If Restore Britain's energy programme became law in spring 2027, a typical household bill would fall by about £60 to £85 in its first year, 4% to 5%. The party says energy could cost a third of today's price, which would need about £1,150 off the £1,723 October cap, or about £570 off the electricity half alone. The bigger moves land in UK carbon, GB power and the North Sea.
Written on 26 October 2026, before the Budget of 28 October. The Budget can change the Energy Profits Levy, Carbon Price Support and the policy costs on bills, and nothing on this page reflects it.
The gap is gas. Rupert Lowe's party would repeal the Climate Change Act, end Renewables Obligation payments and subsidies for new wind, cut North Sea tax to 25% and build coal plants. None of that touches the wholesale gas price behind the largest part of the bill, which the conflict around the Strait of Hormuz has pushed to its highest since 2022.
The bigger effects land elsewhere. UK carbon allowances lose their use, and GB power falls by £16 to £24/MWh against the continent in 2027. Until 2030 North Sea producers keep 75p of each pound of profit instead of 22p, while the owners of 35 GW of RO-backed renewables lose their certificate income.
Restore polls between 3% and 6%, so this is a stress test rather than a forecast. We date it from spring 2027 to use today's prices, though no Restore government could arrive before the election due by August 2029. Its headline pledge, repealing the Climate Change Act, is Conservative policy too.
Restore Britain's Energy Security Outlook, published on 20 May 2026, is the most detailed anti-net-zero programme we have found from a British party. The Conservatives have also pledged to repeal the Climate Change Act, and Reform UK has threatened the latest offshore wind contracts. Restore goes further in four places: ending Renewables Obligation payments by statute, a 25% North Sea tax rate, new coal plants, and a law to override court rulings that get in its way.
| Area | What the paper commits to | Page |
|---|---|---|
| Climate law | Repeal the Climate Change Act 2008 and the laws built on it, ending the net zero target, carbon budgets and the Climate Change Committee's statutory role; end carbon capture and storage schemes | 6 to 7 |
| Carbon taxes | Abolish the Climate Change Levy on business energy and the Carbon Price Support top-up on power station fuel | 7, 9 |
| Renewables Obligation | Stop ROC payments immediately by Act of Parliament, on the argument that a statutory scheme is not a contract | 8, 33 |
| Contracts for Difference | No new contracts. Existing ones wound down in good faith through a windfall tax above a threshold, a duty to restore sites down to the foundations, ring-fenced decommissioning cash with a dividend block, and wildlife law; holders may be offered stakes in oil, gas and nuclear, and existing farms run meanwhile | 9 to 10, 32 to 33 |
| New generation | No subsidy for any new plant, and no new offshore wind unless it pays its own balancing, backup and grid connection costs, with no constraint payments | 31 to 32 |
| North Sea | New exploration and production licences; Rosebank and Jackdaw approved; the Energy Profits Levy and its planned successor scrapped; upstream profits taxed at the 25% main rate instead of 78%; investment deductible up front as in Norway; a sovereign wealth fund studied | 19 to 21 |
| Shale | Lift the fracking moratorium, loosen seismic limits to match geothermal drilling, repeal any law that blocks it | 33 to 36 |
| Coal and gas plant | Life-extend gas plants and build new coal-fired stations as a bridge, which the paper says take three to four years | 21 |
| Nuclear | Waive post-construction rules to extend old reactors; a state-led SMR fleet starting with three Rolls-Royce units at Wylfa; Hinkley Point C and Sizewell C brought into British ownership over time; the regulator moved under the energy department with a growth duty; automatic approval of designs licensed by trusted foreign regulators | 24 to 30 |
| Pricing | Real-time pricing for industrial and commercial users, and a promise that no government intervention will distort the true price of energy. The paper dismisses fiddling with price caps (p. 3) but does not say the household cap would go | 4 to 5 |
| Buildings | Energy Performance Certificates made voluntary and based on insulation alone | 8 to 9 |
| Courts and planning | A Great Clarification Act letting a simple Commons majority override a court ruling or repeal the law it rests on; planning consultees who miss a short deadline lose the right to object | 10, 14 |
| Trade | Seek amendments to Articles 391, 392 and 764 of the EU trade agreement (climate non-regression, carbon pricing, the Paris commitment) and accept the risk of retaliation | 10 to 11 |
The paper's arithmetic is one line: without net zero, it says, British energy "could cost roughly a third of what we pay today" (p. 6). It cites an April 2026 paper by Paul Burgess and carries no costings, no bill estimate and no fiscal table.
