It is worth stepping back to recognise how unusual all of this is. The Climate Change Committee, the National Energy Systems Operator, and the government department responsible for energy policy treat electricity demand as basically independent of price. The laws of supply and demand, the idea that as price rises quantity demanded falls, are ignored.

In more recent years, forecasts have become increasingly wishful. They effectively ask, what would happen to electricity growth if the Government’s targets on EV and heat pump take-up are met. They are not forecasts of business as usual. They assume that policy will change to ensure legally-binding climate targets are met. That doesn’t make them completely useless. The necessary policy changes may come. And it is worth figuring out what our generation and capacity needs will be if our complete policies succeed. The problem is they might not, and that as electricity gets more expensive, politicians (of all stripes) will be less likely to push mandates for heat pumps and EVs. As a result, they’re probably going to err on the side of more grid investment than is strictly needed.

The forecasts are typically black boxes. The general public can’t open them up and play around with the assumptions. As a result, we can only guess the underlying logic. Here’s one explanation? In order to comply with the Climate Change Act, the government of the day must have a plan to meet its legally-binding carbon budgets. This forces external bodies to assume that the government’s green policies like the heat pump rollout will be a success. If they published a forecast that showed electricity demand falling, not rising, then it would essentially concede that it is massively off track to meet the carbon targets it has set itself. In other words, process comes above common sense.