London (18th January 2026) The Social Democratic Party (SDP), the party of the patriotic state, has condemned the recent AR7 energy auctions for failing to meet the country’s urgent need for firm dispatchable capacity to deliver affordable, reliable and predictable energy. Britain’s industry and households will be ever more reliant on intermittent renewables as a result – and poorer with it.
The AR7 round does nothing to change the fundamental facts:
- Record capacity is not the same as energy security. 8.4GW of awarded capacity does not solve Britain’s need for giga-watts of power when needed, not when the wind blows. A renewable-dominant system still requires vast amounts of standby assets and storage which add real, recurring costs to bills.
- Strike prices conceal system and financing costs. Comparing LCOE (the cost of generating electricity) of isolated projects with the full-system cost of running a grid that needs reliability is misleading; the SDP has warned that the current market framework externalises these costs onto consumers and industry, driving up the very prices the government claims to be driving down.
- Budget top-ups and ad-hoc interventions are not a strategy. Raising the Contracts for Difference (CfD) budget to chase capacity is a cosmetic, short-term fix; Britain needs a planned programme of dispatchable capacity and state coordination to cut prices structurally.
The SDP is committed to rapid, state-led delivery of firm capacity. We continue to call for an immediate programme of grid stabilisation via a new fleet of thermal assets, followed by a scalable public nuclear build and the creation of a national energy body to plan, finance and deliver it. This remains the only credible route to restoring low, stable industrial energy prices, and we increasingly see other nations pivoting towards such an essential, common sense approach.
Alastair Mellon, the SDP’s Energy & Industry Spokesperson, said:
“The SDP won’t be seduced by misleading headlines and false statistics. Labour, like the Tories before them, are trading Britain’s prosperity for their own self-righteousness.
“Britain needs cheap, continuous power to revive industry and protect living standards. AR7 may buy megawatts but they can only be delivered when the wind blows – you simply can’t build an industrial base on unreliable power. Without a planned programme of firm capacity and public finance, the British people and British firms will continue to pay a premium for insecurity. The only thing AR7 does on an industrial scale is to mislead the public into believing that Labour has a credible plan.
“The SDP is pushing the Government to implement the ten-year plan set out in our recent ‘Energy Abundance’ Green Paper and create a national energy institution, ‘Central Energy’, that will actually deliver cheap power for the nation.”
Note to editors:
- For further information, and to arrange interviews, please contact Jack.Goodwin@sdphq.org.uk.
