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 them council by council, for the places a network covers well enough that a figure is 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.

Each council is answered by exactly one network operator, and that operator is named beside every figure. Operators publish different measures under similar names and model their own networks on their own assumptions, so nothing here is added up across them or compared between them.

Choose a council area

The list holds only the councils an operator serves almost entirely. Others appear in the published releases and are deliberately absent here; they are named further down, with the share of homes each operator actually reaches.

Several futures, not one forecast

The pathways are the national Future Energy Scenarios, adopted by each network operator and modelled down to its own wires: Holistic Transition, Electric Engagement and Hydrogen Evolution. All three reach net zero by 2050 and 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. Some operators add a pathway of their own on top of those three; the columns of each table are exactly the pathways that operator publishes, named in full.

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 divergent futures produces one that nobody modelled and that describes no scenario the operator is planning for. Where the pathways agree, they are still shown separately.

One thing to expect before you read the tables: the pathways carry identical numbers for the first decade of each edition and separate only afterwards. That is a property of the modelling — one shared near-term trajectory — and not a sign that the next ten years are settled. The year they separate is printed under each table and is read off the figures rather than written down here.

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.

Which network covers which councils

Great Britain has six distribution network operators, and each publishes its own scenarios on its own assumptions and its own measures. This page holds 5 of them. Nothing here can be added up into a British projection or compared like for like between operators — not because the arithmetic is hard, but because the quantities are different quantities.

Within a release, a council’s row covers only the part of that council the network actually reaches. Where that is nearly all of it, the council is in the list above. Where it is a fraction, a projection printed beside the name would describe the wires rather than the place, and it is named below instead.

Licence areas cross council boundaries, so a council can genuinely be served by more than one network. Where that happens each operator has modelled only its own part, and neither part is the council. This page answers such a council with one operator — the one covering the larger share of it — names the others beside the figures with the shares they cover, and never adds them together. Two slices of one council are guaranteed neither to be separate from each other nor to be the whole of it, so their sum would be a number for no area at all.

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. Each operator’s licence, attribution and edition are its own and are printed with its own figures below — Northern Powergrid answers for Leeds.