Introduction

Lowering energy bills in the UK is an economic, social and political imperative. In March 2025, 65 per cent of the public said the cost of living crisis was the most important issue facing the country.^[1] A YouGov poll in the same month found that 81 per cent of the public thought Labour was doing badly when it came to handling the cost of living crisis, with only 12 per cent thinking the Government was doing well.^[2] High energy costs are at the heart of this crisis of affordability; domestic retail prices have fallen from their peak in the aftermath of the Russian invasion of Ukraine but remain 43% above pre-crisis levels and are currently going in the wrong direction.^[3] 40% of the public say energy bills are the area of household spending they are most concerned about, far higher than food (14%) or mortgages/rent (16%).^[4] Meanwhile, small and medium enterprises face energy costs 70 per cent above pre-crisis levels, and this is projected to rise in the coming year.^[5]  Energy costs are a “systemically significant price” with deep consequences for wider inflation and economic stability.^[6] The Government’s own public attitudes tracker suggests 68% expect net zero to raise their living costs in the short term, and 48% in the long term.^[7]  Labour promised before the election its energy policies would lower household energy bills by £300 but currently lacks a plan to deliver this.  Addressing the problem of high energy costs could well be the central test for the Government in the coming years; it will define its ability to confront the international rise of reactionary right-wing populism through genuinely improving living standards alongside tackling the climate crisis.

So far, Labour’s focus has been on reducing exposure to volatility in fossil gas prices through expanding home-grown renewable electricity. This is important and necessary, but not sufficient. Energy costs in the UK are high due to structural economic factors, including the concentrated market power of privately-owned fossil gas plants. British households and businesses pay the price.

Why are prices structurally high? Privately-owned gas-fired power plants hold and make use of market power because of the way the power system is set up:

• Privately-owned gas-fired power plants exploit a unique market power position in the “Balancing Mechanism”,^[8] holding the grid to ransom and demanding eye-watering sums of money to supply energy at short notice. This cost consumers £830mn in 2024, and balancing costs are projected to rise to close to £5bn by 2030 in some scenarios^[9] (this includes wind curtailment costs, but the majority would be gas turn-up payments).  
• Gas generators further benefit from the capacity market system, in which they are paid to be on standby for use during supply crunches. Bill payers in the UK have paid £12.5bn in capacity payments to fossil fuel power plants in the past decade.^[10] This includes over £2.6bn to units currently owned by a private equity fund founded by the Czech billionaire Daniel Kretinsky, £900mn to units currently owned by Uniper (owned by the German state), £320mn to units currently partially owned by Equinor (owned by the Norwegian government).^[11]
• Research by UCL found that revenues to gas generators surged by 200% to £13bn during the energy crisis, and profits likely increased significantly as well as the “spark spread” (the gap between power and fossil gas prices) rose sharply.^[12]  

Fossil gas will continue to play a role in the energy system for some time, particularly during the politically pivotal period ahead of the next election. But this role is changing. Rather than representing a major source of electricity generation, fossil gas use will be confined to infrequently operated but strategically critical “peaking”’ plants. As analyst Nathan Iyer of the Rocky Mountain Institute put well, a system increasingly powered by renewables will have less need for gas energy (or decreasing operation of capacity) but will require a certain level of gas capacity maintenance or even expansion, which will then be retired in a managed phaseout.  

This change of role requires a change in policy approach. There is no longer any reason for market or policy incentives for new gas fired power. Instead, a small number of existing assets need to be maintained for a period and operated at significantly reduced capacity in what could be an unpredictable manner, before being gradually phased out or adapted to alternative uses. This all needs to occur while avoiding the concentrated power that a market-led approach has created. The most sensible way to achieve this is to bring these assets under public control, in the form of a state-owned strategic reserve, that operates outside of the existing wholesale market, balancing mechanism, or Capacity Market, eliminating profits to quickly lower bills and enhance energy security. This proposal has previously been suggested by Adam Bell of Stonehaven^[13] and the energy expertise centre Regen.^[14]

Overall, public ownership of gas generation would give the Government a uniquely strong position to control and set the terms of the phaseout process in line with economic and social objectives. It would allow the Government to:  

• ‍Decide the fate of assets, with trade unions at the table.   ‍
• Direct the transition, allocating capital to meet policy objectives and operating assets at cost.  ‍
• Distribute costs equitably, in a way that reduces the impact on financially burdened households and businesses and retains public support.  