The energy paper never names the UK Emissions Trading Scheme, but the party's economic paper, The Wealth of Our Nation (August 2026), lists it for abolition at £3.4bn a year alongside the Climate Change Levy at £1.3bn. The scheme's founding order was made under the Climate Change Act, so repeal would end it anyway. The economic paper also cuts the main corporation tax rate to 19%, below the 25% the energy paper offers the North Sea.
The two papers disagree on windfall taxes. The energy paper wants one on wind and solar farms (p. 10), while the economic paper would in time abolish the Electricity Generator Levy, which already taxes those farms' windfalls at 55%, along with the Energy Profits Levy. The energy paper also leaves the grid's ownership, reinforcement and storage needs for later (p. 4).
On contracts it is more careful than its rivals. It calls Reform's plan to strike down AR7 contracts naive, because notice of a breach does not keep it out of court (p. 9 to 10). One position has softened: the party's February 2026 policy page proposed barring foreign ownership of energy infrastructure, while the May paper accepts foreign stakes subject to security checks (p. 3).
In interviews Lowe compresses the programme into three themes: Norway, Aberdeen and Ed Miliband. Speaking to Eva Vlaardingerbroek on 16 October he called renewables irrelevant, incredibly expensive and a fraud, and at the party conference on 3 October he summed up the plan with the drill-baby-drill slogan.
His numbers are looser than the paper's. Twice in April he said Norway drilled 400 exploration wells the year before and Britain none; Norway's figure for 2025 is 49, which his own paper uses, and Britain's is zero. No interview or speech we checked puts a figure on the cut to household bills.
Wholesale energy, networks and supplier costs make up close to nine tenths of the October cap, and the programme barely moves them. Taking carbon out of power lowers the wholesale part of an electricity bill, but CfD generators then need bigger top-ups, which come back through the same bill. Household gas never carried a carbon price, so the gas half of the bill barely moves.
On electricity alone the cut is 7% to 10%, depending on Feed-in Tariffs; on gas it rounds to nothing. A business on standard rates does far better. It saves about £57/MWh on electricity, or £65 if Feed-in Tariffs go too, plus £8/MWh on gas, because it pays the Climate Change Levy on both fuels and the full RO, which the Treasury subsidises only for households.
Carbon is worth £30/MWh when a GB gas plant sets the price, which we assume for 65% of a household's use, plus 8.5% for network losses. CfD top-ups apply to about 55 TWh of contracted output, our estimate, spread over 240 TWh of chargeable supply, and the levy rates come from Ofgem's policy cost model for October 2026. At 55% or 80% the total is £56 or £72 before Feed-in Tariffs, and £80 or £96 with them.
The energy paper does not name Feed-in Tariffs or the Green Gas Levy, so the chart marks them as optional. We include them because the economic paper ends all forms of net zero spending, including subsidies; Feed-in Tariff payments go to small generators, many of them households with rooftop solar. The verdict holds if the paper's claim means electricity alone: a third of the £858 electricity bill would need about £570 off.
The Renewables Obligation step is small because the Treasury pays three quarters of the household share from April 2026 to March 2029, about £2bn to £2.6bn a year. The saving also shrinks from April 2028, when Labour has said it will remove Carbon Price Support anyway, which is about £4/MWh of the average carbon step. None of it protects against the next rise in gas.
Only one measure moves British power prices quickly and for certain: taking carbon out of the cost of gas-fired electricity. The rest either takes until the 2030s, lands back on bill payers, or swaps a subsidy bill for a legal one.
