“It’s called a trilemma for a reason,” offered one expert voice referencing the interlocking needs for clean, affordable and reliable energy. The difficulty with these three objectives—clean alludes to environmental sustainability; affordability applies to industrial and commercial users as well as domestic households; while reliable infers security of supply—is that they often work in opposition. Or, as our speaker noted, when you “turn the dial” on one, it impacts the other two. And the effect is not always benign.
To take one stark example, when Ukraine faced invasion in 2022, it bought coal. At that moment, security of supply clearly trumped environmental sustainability. Any conversation concerned with the resilience of our energy supply inevitably touches on all three elements of the trilemma and the tension between them.
After two roundtable debates devoted to water resilience, the third event in Prospect’s Resilience Series explored how the UK can strengthen its essential energy systems in the face of rising geopolitical, technological, environmental and social pressures. The roundtable—jointly hosted with AtkinsRéalis—brought together policymakers, regulators, industry insiders and experts.
Attendees began by assessing the relative strength of the UK’s energy system. There was broad agreement that efforts made over the past decade to secure the energy supply had proved successful. A diversity of supply—including a willingness “to use weather as fuel”—has strengthened the UK’s position, observed one speaker. The average customer experiences a power cut every 11 years, lasting just nine minutes.
Yet positivity comes with caveats. There is concern, for example, about a lack of gas reserves, described by one attendee as “a looming risk”. In the same vein, another voice lamented the government’s decision to “decimate the North Sea industry”. And while solar, wind and tidal power provide a significant source of supply and much-needed diversity, weather—in the shape of climate change—will be the cause of future crises, too. Coupled with geopolitical volatility that is testing energy security and affordability, many around the table urged for increased focus on resilience and net zero energy, not a change in direction.
One organisation represented around the table had undertaken a war gaming exercise to map out potential emergency scenarios. Its conclusion? The energy system is “really hard to destabilise” but when it experiences “multiple crises compounding, that’s where the risks are”.
Several contributors, including those representing infrastructure delivery, argued that resilience challenges increasingly stem from system complexity. With energy supply now concentrated in the North Sea and demand centred hundreds of miles away, significant elements of the grid are effectively retrofit, rather than purpose‑designed. This has created long‑term structural pressures that cannot be solved in isolation or by incremental fixes. Some noted that addressing these pressures will require a coordinated, whole‑system design and delivery plan, jointly developed by industry, government and regulators, to accelerate grid modernisation, incorporate storage and transitional gas, and develop a carefully planned, resilient system.
Another speaker described the UK as “institutionally complacent”. By way of exception, he offered merchant banks that are motivated by a commercial imperative—“every second dealers are not trading, they’re losing money.” It raises an interesting question of risk and reward. The calculation for merchant banks is simple but other organisations might conclude that the cost of investment against disaster is not worthwhile given the likelihood of a major outage.
Those looking for evidence of what can go wrong need only look back to March 2025 and a fire at the North Hyde sub-station that led to the closure of Heathrow Airport. Notwithstanding impressive contingency planning, the fire caused significant disruption and a post mortem revealed a lack of in-built resiliency. Rather than operating as a “ring where if one bit went down the other two would kick in… Heathrow operated like three villages, three points of failure.”
Many around the table urged for increased focus on resilience and net zero energy, not a change in direction
Go further back, and an outage to the power system in August 2019 left large parts of England and Wales without electricity. A review of events recommended a five-point action plan including a need to “scope and define what an essential service is”. Notably, a number of roundtable panellists questioned whether even today there is a common understanding of what critical national infrastructure means, or whether the term has any basis in law.
Other contributors highlighted that the UK remains mid‑transition, and that gas will continue to play a role for resilience beyond 2030. One participant noted that the challenge is not the -molecule itself but ensuring the right molecules are available during the transition, and that long‑duration storage, whether for gas, hydrogen or future fuels, will be essential to balancing affordability and security.
So, what’s required to strengthen and protect energy supplies into the future? Attendees offered a wide-ranging list of recommendations—from a need for superior scientific and economic know-how across local and central government to greater collaboration between policymakers and industry. There was strong agreement that only coordinated, whole‑system planning that combines government, regulators, system operators and industry can address the scale and pace required.
Another observed that given the changing nature of security threats—notably, the increased incidences of cable sabotage—the UK should stockpile a strategic reserve of standardised spare parts. Elsewhere, a couple of attendees argued on behalf of present and future investors for government to address the cost of capital and generate greater market certainty.
One attendee advocated for a secretary of state for resilience to “bring long-term thinking into government”, pulling different departments together in order to drive change. A dedicated cabinet minister may not be on the agenda but an energy resilience strategy is coming. Announced in November 2025, partly in response to the North Hyde grid fire that led to the disruption at Heathrow, it will present ways to “future-proof” the energy system by addressing evolving risks, including climate change impacts, cyber threats and geopolitical tensions.
In the spirit of tactics and strategies, a number of attendees looked overseas for lessons worth absorbing. They pointed to Norway, Finland and other Baltic states as exemplars of contingency planning. Citing Ukraine again, one noted how the under-siege nation had blended analogue and digital when it connected to the European grid “almost overnight”, stockpiled old kit and moved all government data to the cloud.
A common plea throughout the discussion was for better communication. “We’ve got to find a common language, one that can translate conversations like this into conversations about household bills.”
As the event drew to a close, several participants stressed that the roundtable must not be the end of the conversation. The next step must be to bring industry, government, regulators and system operators together to move from discussion into a shared set of practical recommendations. Only through continued collaboration, they suggested, can the UK improve how energy is produced, protected and strengthened in the decades ahead.
A final predicament contemplated by the panel was how to bridge the gap between long-term and short-term thinking. By way of illustration, a general election in or before 2029 is driving political incentives that don’t match the needs of financing and decarbonisation efforts stretching to 2050 and beyond. This -policymakers’ conundrum isn’t exclusive to the energy market, nor is it new. But it might be one to add to the trilemma.
“Building a Resilient Energy Supply for the Future”—a roundtable convened in association with AtkinsRéalis as part of the Prospect Resilience Series—took place on Wednesday 25th February 2026
