The UK is building its biggest transmission network since roughly the 1960s, according to Chris Stark, the government's Head of Mission Control for Clean Power 2030.
Most countries chasing clean power have focused on adding generation. Stark's team went further: it rewrote the queue of which projects get connected to the grid at all, using new legislative powers to push strategically important projects to the front and everything else back.
"Here's something you don't often hear government say: leave it alone, and let you get on with it."
Stark ran the UK's statutory climate advisory body, the Climate Change Committee, for six or seven years before taking this role, and has worked on the country's energy transition for almost 15 years.
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Here are the 8 lessons that matter.
👤 Guest: Chris Stark, Head of Mission Control for Clean Power 2030 at the UK's Department for Energy Security and Net Zero, and former chief executive of the Climate Change Committee
🎙️ Host: Dominic Hudson, RBC Capital Markets' Head of Investment Banking for Europe and APAC
📰 Published: 10 September 2026 on RBC Capital Markets' Powering Sustainable Ideas feed, recorded 25 June 2026 at RBC's Energy Transition Conference in London
🟢 Spotify | ⏱️ 14 min
Key Takeaways
The UK's clean-power target is a mostly-clean system by 2030, not a fully clean one
Stark says the country is two years into the buildout already
Electrification is the core strategy: double the power system, and overall energy use falls by half
Electric cars and heat pumps use far less energy than what they replace
The grid is being rebuilt around wind instead of coal, in the biggest transmission build since roughly the 1960s
Renewable contracts were extended from 15 to 20 years to bring today's costs down
The connections queue was reordered by law, pushing the most useful projects to the front
Stark calls it "the hardest bit of this" and says new connection offers are only now going out
Bills stay high because demand is too low for the system that's been built
Growing EVs from about 3 million to 30 million could cut a quarter off the unit cost of electricity
Data centers help the economics if they locate where power is otherwise being wasted
Long-term contracts run through an independent counterparty, deliberately insulating investors from a change of government
1. Adviser to Mission Control
Dominic Hudson opened by asking how Stark went from running the UK's independent climate watchdog to leading the government's own delivery effort.
Stark said he isn't a political hire. "I came in to this job when Labor won the election in 2024. I'm not a political appointee, but I knew Ed Miliband, the Energy Secretary, very well." He spent six or seven years running the Climate Change Committee, the statutory body that advises UK governments on the energy transition, and has worked on the transition in some form for almost 15 years
The target he described is deliberately short of full decarbonization. "We came in with this idea that we could reach not a fully clean power system, but a mostly clean power system by 2030"
His method is investment first. "You needed much more investment in that energy system, and that is how you displace the dirty stuff." He said the country is "two years into that" build already
2. Electrify, Halve Energy
Asked to describe the mission at a macro scale, Stark led with the arithmetic behind electrification rather than a climate argument.
The core claim is that using more electricity actually means using less total energy. "We need to double the size of the power system, and in so doing, as we electrify, we will halve overall energy use, and that is simply because of electrification... the electric cars, the heat pumps, etc. are just much, much more energy efficient."
He said the case holds regardless of anyone's view on climate. Electrification makes "a much more efficient economy overall," and pairing it with more domestic power generation also improves energy security
The UK's energy system operator, Neso, modeled how much renewable and later nuclear capacity the grid could handle by 2030 if the connections and transmission problems were solved
3. Turning the Grid Inside Out
Stark described the physical rebuild required to move power from where wind blows to where demand actually sits.
The scale of the build is historic. "We have now the biggest transmission build that we've seen since probably the 1960s in this country." He called the shift "a bit like turning the grid inside out"
The grid's original design assumed a fuel source that's disappearing. "The grid was planned around coal. It will, in the future, be planned around wind, mainly," with the new transmission lines relieving constraints on moving wind power from where it's generated to demand centers
Alongside the transmission build, the government has been approving clean energy projects "faster than any previous government"
4. Reordering the Queue
The most disruptive change, in Stark's account, wasn't building new infrastructure — it was rewriting who gets to use the infrastructure that already exists.
Renewable contracts were extended to bring costs forward. Stark said the government lengthened the Contract for Difference, its main renewables policy tool. "We've extended the tenor of that to 20 years, from 15, and that's deliberate to try and bring down the cost today, acknowledging that the major benefits of that will come in the future, rather than today."