The remainder of this briefing outlines problems in the current institutional and ownership structure of fossil gas power, before charting a route to nationalisation through a public “strategic reserve”’ This is followed by a Q&A section, which responds to potential questions for this proposal.

[.box][.box-header]A Note on Terminology[.box-header][.box-paragraph]This briefing uses the term “fossil gas”, rather than “natural gas”. This is to emphasise its status as a dangerous, planet-warming fossil fuel.^[15][.box-paragraph][.box-paragraph]By “gas power plants” we mean electricity generators that burn fossil gas. We use this term interchangeably with “gas generation”.[.box-paragraph][.box-paragraph]The term “strategic reserve” has various possible meanings, as described in the section Public Preferable. We use it here to mean a publicly-owned fleet of gas generation that operates outside of the wholesale market, Balancing Mechanism or Capacity Market.[.box-paragraph][.box]

Tipping the Balance

Public ownership would reduce costs by addressing a fundamental problem in our current power system: the concentrated market power held by a small number of private companies in the Balancing Mechanism — the system that maintains stability in the electricity grid.^[16] This power is becoming more significant as Britain transitions to a more intermittent, renewable-driven power system. In systems with a greater proportion of renewable power, gas peaking plants are used to balance fluctuating power requirements in the electricity network, firing up during periods of high demand or shortage, or when there is a physical constraint on the ability of the grid to transmit renewable power. When wind power generation drops and electricity demand peaks, the owners of these plants gain extraordinary leverage over the entire energy system, leverage which they currently use to collect rent from the public.  

We can see how gas plant owners are able to extract rents by looking at what happens during periods of high demand and low wind speed. For instance, on the 8^th of January 2025, to prevent a blackout, the National Electricity System Operator (NESO) had no choice but to accept the extreme prices demanded gas power stations. VPI’s Rye House plant in Hertfordshire charged an astronomical £5,750 per megawatt-hour (MWh), while Uniper’s Connah’s Quay facility near Liverpool demanded £2,900 per MWh. For context, the actual cost of natural gas that day was just €45 per MWh in European markets. As a result of this price gouging, Rye House made £7.5mn, and Connah’s Quay £10.3mn. The massive difference between the wholesale cost and what the gas plants charged reveals how private companies exploit their position within the Balancing Mechanism. When the margin between electricity supply and demand becomes thin, these companies are able to name their price, knowing that the alternative would be widespread power outages. The British public ultimately bears the cost of their market power through higher energy bills.    

The prices seen on the 8^th of January, for example, are beyond the plausibility of alternative explanations other than rent seeking. Exactly how much of these prices is attributable to pure rent-seeking is difficult to establish without visibility into the cost both of maintaining capacity and of firing up at short notice, which is challenging under a system of private ownership and regulation.  Even though the cost of wind curtailment — where operators are paid to reduce electricity generation to protect grid stability — has captured headlines, gas “turn-up costs” (payments to gas generators to increase their output above contracted volumes to compensate for constrained wind farms) are far larger: turn-up vs curtailment costs were £208mn vs £43 mn respectively for 1.7TWh in 2025 year-to-date, £835mn vs £395mn for 8.1TWh in 2024, £506mn vs £273mn for 3.8TWh in 2023, and £737mn vs £208mn for 3.5TWh in 2022.  

(The figure below shows the total turn-up volume and average price at the BM-unit level for the full year of 2024.)

Figures 1 and 2 below show the prices charged on average by plants of different sizes and ages. Looking at plant-level turn-up generation and volumes across 2024 — that is, exclusively the turn-up needed to replace curtailed wind power — we can observe the range of average prices. (Although we do not know at how short notice or how sporadically the generation was demanded.) Higher prices tend to be charged by those plants — Seabank, Langage, Pembroke, Rye House, Didcot — which provide a relatively small amount of turn-up power throughout the year. The lowest prices tend to be charged by coal (Uniper’s fleet), biomass (Drax) and pumped hydro, in that order. Figure 2 shows the same data mapping price onto the year in which each plant was commissioned. While we might expect older plants to be more expensive to turn up, no such pattern is immediately visible from the average price data.

