Free electricity, anyone? Britain tries new tricks to green its grid.

Britain’s last coal-burning power plant, which closed in September, looms over a local resident working in his garden in Ratcliffe-on-Soar, England, on Oct. 7, 2024. Solar panels will eventually be built nearby. (Andrew Testa/The New York Times)

By Somini Sengupta

Were Heathcliff to roam the blustery moors around Wuthering Heights today, he might be interrupted by a ping on his cellphone saying something like this: The wind is raging, so power is cheap. It’s a good time to plug in the car.

OK. So the 18th century literary occupants of these windswept hills received no such pings.

But Martin and Laura Bradley do. They live in Halifax, an old mill town below the wuthering, or windy, heights of West Yorkshire. And when a squall kicks up, producing a surplus of electricity from wind turbines on the moor, their phones light up with a notification, like one that informed them of a 50% discount one Saturday in October.

The Bradleys plugged in their electric Kia, started a load of laundry and set to work on their most delectable energy-guzzling project: the Christmas fruitcake, which is made weeks in advance of the holidays. “As this takes four hours to cook in my electric oven, this is the perfect timing!” Laura Bradley said.

The phone alerts to the Bradleys and thousands of other people are part of Britain’s ambitious plan to shift the nation’s electricity system away from burning fossil fuels altogether by decade’s end. That would be five years faster than the United States, and a full decade ahead of the European Union, effectively making it the most ambitious target of any major industrialized economy.

That means building many more solar and wind projects, as well as loads of batteries and transmission lines. It also requires convincing millions of Britons of the benefits — most importantly to their pocketbooks.

That’s where the Wuthering Heights pings come in.

Octopus Energy, the country’s biggest electricity supplier, runs nine wind turbines on those hills. When it’s gusty, and power is abundant, it offers discounts. The Bradleys say they save upward of 400 pounds ($517) a year. Octopus says it not only attracts customers but also convinces communities that they benefit from new energy infrastructure.

“We’ve got these famously bleak, windy hills,” said Greg Jackson, the company’s CEO. “We wanted to demonstrate to people that wind electricity is cheaper, but only when you use it when it’s windy.”

It’s one of several creative experiments as Britain tries to convince a wary public that ditching fossil fuels can improve their lives.

Ripple Energy, a London startup, invites people to buy a piece of a wind turbine in exchange for discount energy bills. In the town of Grimsby, a local cooperative invests in small solar projects that reduce bills for charities nearby. In North London, a developer has teamed up with Octopus to sell homes that run entirely on electricity — and whose occupants get free electricity for at least five years.

Britain’s 2030 ambition is a test of how quickly a rich country can build a new energy system. It is all the more notable for happening in a country that birthed the Industrial Revolution, ultimately producing the climate crisis that afflicts the world today.

Hitting the target faces many challenges.

There’s pressure on the government to enable developers to quickly build things like transmission lines. There’s pressure from communities to not spoil the countryside. And there’s pressure to overhaul regulations so that communities near the new infrastructure — Scotland for instance, which produces most of the country’s offshore wind — can get lower electric bills and in turn attract new energy-intensive businesses.

Natural gas still accounts for a third of the electricity mix. Replacing that with renewables in five years is no small feat. One recent analysis concluded that solar and wind projects currently planned would make up less than half of the electricity mix by 2030 without an enormous infusion of capital.

An oil man turns to batteries

Signs of the transition are in plain view. Wind turbines roar like dragons off the Scottish coast. Solar panels line the rooftops of football stadiums. And on an industrial patch of West Yorkshire, where for decades, three enormous power plants burned enormous piles of coal, a former oil worker, Ricky Harker, has been installing giant batteries.

There are 136 batteries in all, each the size of a tractor-trailer and owned by SSE, an energy giant that produces a lot of wind power in the North Sea.

The batteries are designed to harness wind and solar power and store it until it’s needed in the grid. “It’s part of the jigsaw,” said Harker, the project’s manager. “Something we can’t do without.”

Harker embodies the transition. His grandfather was a coal miner. His father worked in a coal-burning steel plant. Harker, too, apprenticed there and then worked at an oil refinery, before an explosion killed five co-workers and literally drove him out.

“I’ve never run so fast in my life,” he said. “The next day I spoke to the police, grabbed my bags and left oil and gas.”

While the government’s emphasis is on accelerating renewables, it has no plans to leave behind oil and gas anytime soon. British homes are mainly heated with gas, and for the foreseeable future, gas will remain in the electricity mix as a reserve. The government has said it would allow already approved North Sea oil and gas projects to proceed, but not issue new permits.

In September, Britain closed its last coal-burning power plant. Its new Labour Party-led government has lifted restrictions on onshore wind projects, created a new entity called Great British Energy to invest 2 billion pounds in renewables and cleared the way for several stalled projects, including a 2,000-acre solar farm, Mallard Pass, which local communities complained would destroy farmland.

“If you want to get control over your energy security, and if you want energy independence, the way to do it is with clean energy,” Ed Miliband, the energy secretary, said in an interview.

The new energy curator

To convince people of the benefits, Chris Stark, the government’s adviser for the 2030 climate target, has been studying magazine advertisements from the 1960s. That was the last time Britain built a new energy system, laying down transmission lines across meadows and moors that the country relies on still.

The old ads are “really clear about why we’re doing it, why it’s good for the country, why it’s good for your kids, and that it’s not going to be a huge imposition on you,” he said. “It’s the sort of thing that we’ll need to do again.”

This month the government plans to outline what will need to be built where. Stark says that projects already planned are sufficient to meet the 2030 target. The challenge, he said, is “to do something which is genuinely new, which is to get our hands dirty and, in a sense, curate that energy system.”

But it will require more than building new things. It will require “a more flexible, smarter energy system,” Stark said.

The ‘zero bills’ inventor

A big part of that is tweaking the electricity system from the inside, which is what Greg Jackson of Octopus does, using software to profit from the peaks and troughs of power. Stark calls him the Willy Wonka of the energy transition, after the quirky chocolate-factory owner in the famous children’s book.

Jackson’s latest invention is the “zero bills” home. Residents pay nothing for light and heat for five years. And yet, Octopus still makes money.

How? The houses usually generate more electricity than they use, storing surplus in batteries. Octopus can sell that energy to the grid when demand and prices are high. (The free electricity doesn’t apply to car-charging, which takes a lot of power.)

There are only a few dozen zero-bills homes so far. Octopus aims to have 100,000 by 2030 by partnering with builders. Buyers get 10 years of free electricity.

“You’ve now got a highly variable system of electricity — wind, solar — replacing the old world,” said Jackson, the Octopus executive. “But we don’t have pricing system to reflect this.”

He is lobbying to change that. Step one, he says: Let sellers like Octopus offer lower prices to people living near new energy sources.

Persuading Grimsby

Climate change is a hard sell in a place like Grimsby, a former fishing town where jobs are tough to come by, aside from the offshore oil and gas industry.

Which is why Vicky Dunn, a longtime environmentalist, skipped the environmental pitch and asked two local secondhand shops, a youth shelter and a hospice if they would like to bring down their electricity bills by putting solar panels on their rooftops.

They did.

Several neighbors were keen to help. They loaned Dunn’s group bits of money to invest in the panels. The nonprofits saved on their energy bills, and the investors (many had put in as little as 100 pounds) earned 5% interest.

The intangible benefit, Dunn said, was winning over the community about the low cost of solar. “The energy transition is needed. But you have to take people with you,” she said.

From Dunn’s vantage point, the strength of these local projects is to show what’s possible. “It gives people something practical to do with the threat of climate change, instead of worrying,” she said. “Or moaning.”