(A blog post by Shane Oxer — Campaigner for fairer and affordable energy)
Britain is being told that the new National Energy System Operator — NESO — represents a clean break from the past: a modern, independent system architect that will plan the electricity network for decades ahead. But this is a political illusion, not a structural truth. The technical designs underpinning NESO’s work were created years earlier by its predecessor — National Grid ESO — under the guidance of civil servants whose job is to uphold Net Zero policy, not to question it.
The titles have changed, but the machinery has not.What has really happened is a rebranding exercise inside a civil service culture that processes directives, circulates paperwork, and enforces carbon targets handed down from Parliament and the Climate Change Committee. This culture persists regardless of organisational reshuffles.
No matter the badge — ESO yesterday, NESO today, perhaps something else tomorrow — the mandate stays the same: deliver Net Zero on paper, even if it is impossible in practice.The bulk of Britain’s electricity architecture — including the Holistic Network Design (HND), the Pathway to 2030, and the early Beyond 2030 blueprints — was conceived by National Grid ESO years before NESO existed.
The reports published by NESO today often remain almost word-for-word reproductions of ESO documents, sometimes still carrying ESO graphics and structure diagrams. That is because the work was not redone; it was transferred, administratively and unquestioningly, into the new organisation.
Civil servants simply moved the files, updated the organisational name, and continued the same modelling trajectory.This reveals something much deeper:
The UK’s civil service operates as a paper-based compliance engine, not an analytical decision-maker.
The law — the Climate Change Act 2008 — imposes Net Zero targets, and the civil service considers its role to be the execution of those targets, not their evaluation.
Institutions such as the Department for Energy Security and Net Zero — DESNZ — instruct the system operator on what outcomes must be assumed, and the system operator produces network plans designed to make those assumptions look deliverable.
The Climate Change Committee — Climate Change Committee — sets the carbon budgets, and the civil service treats those budgets as sacrosanct.
Nowhere in this chain does anyone stop and ask: “Is this technically realistic?”
The system is not designed to ask. It is designed to comply.Changing ESO to NESO was therefore never about engineering independence or reform.
It was an administrative shuffle that allowed ministers to claim progress while the underlying policy factory remained untouched.
The same civil servants who previously drafted submissions and modelling papers for ESO now draft them for NESO. The same assumptions — 50 GW offshore wind by 2030, mass electrification, hydrogen readiness, high-voltage DC corridors, and stability provided by inverter-based generation — continue without scrutiny. The organisational letterhead was updated; the thinking was not.
This explains why senior figures like Fintan Slye and Julian Leslie confidently assert that the grid can deliver both Net Zero and energy security, despite overwhelming evidence of delays, curtailment, cost escalation, and system instability. Their conclusions flow from the documents they inherited — not from a fresh technical assessment.
They are repeating the outputs of a bureaucracy whose role is to make Net Zero appear functional on paper.
If the spreadsheets say it works, the public message must say it works.In truth, NESO is not a new system operator at all. It is the old ESO, wrapped in a new statutory identity, driven by the same civil service assumptions, guided by the same legally binding carbon targets, and producing the same conclusions.
The civil service moves the paperwork, rebrands the directorates, and updates the job titles — but the policy engine remains locked into the same ideological track.
Until Britain confronts the fact that the entire electricity architecture has been produced by a paperwork-driven system that is rewarded for compliance and insulated from consequences, nothing will change.
NESO may be new in name, but the design it is enforcing — and the institutional logic behind it — belongs entirely to the past.
The civil service kept the Net Zero machine running, uninterrupted, through nothing more than a change of stationery.
Footnotes
1. National Grid ESO, Holistic Network Design: A Pathway to 2030 (2022).
2. National Grid ESO, Pathway to 2030 technical documentation (2022).
3. ESO/NESO, Beyond 2030 Regional Blueprints (2023–2024).
4. Climate Change Act 2008, Part 1: Carbon Budgets and Net Zero Target.
5. DESNZ, Electricity Networks Strategic Planning Guidance (2024).
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