UK Trends and Developments Contributed by: Andrea Stauber, Martina Antosova, Medhavi Singh and Sadyant Sasiprabhu, King & Spalding International LLP
• Nuclear – Great British Nuclear was tasked with co-ordinating the UK’s nuclear industry and leading the delivery of new projects in a bid to ramp up the UK’s nuclear capacity to 24 GW by 2050. • Hydrogen – the first winning projects from the GBP240 million Net Zero Hydrogen Fund would build on the UK’s commitment to double its low- carbon production capacity to 10 GW by 2030. • CCUS – new government measures aimed at the deployment of CCUS to capture and store 20–30 million tonnes of CO₂ per year by 2030 include: (a) setting out a vision for CCUS in order to raise investor confidence and improve visibility; and (b) publishing an updated CCUS Investment Roadmap that will provide investors with the latest information on government funding and policy. The Powering Up Britain plans received a mixed response. Friends of the Earth threatened legal action against the UK government – warning these plans look “half-baked… and dangerously lacking ambi- tion”. Energy UK welcomed the UK government’s confirmation of its ambitions. Green Prosperity Plan One of the key tenets of Labour’s economic policy has been its Green Prosperity Plan, which promises substantial investment into green industries to “cut bills, create jobs and deliver security with cheaper, zero-carbon electricity by 2030”. Legislative and regulatory framework The REMA outcome : a settled market framework For more than four years, one of the most significant sources of policy uncertainty hanging over UK energy investment has been the Review of Electricity Market Arrangements (REMA), with the central question being whether to adopt zonal (locational) pricing in place of a single national wholesale market. On 10 July 2025, the Department for Energy Security and Net Zero (DESNZ) published the REMA Summer Update, confirming that Great Britain will retain its national market and will not introduce zonal pricing. The decision provided the regulatory certainty that investors and developers needed before committing
to bids in the seventh CfD Allocation Round (AR7), which opened in August 2025. The Great British Energy Act 2025 The Great British Energy Act 2025, which received Royal Assent on 15 May 2025, established the UK’s first publicly owned clean energy company since the privatisation of the electricity industry in the late 1980s and early 1990s. Backed by GBP8.3 billion of gov- ernment funding, Great British Energy is mandated to promote, invest in, own and manage clean energy projects. The Planning and Infrastructure Act 2025 : unlocking the consenting bottleneck One of the most persistent constraints on UK energy infrastructure delivery has been the speed and pre- dictability of the consenting process for Nationally Significant Infrastructure Projects (NSIPs). The Plan- ning and Infrastructure Act 2025 represents the gov- ernment’s most ambitious attempt in over a decade to address this bottleneck. Analysis had shown that 58% of Development Consent Orders (DCOs) for NSIPs had been challenged by judicial review in recent years, while the pre-application consultation process alone had grown to typically two years in duration. Outdat- ed National Policy Statements (NPSs) had created uncertainty and provided ammunition for legal chal- lenge, with the very statutory framework designed to expedite major infrastructure delivery itself becoming a source of delay. The Act’s principal reforms for the energy sector include: • a streamlined NSIP consultation process, with sev- eral statutory consultation duties removed; • a duty to update NPSs at least once every four years; • removal of the paper permission stage for judi- cial reviews of NPSs and DCOs, with the right to appeal removed for cases deemed totally without merit at the oral permission hearing; and • a power for the Secretary of State to direct projects out of the NSIP regime where an alternative con- senting route is more appropriate.
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