The energy conversation the UK is having isn’t the one business needs

The government’s announcement of the British Industrial Competitiveness Scheme (BICS) has been welcomed by industry bodies, albeit cautiously by some and with barely concealed frustration by others. I understand both reactions. Any meaningful acknowledgement that UK businesses are carrying an unsustainable energy cost burden is welcome. But if I’m honest, what struck me most wasn’t the policy itself, but the fact that we’re still having the same conversation.

There tends to be a binary focus on specifics like price relief, targeted support, who qualifies, who doesn’t, and when it might arrive. These are legitimate questions, but they’re the wrong starting point for most businesses trying to build a genuinely resilient energy strategy.

And the national debate that’s mostly told through a consumer lens, which yet applies to only around a quarter of total UK energy use, is actively making that harder.

We’re looking at the wrong part of the bill

Every time energy costs dominate the headlines, the debate collapses into familiar territory; that bills are too high, renewables are either the problem or the solution, and government is moving too fast or too slow. The conversation is built around the wholesale unit rate, as if that’s where the story begins and ends.

We know that for most commercial operators, it doesn’t even tell half the story. Non-commodity charges, the regulated costs that fund grid infrastructure, system balancing, capacity mechanisms and decarbonisation policy, already represent more than half the electricity bill for many organisations, and that share is rising. These charges have increased by around 57% in the last four years. From April 2026, they’re expected to account for approximately 65% of the total electricity invoice. Transmission charges in many regions are set to more than double, and the Capacity Market Levy is forecast to rise by up to 100% by winter 2026.

BICS removes some of these charges for qualifying manufacturers. But most commercial operators sit outside its scope and are left fully exposed to a structural cost shift that are complex to navigate and mitigate, something the national conversation barely acknowledges.

The problem with binary thinking

What frustrates me most about the current debate is that it forces a set of simplified, and false, choices. Clean or cheap. Fast or slow. Fix now or plan long term. In my experience, the organisations that are managing energy most effectively aren’t the ones that found the right answer to any one of those questions. They’re the ones that stopped asking each question isolation.

Energy needs to be considered as a system. One in which on-site generation, battery storage, tariff strategy and procurement aren’t four separate decisions to be made sequentially or in silos, but as interconnected levers that only deliver their full value when they work in unison.

Each element amplifies the others so the combined effect on each element of the energy trilemma – affordability, security and sustainability – is materially different from what any single one of them delivers alone. That’s not a complicated idea, but it gets completely lost when the national debate reduces energy to a single variable.

The conversation business needs

The energy trilemma is often treated as a challenge for governments to resolve at system level. In my view, that framing lets businesses down, because these three pressures are felt directly at organisational level, in budgets, operations and investment decisions. They simply can’t be addressed one at a time.

I agree that schemes like BICS are important, and that policy needs to do more to address the structural cost pressures UK organisations face. But I’ve spent more than twenty years watching organisations wait for the external environment to improve before taking control of the thing most within their reach: their own energy strategy.

Put simply, the national debate isn’t wrong, but it is incomplete. It focuses on the cost of energy at a system level while saying almost nothing about how businesses can manage it at an organisational one. If the gap persists between the conversation in the headlines and the reality on the electricity invoice, there will be organisations absorbing costs, missing savings and delaying decarbonisation that they could already be acting on.

The question for any business leader right now shouldn’t be ‘when will energy get cheaper?’ It should be ‘what integrated approach do we have in place to manage it regardless?’ That, to me, is the conversation that needs to happen next.

By Maureen Bray, Managing Director – Equity Energies