[.fig][.fig-title]Figure 1: Coal Tended to Provide the Lowest Balancing Prices[.fig-title][.fig-subtitle]Turn-up volume and prices by technology, full year 2024[.fig-subtitle][.fig]

[.notes]Source: Common Wealth based on Robin Hawkes.[.notes]

[.fig][.fig-title]Figure 2: Balancing Prices do not Appear to be Associated with Older Plants[.fig-title][.fig-subtitle]Average balancing price per MWh versus plant age and owner[.fig-subtitle][.fig]

[.notes]Source: Common Wealth based on Robin Hawkes and DESNZ Digest of UK Energy Statistics.[.notes]

Power plays

Right-wing criticisms of net zero often point to the need to balance intermittent renewable output as evidence that renewable technologies are fundamentally flawed.^[17] Although the total contribution of balancing events to household bills are relatively small, they are non-trivial and likely to increase in both cost and public prominence, which could reinforce such damaging narratives ahead of the next election. Reform UK for example — who currently frequently find themselves at the top of voter intention opinion polls — have called renewable energy a “massive con”’ and pledged to impose taxes on the industry.^[18] But to use the high prices observed during balancing events as evidence of the folly of clean energy is to conflate an engineering problem with a market coordination problem, redirecting anger away from those who are actually extracting rents and elevating prices, and wrongly directing it towards the energy transition. Put another way, the fundamental flaw in the emerging electricity system is one not of electrical power but economic power. The solution is not to reverse course on renewables, but to rationalise the governance of the electricity system. This means eliminating opportunities for price-gouging while preserving system resilience, through moving gas generation into public ownership.

Capacity Capture

As well as the Balancing Mechanism, fossil gas-fired generators benefit from the UK’s Capacity Market (CM). CM contracts — introduced during the Coalition Government’s Electricity Market Reform programme — make large regular payments to “reliable” generators in exchange for their guaranteed availability during periods of severe “system stress”. Systems stress events occur when the system operator is concerned that it may not be able to match demand through usual methods.  Revenue from CM contracts is additional to revenue made through operation in wholesale electricity markets and the Balancing Mechanism described above.  

Data collated by Aurora Energy Research for Beyond Fossil Fuels and analysed by Common Wealth shows where the money from British bill-payers ultimately flows.^[19] Ownership of plants with CM contracts includes billionaire-run private equity funds and foreign state-owned companies.  

[.fig][.fig-title]Figure 3: Daniel Křetínský’s EP Corporate Group is the Largest Recipient of Capacity Payments[.fig-title][.fig-subtitle]Daniel Křetínský’s EP Corporate Group is the largest recipient of capacity payments[.fig-subtitle][.fig]

[.notes]Source: Common Wealth based on Beyond Fossil Fuels and Aurora Research.[.notes]

The Government is pursuing reforms to the Capacity Market, in part aimed at supporting existing gas plants to decarbonise through the installation of carbon capture and storage or conversion to burning hydrogen. However, attempting to do this without addressing the fragmented landscape of private, profit-seeking actors runs into two obstacles: the poor economics of maintaining an infrequently operated reserve of plants, and a coordination problem in the strategic repurposing of assets to low carbon alternative technologies.  

Firstly, maintaining system resilience during a transition to a renewable-led power system requires keeping gas-fired generation capacity operational, but used on an increasingly diminishing and intermittent basis.  Under the current privatised system, this creates high prices that burden consumers. However, the traditional market response — building more gas capacity as prices rise — directly undermines the UK’s decarbonisation goals. This creates a fundamental problem: the price signals that normally drive market behaviour cannot function as intended if the Government is to successfully deliver on its clean power commitments.   

Secondly, existing gas infrastructure must be strategically repurposed for future applications such as carbon capture and storage (CCS) or hydrogen production. These technologies contain significant uncertainties, but public ownership creates the conditions for an entrepreneurial state that can drive this conversion process through risks with the public interest in mind. This follows the historical precedent where nationalised gas authorities successfully managed the conversion from “town gas” (gas manufactured from coal) to fossil gas infrastructure — demonstrating how public ownership can effectively navigate major technological transitions.^[20]  

Public ownership provides the coordinating mechanisms to resolve these dilemmas in ways that the private profit-driven model cannot and will not because it would contradict the primary aim of generating the maximum profit for their shareholders. The unpredictable needs of the system as we navigate power decarbonisation requires a flexibility beyond what regulation can achieve, given both the temporality of regulatory regimes and difficulty of managing both capacity and balancing from a distance. Public ownership enables strategic planning that balances immediate consumer needs with long-term decarbonisation goals, including delivering industrial conversion, without distortion by the profit-seeking behaviour of private gas companies whose interests may fundamentally conflict with the energy transition or the interests of their workforce or the public at large.  

