November has been a month of anticipation in energy – for a Budget that seems likely to have a big impact on the sector, and for the outcome of the COP30 conference in Brazil. This short blog focuses on UK policies and what they could mean for clean energy innovation.

Budget uncertainty

The government is faced with two daunting challenges: a tight fiscal position and urgent need to reduce the cost of energy for households and businesses. The former severely limits what can be done on the latter.

And so, the last few weeks have seen much speculation as to what the budget will say about energy. There are rumours that VAT could be taken off energy bills completely. This seems like a simple solution. But it has plenty of knock-on effects – one of which is to further under-value emissions reductions from energy use in the home (see my colleague George Day’s recent blog on the topic).

Others have suggested that the Energy Company Obligation (ECO) scheme, which funds energy efficiency measures for the fuel poor, could either be scrapped or removed from energy bills and funded as part of the £13.2 billion that had been earmarked for the Warm Homes Plan. We think the Warm Homes Plan and ECO (however funded) can make a real difference to people and support clean energy innovation, but they need to be better targeted and delivered through local schemes.

Lastly there’s the suggestion that electric vehicle use could start being taxed. It is inevitable that road and vehicle taxation will need to be reformed as we move from vehicles that burn fossil fuels to ones that have no tailpipe emissions. But such a change is best done in a systematic, rather than piecemeal way.

Regional Energy Strategic Plans

If we’re going to roll out heat pumps and low carbon technologies to people’s homes, the electricity infrastructure needs to be there to ensure reliable power supply. As Ofgem CEO Jonathan Brearley made clear in a recent speech, the way we as a country have chosen to do that is through more centralised planning. This holds true at the national level (through the Strategic Spatial Energy Plan (SSEP)) and at a regional level through the Regional Energy Strategic Plans (RESPs).

NESO is responsible for producing both the SSEP (the first one is due by the end of 2026) and the RESPs for 11 regions. There will be “transitional” (i.e. highly simplified) RESPs published in early-2026, in time to feed in electricity distribution network operators’ plans for ED3.

NESO is now consulting on the methodology it should adopt for the full RESPs, which NESO says are likely to be published by the end of 2028.

NESO’s consultation sets out five components of the full RESPs:

• An articulation of national and regional contexts (for example, local decarbonisation aims).
• Projects of energy supply and demand to 2050 across different ‘pathways’.
• A set of planning assumptions that should be used by the energy distribution networks to inform their investment proposals.
• Identification of which investments have the greatest strategic impact (for example, by accelerating decarbonisation and supporting growth).
• Visualisation of network capacity and investment needs under the pathways.

The latter appears to be the area where NESO’s options are most open, and consultation responses may have the greatest impact.

The consultation runs to 16 January 2026.