It is 2026. Britain's lights are kept on by 14 GW of nuclear power. The old AGR reactors were each given ten more years, and they now run alongside the first of a new generation of reactors, which started feeding the grid in 2019/20. Offshore, 31 GW of wind turbines turn in the North Sea. Coal is nearly gone, and what remains, along with a new generation of gas plant, is being fitted with carbon capture. CCS power stations will generate 45 TWh this year: an average of 5 GW, around the clock.
At home, 3.6 million households heat with heat pumps. Six million electric cars charge overnight on time-of-use tariffs, read by the smart meter every home has had since 2025. Solar panels are a niche: about 3 GW, mostly on roofs. Nobody has built a grid battery.
This is not science fiction. It is Gone Green, the flagship scenario in National Grid's first UK Future Energy Scenarios, published in 2011. It was the only scenario the report modelled in full detail, and the one it was built around.