Cashing In

The fossil gas power generation industry has been a site of vast money making in recent years.  Research by UCL showed that total annual revenue to gas generators rose by about £13bn during the energy crisis, and that this likely significantly exceeded their costs, as evidenced by the fact that the “spark spread” — the gap between the wholesale power price and the price of natural gas — rose eightfold in the same period.^[21] Despite this, gas generators were exempt from the then Conservative Government’s windfall tax (the Electricity Generators Levy).  Research by Gareth Fearn for Common Wealth suggests firms owning gas generating plants covered in the Government’s Digest of UK Energy Statistics made £3bn in profit before tax in 2023, and that their net asset value is approximately £7.7bn.^[22]  

In a volatile world beset by geopolitical risks, Britain will continue to be exposed to shocks in global fossil fuel markets, and it is crucial that the Government has a strategy for managing this and minimising its consequences. Public ownership through a strategic reserve must be a core plank of that strategy. Even if wholesale fossil-gas prices do decline (a possibility given recent global investments in Liquified Natural Gas facilities, but by no means guaranteed given present global geopolitics), this could present a political double bind for the Government, as its right-wing opponents could (wrongly) argue this shows the solution to high energy bills is to expand fossil fuel production. In response, the Government needs a clear narrative about how its actions are managing costs and feeding through wholesale savings to the public, which is made much easier if it can point to actions of a publicly-owned strategic reserve.  

Who benefits?

Higher costs are paid for by higher bills. The privatised system transfers wealth from British households and businesses to power plant owners. Who exactly benefits from these high prices? Take Uniper Power Ltd, which reported substantial revenues of £6.2 billion at the end of 2023. What many British bill-payers might not realise is that Uniper is owned by the German government, which nationalised the company during the energy crisis. Uniper’s performance — making £562mn profit before tax in 2023 — reveals a striking irony: public ownership of critical energy infrastructure is already proving its worth, just not for billpayers in the UK. While British households struggle with rising energy costs, the German government, through its ownership of Uniper, is capturing the benefits of high prices in the UK market.  British consumers contribute to German public coffers every time Uniper's power plants charge premium prices during periods of grid stress.

Public Preferable

We are in a peculiar moment. Even as we transition away from fossil fuels, gas will remain an important part of our energy mix into the 2030s, but we do not want to build any new unabated gas stations. This gives the current fleet of peaking plants significant market power, giving them effective permission to charge extremely high prices at crunch points. This ability to extract high prices serves no useful purpose in terms of maintaining a reliable electricity supply, it hurts household and business incomes — and therefore, the economy as a whole — and it undermines political support for the green transition.  A fundamental question thus arises about how these plants should operate: do the assets really need to participate in the competitive wholesale electricity market to serve their basic function of keeping the lights on when renewable power is scarce? Or could we have a different arrangement that maintains their essential backup role while preventing profiteering?   

The Government could look to identify critical remaining gas power plants and bring them into public ownership in the form of a state-owned strategic reserve. This means explicitly deciding and planning the phase-out of these assets and controlling their operation. The term strategic reserve has various meanings. In the original Review of Electricity Market Arrangements (REMA) consultation, it referred to a policy option in which a central authority auctions privately-owned reserve capacity. This would operate entirely outside of the wholesale market, and function as a potential alternative to the continuation of the Capacity Market. This policy option, and a reformed role in which it complemented rather than replaced the CM, were both ruled out in subsequent consultations. However, the most recent REMA “Autumn update” refers to the existence of the “necessary strategic reserve capacity of unabated gas generation”, and the possible need for a “a novel out-of-the-market mechanism” to manage it”.^[23]  

Common Wealth’s view is that to have the best chance of maintaining the required gas plants while curbing profiteering, the introduction of a strategic reserve mechanism should be accelerated and involve public ownership of assets and their operation “at cost”, meaning charges to consumers of power reflect only the genuine marginal cost of generation, which should not be opaque to the public bodies like NESO, Ofgem or DESNZ. Further detailed policy work would be required to determine and define the precise manner in which assets within the public strategic reserve exist within wider market arrangements (which themselves are being reformed under REMA), but the broad principle that we are suggesting is that they should sit outside of the wholesale market, not require a Capacity Market contract to retain operations, and when required should be operable by the system operator directly at cost, rather than through the bid/offer system of the Balancing Mechanism.  