The queue of projects waiting to connect to the grid was reordered by law. "Somewhere in the queue of projects across Britain are the projects that we actually want to see on the system in the 2030s, so let's go into that and reorder it." He called it "a very un-British thing to do" and said the government had to take legislative powers to do it
He named it the hardest part of the whole effort. "That has definitely been the hardest bit of this." New connection offers are only now starting to go out
5. Why Bills Are Still High
Asked directly about affordability, Stark said the country solved only half of the problem it set out to fix.
He rejected the idea that the "energy trilemma" — security, cost and decarbonization — has an easy simultaneous answer. "There was a period when we thought we'd solved the trilemma... the idea that there is a sort of easy answer to that is very much not the case"
The main driver of high bills is a legacy policy choice, not the buildout itself. The UK put the levies and policy costs that funded the transition directly onto electricity bills, and moving them onto the exchequer instead is underway but constrained by "a tough fiscal environment"
The deeper problem is that Britain built supply without building demand. "We've done the first part only, which is to grow the generation and the storage in the grid... electricity demand is too low." In a system with large fixed costs, he said, more demand spreads those costs over more usage and pushes bills down faster
6. EVs and Data Centers
Stark named two specific sources of new demand that would do more for affordability than anything else on the table.
Electric vehicles are the fastest lever, in his view. The UK has "about 3 million vehicles or so" on the road today; getting to 30 million, combined with a modest rollout of heat pumps, could "cut a quarter off the unit cost"
EVs also add flexibility, not just demand. Because charging times can shift, growing the EV fleet lets the system move consumption to when power is cheapest, which he called the quickest route to lower bills for consumers who want it
Data centers help specifically when they're sited well. Locating them where there are "spare electrons that would otherwise be constrained off" turns otherwise-wasted grid capacity into useful demand
For heavy industry, the government is cutting costs directly through rebates that strip grid costs and levies from the heaviest energy users, though Stark said most of that relief hasn't fully reached customers yet
7. CCS and Hydrogen's Limits
Asked to finish on electrification's limits, Stark turned to what's left over once electrification does as much as it can.
Electrification is improving faster than expected, but it isn't the whole answer. "What we learn every year we look at it is they can do more than we thought the previous year," but he estimated it might only do "70-80% of the job from here to 2050," leaving a "rump" that needs other technology
He said the UK has a natural advantage in carbon capture. The country has depleted oil and gas wells that can store carbon, and its recent spending review made "big allocation for CCS" — though he said those projects are turning out more expensive than expected
Hydrogen production, use and storage round out the remaining gap, and he called developing both technologies expensive but necessary, since he said there's no credible path to net zero — in the UK or globally — without them
8. Investor Certainty vs PM
Asked how long-term investors should think about UK political risk with a Prime Minister transition underway, Stark argued the structure of the contracts, not the government in office, is what protects them.
He doesn't expect the change in Prime Minister to shift the underlying agenda. "I don't expect with the change of Prime Minister that there will be a change of agenda when it comes to the things that we've spoken about," because the program also serves energy security and affordability goals that have bipartisan appeal
The contracts are deliberately built so government isn't the counterparty. Renewable projects sit on long-term, fixed-revenue Contracts for Difference administered by the LCCC, a body independent of government, which he said makes the contracts "extremely difficult to unpick" by design
His closing argument was about what actually sets the cost of energy going forward. "This energy transition overall is a capital-intensive one... it's the cost of finance that will determine the cost overall." His advice to investors: "Here's something you don't often hear government say: leave it alone, and let you get on with it."
Bonus Insights
Stark said Neso, the UK's energy system operator, modeled not just what renewable capacity the grid could carry by 2030 but also how much more nuclear capacity it could support beyond that date, once the connections and grid-build problems were solved
Stark's bottom line is that the UK has already built the supply side of a cleaner grid, and that lower bills now depend on growing demand — through EVs, data centers and industry — fast enough to spread the system's fixed costs, while long-term contracts insulate investors from whoever holds office next.
Products, Companies & Tools Mentioned
Neso (The UK's energy system operator; Stark said its modeling of how much renewable and nuclear capacity the grid could carry by 2030 shaped the whole build-out plan)
Low Carbon Contracts Company (The independent body that acts as counterparty on renewable energy contracts instead of the government, which Stark said is what makes them "extremely difficult to unpick" if a future government wanted to)
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