Over the weekend, The Guardian released an insightful visual analysis on the state of clean energy in the UK. 

The article highlights a critical reality: there is a staggering gap between the government’s 2030 clean power ambitions and the reality of getting projects from ‘approval’ to ‘operation’.

The piece features a compelling case study on the Viking Energy windfarm – which took over 15 years to reach operation – as a primary illustration of the complex, lengthy, and often contradictory planning processes that developers currently face.

While the article is a strong and technically sound report on the symptoms of our current energy malaise, it stops short of diagnosing the disease; by framing the issue as a failure of green projects to deliver on lower household bills, the narrative risks obscuring the systemic infrastructure debt we are collectively paying.

What we are witnessing is not a failure of green technology, but a failure of the delivery system. 

We are forcing 21st-century environmental mandates onto an archaic, crippled grid that was never designed for decentralised, integrated power. 

When you couple this with rising construction costs and a grid queue that has historically prioritised “zombie projects” over shovel-ready schemes, it is clear that developers are hitting a systemic bottleneck. 

The issue isn’t that the energy isn’t green or cheap; it’s that the delivery infrastructure is archaic and the conditions developers must operate under are fundamentally broken.

But there is a gaping hole in The Guardian’s narrative: the role of Energy from Waste (EfW) and Anaerobic Digestion (AD).

While the article focuses on intermittent volume, our national energy crisis is one of system stability. 

We need a dispatchable baseload – the kind of 24/7 reliability that EfW and AD plants provide; once you turn an AD plant on, it is designed for continuous operation. 

By leaving these facilities out of the conversation – especially when fitted or retrofitted with CCUS technology – we are ignoring the most efficient, carbon-negative tools currently at our disposal.

We aren’t failing because green energy is too expensive; we are failing because we are forcing it into a grid that lacks the dispatchable, carbon-negative backbone required to stabilize it, alongside the physical capacity to carry it.

On top of this, we lack the processes necessary to ensure shovel-ready projects are prioritised, supported, and valued. 

For green energy projects to successfully lower household energy bills long-term, we need a policy shift that prioritises infrastructure stability over political targets. 

It is time we stop blaming the projects and start fixing the system.