Nationalisation of the remaining necessary peaking gas generation plants would allow for the timely reduction of both balancing costs (bringing them more in line with the assets’ genuine short run marginal costs of operating) and, over time, the absorption of capacity costs, addressing head-on the instances of acute market power that translate to higher bills and transfers wealth to private equity funds, foreign state-owned companies and wealthy shareholders.^[24] Rather than being owned and controlled by an array of self-interested private actors, it would be better for these plants sit on the public balance sheet, with their fate decided, their operation directed, and their costs distributed in a more strategic and equitable way.  

The creation of a public strategic reserve step would have implications for the Government’s chosen fiscal rules under Public Sector Net Financial Liabilities (PSNFL) and its Financial Transaction Control Framework (FTCF). As we have noted, rules under PSNFL and FTCF may limit the ability to obtain physical assets or equity stakes that confer meaningful control to the public sector.^[25] However, there is scope for Treasury discretion in application of these rules, specifically in judging whether greater public control will enhance the delivery of policy objectives or deliver better value for money. We argue that a public strategic gas generation reserve represents a very strong case: enhanced public control would help deliver the Government’s objectives of decarbonisation of the power system and lowering bills and would represent enhanced value for money relative to the current privatised arrangements. Fiscal rules should have sufficient flexibility in their application to allow for cases where public ownership serves a specific economically desirable and (given plants will eventually be phased out) time limited purpose. Further work would be needed by the Government to decide the relationship between a public sector strategic reserve and the fiscal rules.

The cost of bringing gas power plants into public ownership would be subject to negotiation. It would, though, be up to parliament to decide on a case-by-case basis the appropriate amount of compensation. The market value of these assets is speculative and forward-looking, pricing in expectations about the future, including the firm’s market power vis-à-vis consumers and suppliers and the associated rents. Given that these rents are made possible because of the regulatory failures that the nationalisation serves to rectify, it would be somewhat self-defeating if nationalisation simply amounted to investors cashing in those rents today, by compensation. By contrast, pricing based on book value (net asset value [NAV]^[26] specifically) would withhold those rents, compensating shareholders for their previous capital contribution (albeit excluding the opportunity cost of that sunk capital), inasmuch as it has been already converted into economic value for the firm but not yet distributed back to shareholders. This backward-looking approach is therefore more appealing from a policy perspective, but there is a risk that without clear messaging and explanation, paying less than market value could concern investors. A fundamental mitigating factor here is the exceptional status of gas generation as a sector where investment in additional capacity is specifically discouraged by the Net Zero mission.  Another unusual feature of the fossil gas generation sector is that it combines market power with the risk of owning assets that might lose value and become useless (stranded assets). This mix makes it a risky investment by normal standards. As a result, owners might be more willing to sell than would be expected just based on market power, which can lower the market value overall.  

There is also the issue of price discovery here, as there are unlikely to be deep, liquid markets for these kinds of gas assets to give us a benchmark of market value.  The net present value^[27] of expected future cash flows is in any case highly dependent on government policy, which — subject to legal and contractual complications — gives the Government leverage to reduce market value relative to NAV. It could do this by preventing assets from obtaining new capacity market contracts, and limiting their maximum potential operational hours over time through emissions intensity regulations (a policy that has a precedent in the Emissions Performance Standard introduced during the Electricity Market Reform programme which regulated annual emissions of new fossil plants, and which helped bring coal out of the power system.  Even if acquisition at market value amounts to a bringing forward of rents for the seller, the Government would still essentially be buying policy space on top of this to more effectively coordinate the transition and better guarantee economic security in the process.  

Time to Act

Transitioning to a publicly-owned strategic reserve of gas-fired power plants is exactly the kind of bold but actionable policy that a government focused on the cost of living and climate action should pursue. Whilst negotiating terms and transferring ownership would take some time, the Government should actively consider its options — and its leverage — as soon as possible, with a view to complete the process ahead of the next general election.  

Taking the critical first step to commit to proactively decide, direct and distribute the costs of the gradual phaseout of fossil gas fired power can help the Government to realise its mission of making Britain a Clean Energy Superpower in an equitable, democratic and secure way.  

Politically, the case for action is clear. This Government’s ability to combat the reactionary right and win re-election will be defined by its ability to tackle the cost of living crisis. That means that the Government needs policies that deliver quickly and at scale. This needed ambition must not be stymied by tired, received wisdom. Moving towards a public strategic reserve is a clear and direct way to regain control over energy bills, whilst ensuring energy security. The case for action could not be clearer; the time for action is now.

