Four Futures for the British Home, to 2050

Somebody has to decide how much electricity Great Britain will need in 2050, and how much gas, and what will be burning or drawing it. The National Energy System Operator does it by refusing to answer once. Its Future Energy Scenarios set out several deliberately different versions of the next twenty-five years and then models each of them all the way through, so that the network and the market can be planned for a range rather than for a guess.

This page shows the residential part: what happens to the boiler in the cupboard, the heat pump that might replace it, what a home draws from the grid, and what a household with a battery on wheels could give back. Nothing on it has happened.

Four futures, and a fifth column that is not one

NESO publishes four scenarios: Holistic Transition, Electric Engagement, Hydrogen Evolution and Falling Behind. They differ in how quickly homes stop burning gas, in what replaces it, and in how much of the change households take part in rather than have done to them. By 2050 that produces genuinely different countries, not variations on one.

There is no central case here and we do not calculate one. Every figure below is labelled with the pathway it belongs to, in the column header it sits under and again beside the chart. Averaging four divergent futures produces a fifth that nobody modelled and that describes no scenario anyone is planning for.

There is one more thing to know before the tables. The published file has a column headed Pathway with five values in it, and the fifth is not a scenario: Ten Year Forecastis NESO’s own central view of the next decade. It stops in 2035 while the scenarios run to 2050, and it is shown further down this page on its own, never mixed into a table of scenarios.

Gas boilers

The number of homes with a gas boiler, at the end of each year. This is the measure the four scenarios disagree about most starkly, because almost everything else in a home follows from how it is heated.

Air source heat pumps

The same count for air source heat pumps, the technology every scenario expects to do most of the replacing. Ground source heat pumps, hybrids and heat networks are all counted separately by NESO and are not included in the figures below.

Hydrogen boilers, in one scenario of four

Hydrogen for home heating is the clearest illustration of what a scenario is. It is not a thing that might happen a bit in every future: NESO models it in one pathway and publishes no series for it at all in the other three. A table with a single column is the honest shape of that, and it is the reason the column is named.

What homes draw from the grid

Total residential electricity demand across Great Britain, in gigawatt-hours. It rises in every scenario, because electrifying heat and driving moves energy onto the grid that used to arrive as gas or as petrol — and it rises by very different amounts, because that is what the scenarios are about.

NESO’s years here are financial ones, April to March, so a column headed 2030 is 2030/31. The release also breaks this total into appliances, lighting, heat pumps, electric vehicles and the rest, and those parts are the total divided up rather than added to it — which is why only the total is shown.

What a household could give back

An electric car is a large battery that spends most of its life parked. Vehicle-to-grid lets it push power back out at the moment the system is tightest, and NESO models how much of the winter peak that could take off. The figures are published as negative numbers because they are subtractions from peak demand, and we leave them that way.

Read them as a modelled potential rather than as a plan. They depend on how many electric cars exist in that scenario, how many are plugged in at the wrong time of a winter evening, and whether their owners have any reason to let the grid use them.

NESO’s own ten-year view

Alongside the four scenarios, NESO publishes a Ten Year Forecast in the same column of the same file. It is the operator’s own central view of the next decade rather than one of the futures it is exploring, and it is shown here on its own footing: its own table, its own heading, and stopping where NESO stops it.

It is tempting to treat it as the answer and the scenarios as the error bars around it. That is not what either is. The forecast is built for a shorter horizon and a different purpose, and there is no arithmetic anywhere on this page that relates the two.

None of this has happened yet

Everything above is modelled. It is worth saying plainly, because the figures look exactly like the measured ones elsewhere on this site: the same units, the same technologies, the same country.

The measured picture — heat pumps and solar actually installed, grants actually paid, and what the grid actually did — is on solar and heat pump deployment and live electricity. We keep them apart on purpose. A modelled 2050 figure and a counted 2024 one on one axis would draw a line between them, and that line would not be a trend: the two are built on different definitions, different counting bases and different vintages.

For the same question at a local scale, from a network operator’s own modelling rather than this one, local energy projections covers 25 council areas. It is a different model on different assumptions, so those figures are not a share of these.

Where these projections come from

Future Energy Scenarios is published annually and revised each year, so a figure here can move because the modelling changed rather than because the world did. Scope is Great Britain: the release models the British electricity and gas systems, and Northern Ireland is not in them. The edition every number on this page comes from is named below.