What Your Area's Energy Future Is Projected to Look Like

Every company that runs electricity wires in Great Britain has to guess what will be plugged into them. Heat pumps, electric cars and solar panels all change what a street draws and when, and a network built for the wrong future is either overloaded or overbuilt. So each network operator publishes a set of Distribution Future Energy Scenarios: several different versions of the next twenty-five years, modelled down to individual council areas.

This page shows Northern Powergrid’s, for the 25 councils its network covers well enough for a figure to be about the place rather than about the wires. It answers a question no measured statistic can: not how many heat pumps are here, but how many are expected to be.

Choose a council area

The list holds only the councils Northern Powergrid serves almost entirely. Nine more appear in the published release and are deliberately absent here; they are named further down, with the reason.

Three futures, not one forecast

Northern Powergrid publishes three pathways, each aligned to a national scenario: Holistic Transition, Electric Engagement and Hydrogen Evolution. They differ mainly in how homes end up being heated — a mostly electrified route, a strongly electrified one, and one where hydrogen takes a share of home heating — and by 2050 that produces genuinely different networks.

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 three divergent futures produces a fourth that nobody modelled and that describes no scenario the operator is planning for. Where the three agree, they are still shown as three.

One thing to expect before you read the tables: the three pathways carry identical numbers for the first decade and separate only from 2036. That is a property of the modelling — one shared near-term trajectory — and not a sign that the next ten years are settled.

Heat pumps

The count of domestic heat pumps expected on the network in Leeds, full electric and hybrid together. This is the measure the three pathways disagree about most, because it is the one that follows directly from how the scenario assumes homes stop burning gas.

Electric cars and vans

This is the one measure here that is not domestic. Northern Powergrid counts electric cars and vans together, including commercial vans, and counts electric lorries and buses under separate parameters that are not included. It is therefore a count of vehicles in the area, not a count of household cars, and should not be divided by the number of homes.

Domestic solar capacity

Solar is published as installed capacity in megawatts rather than as a number of roofs, and there is no count of domestic installations anywhere in the release. We show megawatts. Turning them into a number of homes would mean assuming a typical system size and presenting our arithmetic as the operator’s data.

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 council names, the same tables.

The measured picture for these same areas — consumption, how homes are heated, EPC bands, and the solar, heat pumps and chargers already connected to the network — is on energy use in your area, and grant-funded installations are on solar and heat pump deployment. We keep them on separate pages 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.

One network of six, and 25 councils

Northern Powergrid runs the distribution network in the North East, Yorkshire and northern Lincolnshire. It is one of six distribution network operators in Great Britain, and each publishes its own scenarios on its own assumptions, so nothing here can be added up into a British projection or compared like for like with another operator’s numbers.

Within the release, a council’s row covers only the part of that council the network actually reaches. For 25 of the 34 that is almost all of it. For the other nine it is a fraction, and a projection printed beside those names would describe the wires rather than the place.

Where these projections come from

Distribution Future Energy Scenarios are published annually by each network operator and revised as the modelling changes, so a figure here can move without anything happening in the world. The edition every number on this page comes from is named below.