Frequently Asked Questions

[.num-list][.num-list-num]1[.num-list-num][.num-list-text]How much would nationalising fossil gas plants cost?[.num-list-text][.num-list]

The costs are challenging to independently quantify, as they would depend on negotiation and asset valuations that are not publicly available. This would involve an asset swap between the public and private sectors, and upfront capital expenditure by the Government needs to be considered against the income generating asset it would obtain. Whilst this would not be accounted for under the default interpretation of the current fiscal rules (Public Sector Net Financial Liabilities) there is Treasury discretion in the application of these rules in cases that represent value for money and a clear policy objective. In addition, there are steps the Government can take to lower the costs, through restrictions on further revenue generation by privately-owned plants.

[.num-list][.num-list-num]2[.num-list-num][.num-list-text]How does this lower bills? How much by?[.num-list-text][.num-list]

Lower bills would come about through reductions in gas turn-up balancing costs, and reductions in costs resulting from the Capacity Market, both of which are ultimately paid for by the final consumers of power (i.e. households and businesses). More speculatively, some elements of wholesale costs could be reduced through operating assets at cost and removing profits from this part of the system. The Government could have the option to use a strategic reserve to subsidise some elements of power consumption using fiscal spending.

We have not attempted to quantify the bill saving that would come from a publicly-owned strategic reserve, as doing so would require information about plants running costs that we do not have access to. However, we do note that annual profits for firms owning the UK’s gas power plants works out at around £120 per household (please note this is provisional analysis) and believe that a significant proportion of overall costs from gas generation could be reduced through public ownership.^[28]

[.num-list][.num-list-num]3[.num-list-num][.num-list-text]Why public ownership? Is the private sector not better than the Government at doing this sort of thing?[.num-list-text][.num-list]

During the transition to a zero-carbon grid, further profits from gas generation largely derive from market power and rent seeking, not innovation or productive investment. The owners of these plants will not be undertaking significant new valuable economic activity beyond recouping the gains of a fortuitous market power position. This market position is a result of 22 the absence of competitive pressures that would ordinarily compel private sector efficiencies. We believe that a publicly-owned entity would be in a uniquely strong position to decide assets’ fate, direct their operation and distribute their costs in an equitable way. Given there is likely no need for new gas plants (i.e. the state wants to actively disincentivise new investment) there should be no objection to a capital swap between the public and private sectors. The private sector can instead invest in new clean energy sources.  

It is also worth noting that a publicly-owned strategic reserve would need to be managed and staffed by experts from within the energy sector, albeit with policy direction and objectives set by ministers. It would not be operated on a day-to-day basis by government ministers or officials in Whitehall.  

[.num-list][.num-list-num]4[.num-list-num][.num-list-text]Would this policy mean gas no longer sets the price of electricity?[.num-list-text][.num-list]

Potentially. Marginal pricing in wholesale electricity markets (where the cost of the most expensive generator needed to meet the demand for power in each period) is a feature of the existing electricity market design which would not itself be automatically changed by a change in of ownership of gas generation. However, the opportunity would be available for some or all publicly-owned gas generation assets to be taken out of the wholesale market, and instead be exclusively dispatched as needed “‘at cost”’ on instruction from the system operator. This would have the effect of “‘shortening”’ the wholesale market merit order (the ordering of available generation to meet demand arranged by their short run marginal cost) and reducing the frequency of high marginal price periods. In general, and regardless of the ownership structure of fossil gas assets or their role within wholesale markets, the extent to which fossil gas sets wholesale prices will diminish as renewable generation and low carbon flexibility increases.

[.num-list][.num-list-num]5[.num-list-num][.num-list-text]What would happen to workers in gas generation plants?[.num-list-text][.num-list]

A publicly-owned operator of these assets must work with trade unions to achieve a just outcome for all impacted workers. In many cases, staff will need to be retained, and in cases where plants are a genuine stranded asset, it will be critical that the operator, and unions work together to find appropriate alternative employment in low-carbon sectors. A successful example of redeployment of workers from legacy fossil fuel power stations can be seen in the closure of Ratcliffe on Soar coal plant in 2024, during which the GMB, Prospect and Unite worked with the owners Uniper to redeploy staff to other areas of the business or external opportunities.^[29] A publicly owner of fossil gas plants must act in a similar or even stronger manner to minimise negative economic disruption from the transition.