| Measure | What it does | Treasury, a year | Main friction | Lands by 2031? |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| Repeal the Climate Change Act; abolish the ETS, Carbon Price Support and Climate Change Levy | About £30/MWh off power whenever a GB gas plant sets the price; UK allowances lose their use | About £4.9bn less in 2027-28 (ETS £3.2bn; Climate Change Levy with Carbon Price Support £1.7bn) | Trade agreement Articles 391 and 392; the EU border tax on about £7bn of exports | Yes, in one Act |
| Stop Renewables Obligation payments | Strips about £8bn a year of certificate income from 35 GW at 26,644 stations | Saves the Exchequer about £2bn a year of household support to 2028-29, and later only if Labour makes it permanent | Treaty claims into the 2040s; no UK precedent for cutting accredited stations | Yes, with claims attached |
| No new CfDs; squeeze signed ones | Ends new rounds after AR8; projects not yet financed stall | Roughly neutral: these are levies, not taxes | The contracts' own change-in-law and generation tax clauses | New rounds stop at once; the squeeze backfires |
| North Sea: tax from 78% to 25%, new licences | More investment in old fields, new fields after 2030, no change to NBP | About £1.4bn less in 2027-28 on the OBR's March forecast, more at today's prices | Scope 3 assessments after the Finch ruling | Tax yes; volumes mostly after 2030 |
| Lift the fracking moratorium | Test wells at best | Nil | Scotland and Wales license their own onshore; statutory safeguards | No gas by 2031 |
| Build coal plants | Fuel at about a third of gas's cost, once a plant exists | Unfunded | No plant or mine to restart, and no lender | No |
| Nuclear waivers, SMRs, buying out EDF | Cannot stop the AGR closures in March 2030 | Buying EDF's stakes costs billions | Graphite, and the nuclear safety convention | Partly |
Carbon is worth about £30/MWh in every hour a GB gas plant sets the price: it emits 0.37 tonnes per MWh and pays £64.18 for an allowance plus £18 of Carbon Price Support. The government and UKERC both put gas at the margin about 60% of the time over 2026 to 2029, and in some of those hours imports priced off continental gas set the GB price instead.
We use 55% to 80% for 2027, an average fall of £16 to £24/MWh. From April 2028, when Labour has said it will scrap Carbon Price Support anyway, the fall is about £10 to £18.
The EU would take some of it back. Its carbon border tax, CBAM, charges UK steel, aluminium and fertiliser on a rising share of their emissions: 10% in 2028 and 48.5% in 2030. It charges exported electricity in full from the start, with no deduction once Britain has no carbon price of its own.
If repeal went as far as leaving the Paris Agreement, the trade agreement treats that as breaching an essential element. The EU could then suspend all or part of the deal 30 days after asking for talks.
The paper says ROCs can be cancelled without breaching any contract (p. 8), and in domestic law that is mostly right: the RO is a statute, and no UK court can strike down an Act. The exposure is abroad. Foreign owners can bring Energy Charter Treaty claims into the 2040s, which the party's override law cannot reach, and the UK has never cut support for a station already accredited.
Spain's 2013 cuts drew 51 such claims and about €1.3bn in awards, and in March the UK Supreme Court ruled that awards like these can be registered in London. The losers would not all be foreign utilities. About a quarter of operating offshore wind is owned by UK entities, including listed funds held by British savers; in Greencoat UK Wind's case we estimate certificates bring in about half of revenue.
The CfD squeeze runs into the contracts' own drafting. Under the standard terms, a tax aimed at CfD generators triggers a strike price adjustment, and a law aimed at them must be compensated as a Specific Change in Law. A windfall tax would mostly flow back to bill payers through the CfD levy.
Stopping new rounds is the part that bites. AR8's bids closed in August, so it may be signed before a 2027 government arrives, but nothing would follow it. Without a contract a project's hurdle rate rises by 1.5 to 3 percentage points in DESNZ's own investor survey, which adds roughly 10% to 22% to offshore wind's cost on DESNZ's inputs.
The North Sea tax cut is a transfer to producers, not a cut in the gas price. Britain produced just under half its gas in 2025, the NSTA expects gas output to fall by about two-fifths by 2030 because the fields are old, and new licences would add volume mostly in the 2030s. Every extra molecule still sells at NBP, which Norwegian pipelines and LNG set; Jackdaw, approved on 21 October, adds about 6% of domestic output at its peak.
Shale is further off still. The fracking moratorium, first imposed by written statement in 2019 and reinstated in 2022, could go in a day unless Labour legislates its promised ban first. No British shale well has ever produced commercially, and Scotland licenses its own onshore.
Coal is the paper's most interesting idea, because without a carbon price it is cheap to run. At the 2027 API2 coal price a new plant at 40% to 44% efficiency would burn about £40 to £45 of fuel per MWh, against roughly £110 to £125 for gas at summer 2027 NBP. At today's gas prices coal would win even with carbon priced in.
Building one is the problem. Ratcliffe is being demolished, Britain mined 120,000 tonnes of coal last year, and Germany's last new unit, Datteln 4, took twelve and a half years from groundbreaking to commercial operation. It was also fought in the courts for years, which is the kind of delay Restore's override law is meant to remove.
