Later this year, the National Energy System Operator (NESO) will release the full methodology for developing regional energy plans in Britain. Its publication will mark the next step in one of the most significant shifts in energy governance in decades. From late 2026, NESO will start developing eleven full Regional Energy Strategic Plans (RESPs), one each for Scotland and Wales and nine for the English regions, covering electricity, gas and hydrogen as one integrated system.
If you’ve never heard of a RESP, you’re not alone. But if you care about how Britain decarbonises heat, you should start paying attention now, because the design choices being made now will shape heat policy for the next 20 years.
Heat is not like electricity. Building a wind farm or a transmission line is a national infrastructure question. But how to decarbonise the heating of a Victorian terrace in Cardiff, a tower block in Glasgow or a rural village in Devon is not. That depends on the building stock, the density of demand, the state of the local electricity network, whether a heat network is viable and what happens to the gas grid which currently serves around 23 million homes.
They are inherently place-based decisions and until now nobody really owned them. National governments set targets and subsidy schemes. Distribution network operators plan their wires. Gas networks plan their pipes, mostly on the assumption that they will keep being used. Local authorities produce heat strategies that have no levers to deliver them. Each plan is prepared separately, often on incompatible assumptions about the same streets.
RESPs are designed, amongst other things, to solve this. For the first time a single body will produce a whole-system plan for each region, looking at electricity and gas together, informed by local priorities, and feeding directly into the regulated investment plans of the network companies.
Done well, RESPs could transform heat. A credible regional plan could tell electricity networks where to reinforce before the mass uptake of heat pumps, rather than waiting for connection requests to pile up. It could identify where heat networks make sense and give investors the confidence to build them. And perhaps most importantly, it could kick-start an honest conversation about the parts of the gas network that will not be needed, allowing a managed, fair wind-down rather than an unplanned one where the last households connected pay for a shrinking system.
Our research into gas network decommissioning shows that no one currently has the mandate to plan for less gas. RESPs would be the first institution in Britain that could.
The engagement up to this point is promising. More than 2,800 local stakeholders have joined NESO’s RESP forums since March 2025, and nearly 2,500 submissions have been incorporated into the transitional plan. There is clearly a hunger for this.
There are at least three main challenges in developing plans. Further challenges will arise in implementation.
The quality of regional plans is only as good as the local knowledge that goes into them, and local authority capacity for energy planning is extremely uneven. Some councils have full energy teams but many have a fraction of an officer. If the RESP process is simply a matter of who has the resources to show up, the plans will reinforce rather than correct existing inequalities.
RESPs are caught awkwardly between national strategy and local delivery. The full plans are now scheduled to arrive by the end of 2028, according to NESO’s own timeline, pending decisions on the national Strategic Spatial Energy Plan. Meanwhile, decisions are being made every day about heat. Boilers are changed every 12 to 15 years. Each year of delay locks in another generation of fossil heating.
Strategic planning may sound technocratic, but the decisions baked into a RESP (where to electrify first, where to put heat networks, what happens to gas assets) are very political. They affect bills and jobs and homes. Building legitimacy for those choices takes more than a consultation portal.
These are the sort of questions our new UKERC project is investigating. We are looking at how RESPs are being developed and implemented in real time, through comparative case studies in Scotland, Wales and South West England. We want to see what new institutional roles are emerging, how different regions organise the process and how the capabilities of local authorities, businesses and community groups influence outcomes.
RESPs are being built at a rapid pace to meet an ambitious schedule. Institutions created in this way tend to crystallise rapidly around early decisions, which is why it is important to study them now, rather than evaluate them in 2030.
Britain has learned over fifteen years that heat decarbonisation cannot be delivered from Whitehall alone. RESPs are the most serious attempt yet to create governance arrangements that are fit for purpose. Their success depends on decisions made now.