In October 2024, three months after the general election, the new government made three clean energy announcements in quick succession. On 4 October, ministers committed up to £21.7bn over 25 years to the first carbon capture projects in Teesside and Merseyside. On 9 October, a joint government and industry taskforce published a report on floating offshore wind. On 10 October, the government confirmed it would introduce a new support scheme for long-duration electricity storage (LDES).
Each of these met a different need. Storage that can run for many hours helps keep the lights on when wind and solar output is low. Britain had built almost no new large-scale long-duration storage for nearly 40 years. Under the new “cap and floor” scheme, run by Ofgem, a storage project’s revenue is guaranteed a minimum level but also limited to a maximum. This is meant to make it easier to finance expensive projects such as pumped hydro.
Carbon capture funding had been promised by successive governments since 2009. The October money was aimed at two industrial clusters, and the government expected it to bring about £8bn of private investment and 4,000 direct jobs. The floating wind report, co-chaired by trade body RenewableUK, estimated that the technology could provide around a third of UK offshore wind capacity by 2050. It also warned that the UK lacked suitable ports and faced strong competition from European suppliers.
What happened next
December 2024: The Teesside carbon capture projects reached financial close. These were the Northern Endurance Partnership, which will carry and store CO2 under the North Sea, and Net Zero Teesside Power, a gas-fired power station with carbon capture. The developers are targeting start-up in 2028. On 13 December, the government published its Clean Power 2030 Action Plan. It set a goal for clean sources to supply at least 95% of Great Britain’s electricity by 2030, with ranges for offshore wind, onshore wind, solar and storage.
March to April 2025: Final scheme rules set a minimum discharge of eight hours for LDES projects, longer than the six hours first proposed. Ofgem opened its first application window in April 2025.
May 2025: The Great British Energy Act received Royal Assent, setting up Great British Energy as a publicly owned company backed by £8.3bn over this parliament. Its strategic plan followed in December 2025. By its first anniversary in May 2026, it had funded completed solar installations at 225 schools and colleges and 162 NHS sites in England.
September 2025: Ofgem said 77 of the 171 LDES applications it received met its eligibility criteria.
June 2026: Ofgem provisionally selected 16 storage projects, totalling about 7.65 GW, for cap-and-floor support. They included lithium-ion batteries, three pumped hydro schemes, a compressed air project and a flow battery. Final decisions were expected in autumn 2026. In the same month, the Climate Change Committee said the UK was on course for a very low-carbon power system. It also warned that wind and solar were not yet being built fast enough to meet the 2030 goal, and that power-sector emissions did not fall in 2025.
Why it matters for UK energy
These announcements dealt with parts of the energy system that wind and solar cannot cover alone: storing power for days with little wind and cutting emissions from gas and heavy industry. Two years later, the storage scheme and the Teesside projects have moved from policy into delivery. The 2030 target, however, still depends on faster building and grid upgrades. For more on how these technologies fit together, see the rise of hybrid renewable systems and our overview of UK energy.