On nuclear, Restore is closest to the government it attacks. All eight AGR reactors are due to close in March 2030 after EDF extended Heysham 1 and Hartlepool in July, and no waiver repairs cracked graphite. The government has accepted all 47 of the Fingleton review's recommendations in principle, chose Rolls-Royce's SMR for the mid-2030s and put the first at Wylfa.
Putting the nuclear regulator under the energy department, which promotes nuclear power, would cut across Article 8 of the Convention on Nuclear Safety, which requires an effective separation between regulating nuclear power and promoting it. The paper also rules out subsidy for new plant while inviting SMRs to bid for contracts and accepting a premium for security (p. 27 to 28).
Much of what Restore promises is already happening under Labour in milder form. The government approved Jackdaw, has said it will drop Carbon Price Support in 2028 and taxes generator windfalls at 55%. It is legislating the nuclear review and plans to cut eligible manufacturers' power costs by about £35 to £40/MWh from 2027.
What is distinctive against Labour is repeal of the Climate Change Act, the end of the RO, a 25% North Sea rate, coal, and a law to override the courts.
By 2031 Britain would run on much the same gas, wires and wind farms as it would have anyway, because almost everything generating in 2031 is built or contracted today. The difference lies in who carries the risk.
| Lane | 2027: repeal | 2028 to 2029: friction | 2030 to 2031: squeeze |
|---|---|---|---|
| Law and money | Climate Change Act repealed ETS, levies and ROCs end North Sea tax cut to 25% | Treaty claims filed Court rulings overridden EU panel or rebalancing | Claims run into the 2040s Treasury down £2bn to £4bn a year Less tax per barrel |
| Power | Power £16 to £24/MWh lower No rounds after AR8 RO farms lose ROC income | Unfinanced wind stalls Cost of capital rises Old gas plant runs longer | All 8 AGR reactors due to close Hinkley Point C unit 1 due No coal plant likely |
| Oil and gas | Licensing round opens Rosebank cleared Fracking ban lifted | Rigs back on old fields More infill drilling First shale test wells | Output still falls steeply No shale gas on the grid NBP still set abroad |
| Trade and markets | UK allowances lose their use Power exports pay CBAM in full Wind funds repriced | CBAM on goods 10% to 22.5% Power-market talks frozen GB premium to the EU shrinks | CBAM on goods 48.5% to 61% Gas spikes hit harder Steel's CBAM bill grows |
A household saves about £60 to £85 in the first year. In 2030 the saving is roughly £40 to £75 a year if Labour makes its RO support permanent, as the King's Speech promised, and roughly £90 to £120 if that support lapses in 2029. Either way it stays well under a tenth of today's bill.
On the measures we can price, the Treasury comes out behind. It gives up about £6.4bn of carbon and North Sea tax in 2027-28 and stops paying about £2.1bn of household RO support, a net cost of about £4bn. After 2029 the net cost is about £2bn a year if that support would have become permanent and about £4bn if it would have lapsed, before any arbitration award.
The economic paper claims another £15bn to £20bn a year from ending net zero spending, without itemising it. Great British Energy, with £8.3bn over this Parliament, and the Warm Homes Plan, with just under £15bn, show where part of it would come from. The paper promises tax cuts only when savings fund them, and markets would test that against its £155bn plan.
The tight point comes in 2030 under any government. All eight AGR reactors, 4.7 GW, are due to close in March, and Hinkley Point C's first unit is due the same year. Under the programme fewer wind farms are financed after AR7 and no coal plant is likely to be ready, so imports and old gas plant fill the gap.
That matters most in a year like this one. Contracted wind farms pay money back to bill payers when the market price is above their strike price, and stopping new contracts removes that cushion for every project not yet signed. Bills would track gas more closely, in both directions.
