{"id":3515189,"date":"2025-08-18T09:02:50","date_gmt":"2025-08-18T09:02:50","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.resilience.org\/?p=3515189"},"modified":"2025-08-18T09:02:50","modified_gmt":"2025-08-18T09:02:50","slug":"how-resilient-is-our-energy-system-reflections-on-the-findings-of-a-report-by-the-national-preparedness-commission","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.resilience.org\/stories\/2025-08-18\/how-resilient-is-our-energy-system-reflections-on-the-findings-of-a-report-by-the-national-preparedness-commission\/","title":{"rendered":"How resilient is our energy system? Reflections on the findings of a report by the National Preparedness Commission"},"content":{"rendered":"

The National Preparedness Commission<\/a> is an independent and non-political body, seeking to promote policies and actions to help the UK be capable of avoiding, responding to and recovering from major shocks and challenges, whatever the initial cause.\u00a0 Its recent report \u201cAssessing Energy Resilience in the UK 2050<\/a>\u201d was prepared by an international management consultancy firm, Baringa, that has a credible reputation.<\/p>\n

Set alongside all the other infrastructure challenges this country faces, it makes worrying reading. Ageing infrastructure and bottlenecks in grid connectivity are key concerns, along with a chronic shortage of skilled labour. The risks from many sources need to be assessed together because they are interconnected and cascading \u2013a power cut can affect water supply and processing of sewage, with associated risks and challenges to the population \u2013 yet governance and responsibility in the energy sector is fragmented between government, energy producers, retail supplies, Ofgem, and NESO, making it more complex to ensure system resilience.\u00a0 Cybersecurity in the UK energy industry is particularly poor, especially in the wind sector, with only 1% of sites having measures in place.<\/p>\n

The growth of renewable energy relies on scarce mineral resources for which global competition is fierce. Even if energy efficiency increases, demand will rise in unpredictable ways, due to EV charging, growth of AI and other internet uses.<\/p>\n

To make the energy system resilient requires identifying all potential risks and their impacts, maintaining flexibility and redundancy in the system, and ensuring a wide range of stakeholders are involved in decision making.<\/p>\n

Demand reduction is discussed only briefly \u2013 and the possibility and impacts of the need for rationing is not broached at all.\u00a0 In terms of the changing climate, the main issues raised are flooding of infrastructure and higher temperatures. While uncertainty surrounds the likelihood and timing of a significant slowdown in the Atlantic Meridional Overturning Circulation, this is a risk that surely should be considered in its potential impact, certainly in a report looking towards 2050. Periods of freezing weather would lead to ice collecting on overhead cables, bringing them down; there would be high demand for electricity during the longer spells of cold weather, which has not been taken into account as a possible scenario.<\/p>\n

The report’s key conclusion is that without a comprehensive approach to assessing energy resilience we can’t be certain of the extent of the risks we face and the costs to all consumers of lost supply. What is clear from this report is that there are major gaps in the country\u2019s resilience, and we all need to take action to build our own resilience within our communities \u2013 a key focus of the Climate Majority\u2019s recently launched campaign, SAFER (https:\/\/climatemajorityproject.com\/safer-2\/<\/a>).<\/p>\n

The NPC\u2019s report\u2019s recommendation is for the Department for Energy Security and Net Zero to take responsibility for developing a framework for energy resilience and stress testing it for short term shocks. Will this be a priority action for the government, before<\/strong> we experience the impacts of the lack of resilience in the energy supply system?<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

To make the energy system resilient requires identifying all potential risks and their impacts, maintaining flexibility and redundancy in the system, and ensuring a wide range of stakeholders are involved in decision making.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":128238,"featured_media":3515429,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_acf_changed":false,"footnotes":""},"categories":[79716,213529,79718],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-3515189","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-energy","category-energy-featured","category-environment"],"acf":[],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.resilience.org\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/3515189","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.resilience.org\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.resilience.org\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.resilience.org\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/128238"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.resilience.org\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=3515189"}],"version-history":[{"count":6,"href":"https:\/\/www.resilience.org\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/3515189\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":3515431,"href":"https:\/\/www.resilience.org\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/3515189\/revisions\/3515431"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.resilience.org\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/3515429"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.resilience.org\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=3515189"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.resilience.org\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=3515189"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.resilience.org\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=3515189"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}