Thiago Los, associate at Turquoise International, outlines why a grounded, resilient approach to net zero is essential for strengthening long‑term market competitiveness.
Britain’s energy debate has become louder, angrier and less useful for those who need clarity: the investors allocating capital, and the businesses and households that must live with the resulting systems. This net zero backlash has found an audience because it speaks to a real problem; namely that energy is too expensive.
In 2025, 9.4% of households in England were in fuel poverty[1]. The UK has the highest industrial electricity prices in the world. This puts pressure on its industrial base, and the next generation of energy-hungry businesses. In April this year, OpenAI shelved its Stargate UK data centre project, citing high energy costs and regulatory uncertainty.
Renewables arelabelled as costly, unreliable and hard to manage. High-profile events such as Spain and Portugal’s blackouts last year are held up as proof that clean energy has failed. However, blackouts aren’t caused by one technology alone. They are usually failures of system design and management. The lesson here is that grids must be built and run for the electricity system we’re creating, not for historical models.
The infrastructure gap
Britain hasn’t built enough of the infrastructure needed to make the best use of clean generation. Grid transmission and distribution constraints, slow connections and a lack of long-duration energy storage (LDES) mean that, on windy and sunny days, power is curtailed. When the wind drops and the sun sets, gas is called on to fill the gap. The result is a system that offersmore clean power but has too much exposure to the fossil-fuel price that still sets the market.
Oil and gas have not provided stability. Russia’s invasion of Ukraine in 2022 drove a severe energy shock across Europe, then conflict in Iran again reminded markets of how quickly geopolitics can affect fossil-fuel prices. The Climate Change Committee has argued that the total additional cost of a fossil-fuel price shock on the scale of 2022 is likely to be as large as the total net additional cost of meeting Britain’s pathway to net zero by 2050.
The answer is not to retreat from clean energy but to continue to progress. That means more renewables, better grids, faster connections, more flexible demand and more storage. Proven solutions need to be deployed faster, from batteries and smart charging to interconnectors.
New technologies must be further developed including LDES, smart homes, distributed generation and more intelligent ways of matching power consumption with supply. The future energy system won’t be built on one technology alone. It will require ambition on the scale that we are seeing from the likes of Michał Sołowow with SGE, who is aiming to bring 14 small modular reactors to the UK, and Alan Chang with Fuse, whose mission it is to make energy abundant.
Renewables: Costs and strengths
Renewables can have high upfront costs, but they have clear strengths: low operating costs, long useful lives and no exposure to international fuel prices once built. They don’t need to be drilled from the seabed, shipped across borders or bought on volatile markets. A clean power system is not automatically cheap. But if built well, it can be more secure, decentralised, and less exposed to the petro-shocks that have defined this decade.
People are rightly angry about high bills, but that doesn’t mean they want less secure or more volatile energy. They want a system that works. The task for government, investors and industry is to make clean energy economic and practical. Cleantech won’t win because people are told to want it; it will win when it is cheaper, more reliable, easier to use and better than what it replaces. The commercial case must be as strong as the climate case.
Cleantech up close
At Turquoise, our portfolio spans much of the climate-tech economy.
RheEnergise has demonstrated its first-of-a-kind High-Density Hydro energy-storage system, designed to make pumped hydro viable across a wider range of sites in Britain. Connected Energy is developing modular, grid-scale storage systems using second-life electric vehicle batteries, aiming to reduce waste and system costs.
That’s where we will continue to focus our work: investing in and advising ambitious companies solving real problems with cleantech. Not every company will succeed. But the need is clear.
Scrapping net zero would not make energy cheap. It would leave Britain more exposed to the same fossil-fuel shocks that have already hurt households, industry and public finances. We must build the infrastructure, back the technologies that solve real problems, and keep moving towards clean, abundant and secure energy.
[1] https://assets.publishing.service.gov.uk/media/69c3af123ed0546101e0dc3e/Main_Report__2026_Fuel_Poverty_Statistics_Publication_.pdf