Three prices move hard on enactment: UK carbon, GB power against the continent, and North Sea producers against RO-backed wind funds. Gas barely moves, and gilts would trade on the whole manifesto rather than its energy chapter.
| Market | Level, 23 Oct 2026 | Under the programme | Change |
|---|---|---|---|
| UK allowances, Dec-26 | £64.18/t | Lose their compliance use | Towards zero |
| EU minus UK allowances, Dec-26 | About €9.6/t | Widens | Towards the full EU price, €86/t |
| GB baseload, Summer-27 | £132.76/MWh | Lower | £16 to £24/MWh lower |
| GB minus German baseload, calendar 2027 | About +£16/MWh, on our GB proxy | Premium shrinks or vanishes | £16 to £24/MWh narrower |
| NBP minus TTF, front month | About level | Little change | Pennies a therm |
| UK-weighted North Sea producers | Ithaca £4.94bn, Serica £1.11bn, EnQuest £0.58bn, market values on 26 Oct | Higher | 75p of each £1 of profit kept, not 22p, to 2030; then 75p, not 60p |
| Greencoat UK Wind | 116.3p, 13% below its June NAV | Lower | Most of its £2.9bn NAV, on our rough numbers |
| 30-year gilt | 5.74% | Higher | 2022 analogy: +160bp in days |
Levels are settlements and closes for 23 October: UK allowances, GB power and NBP from Catalyst Commercial, EU allowances, TTF and the 30-year gilt from Investing.com (EUA futures, TTF futures, 30-year gilt), German power from Tacto (EEX) and share prices from stockanalysis. The GB curve rests on one public source, which calls its levels indicative, and market values are from 26 October.
Carbon is the cleanest repricing because the instrument dies with the policy. UK allowances trade only about €10 below EU ones because the market expects the two schemes to link, and the remaining gap prices the chance they don't; the 20 November summit is meant to settle it. Repeal would end the UK scheme and any link with it, and what happens to allowances already issued would turn on the link's exit terms, which nobody has published.
GB's premium over Germany, about £16/MWh for 2027 on our proxy for the GB calendar year, would shrink or vanish. With no UK carbon price to deduct, GB exports would pay the EU border charge on a default factor drawn from the UK's fossil fleet, which we estimate at €30/MWh or more. The cables could not arbitrage the gap back, so the narrower spread would stick.
Gas barely moves. More UK drilling changes Britain's import bill, not the price, because NBP clears against Norwegian pipeline gas and LNG; on 23 October the NBP and TTF front months settled within half a penny a therm of each other.
The equity effect is a swap: UK-weighted producers keep more than three times as much of each pound of profit until the Energy Profits Levy ends in 2030, and a quarter more after that. Greencoat UK Wind trades at a 13% discount to its June NAV against 22% to 31% for its peers, partly because power prices have risen since June. On our rough numbers its certificates bring in about £500m a year for another eight years or so, against net assets of £2.9bn.
Gilts would answer to the economic paper more than the energy one: £155bn of tax cuts that the party says come only when savings fund them, which is the claim markets would test. The energy chapter adds a separate premium. A government that cancels a statutory support scheme tells every owner of regulated infrastructure, Sizewell C's investors included, that their terms are negotiable.
These are paper ideas for a scenario we put at low odds, written to show where the risk would sit. Restore polls between 3% and 6% and the next election is due by August 2029. Repeal of the Climate Change Act is Conservative policy too, so the carbon and power ideas carry wider political risk than Restore's own.
If we ran these on paper, the carbon spread would be the core idea. Held through the summit it is a bet on the link failing, and rolled into 2029 it is an option on repeal. The equity pair is the only energy idea that can be held to an election with daily liquidity, and the power spread has to wait for its delivery seasons to trade.
We hold the power idea most loosely. The government expects gas to set the price only about half the time by 2030, and the AGR closures could make GB the tighter market in the very year the trade pays. Expiry dates come from ICE's expiry table; open interest comes from TradingView pages that we could not check against ICE.
The UK-EU link is signed in November with exit terms that protect allowances already issued, so repeal costs holders little.
The Conservatives or Reform win on a programme that repeals the Act but keeps the RO, leaving the equity pair without its catalyst.
A GB gas plant sets the price less often than we assume, taking the carbon effect below £10/MWh by 2029-30.
Arbitration or a negotiated buy-out compensates RO owners, which turns the short leg into a recovery story.
The programme offers no clean gas trade. NBP stays tied to Norway and LNG, shale and coal would not reach the grid before the 2030s, and SMRs are too small a part of Rolls-Royce to trade on.
Pages opened on 26 October 2026. Figures labelled as our estimates are derived from these, and market levels are the dated prints named under the markets table.
As of 27 October 2026, Voltstack is a browser-based analytics workspace that puts official European power, gas storage, LNG and REMIT data into dashboards and alerts for traders and analysts on European gas and power desks.
voltstack.energy