative is no longer sufficient. The geopolitics has changed.
NATO is already ramping up its preparedness in the Arctic as strategic threats rise, with the region taking on renewed military significance. Finland is also pushing for an Arctic security initiative ahead of NATO’s July summit, explicitly framed around intensifying competition and the strategic value of the High North.
It is tempting to treat that as a defence story, separate from energy. It isn’t. Climate change is opening routes and exposing resources, and those resources include the critical minerals that sit inside batteries, power electronics, grid technologies and renewables. In other words: the kit that makes decarbonisation possible is also the kit that makes industrial power possible. The West wants supply chains that don’t run through Beijing. China wants to keep its leverage. Russia wants the Arctic to remain a strategic fortress. You don’t need to be paranoid to see the direction of travel: the energy transition is becoming a contest of industrial capacity and secured inputs, not just emissions targets.
That matters for the UK because it destroys the fantasy that we can outsource the difficult bit. If critical minerals, shipping routes and strategic infrastructure are increasingly contested, then resilience becomes the primary design requirement. And resilience is, again, a grid stability question.
Why oil and gas won’t go away
There is a moral impulse to say: “we must stop relying on oil and gas.” But the electricity system does not run on moral impulses. It runs on physics.
Even in 2024, gas remained the single largest fuel in UK generation by output, at 86.7TWh. And as long as the system is managing constraint volumes, variable renewables and the electrification ramp, dispatchable generation is part of how you keep the lights on. The honest transition story is not wind replacing oil and gas overnight. It is wind expanding fast while oil and gas remains a stabilising backstop until the grid, storage and stability services catch up.
In other words: for at least the next decade, many countries will be doing three things at once. They will be building renewables. They will be running legacy hydrocarbons for system security. And they will be investing heavily in grid infrastructure to make electrification possible. Any narrative that ignores one of those three is not strategy; it’s marketing.
Steel is the bottleneck material
Here is the uncomfortable truth for policymakers: the transition is not being constrained by ambition. It is being constrained by build capacity – and build capacity is, in large part, a supply chain problem. World Steel Association figures put the material intensity in blunt terms: onshore wind turbines require an average of 180 tonnes of steel per MW, while offshore wind requires an average of 450 tonnes per MW. That is before you account for the even larger steel footprint in substations, converter stations, offshore platforms, reinforcements, foundations and the physical grid upgrades that stop wind becoming “constrained” power you pay to switch off.
Now layer in the North Sea build-out being discussed in Europe. Ten countries have committed to cooperate on developing 100GW of offshore wind by 2040 and the interconnected grid infrastructure to move it – an explicit attempt to turn the North Sea into a clean energy reservoir. A UK-Germany grid operator partnership has also been proposed to develop a link designed to share up to 2GW of offshore wind power. This is the right direction – but it is steel-heavy direction. High-voltage links, offshore substations, cable protection systems, onshore conversion and reinforcement – none of it can be built out of good intentions.
This is where the conversation should become more honest about what the UK actually needs: not just more generation, but a stability and security-led industrial programme. That means more network build, faster consenting and procurement strategies that recognise materials and manufacturing as strategic constraints. It also means treating specialist steel and advanced alloys as enabling technologies rather than background commodities.
In practical terms, building out our grid and offshore energy capabilities increasingly depends on certified materials, traceability, corrosion performance, fatigue resistance and the ability to deliver complex, high-integrity components without slipping lead times.
If we’re serious about grid stability, we have to be serious about the supply chain that builds it. That means steel stockholding, specialist alloys, precision machining, QA regimes and non-destruction testing and inspection discipline. It’s the unglamorous industrial work that turns a policy target into functioning infrastructure.
Grid stability
The EV charger rollout is not a side quest. The Arctic security story is not unrelated. The offshore wind pact is not just a climate headline. They are all different faces of the same problem: the UK is entering an era where energy, security and industrial capacity are fused.
Grid stability is now a competitiveness issue. If we get it wrong, we will pay more to balance the system, frustrate electrification, and keep households sceptical. If we get it right, we don’t just integrate more wind; we unlock EV charging at scale, bring down system costs, and build resilience in a world where supply chains are being weaponised.
The next decade of the transition will be won by the countries that stop talking about megawatts and start building an industrial backbone that makes megawatts usable. The UK can be one of them. But only if it finally treats grid stability as the main event.
Emma Parkinson is CEO of International Energy Products.