On the afternoon of 28 April 2025, the lights went out across Spain and Portugal for ten hours. Eight people died during the event. A study published two months later by Imperial College and Spain’s Instituto de Salud Carlos III, using the country’s official mortality surveillance system, found a further 147 excess deaths over the three days from 28 April — a 4.2% rise over expected mortality, concentrated among women aged 85 and over. The 95% confidence interval ran to 330.
NESO’s own Reflections report on the event concludes that the GB system is “well-protected” against the same sequence. The conclusion sits oddly: the body most exposed if the read-across is real is the same body telling us the read-across does not apply. This essay sets that contradiction aside and asks the only question that matters — who, in the United Kingdom, is independently capable of testing whether it is true?
The question is not academic. On the evening of 23 June 2026, in a record heatwave, the GB grid’s frequency repeatedly fell below the 49.8 Hz operational limit between 18:30 and 20:30. Emergency assistance was called on the BritNed and IFA interconnectors to cut exports. Demand out-turn was more than 1,500 MW above forecast — beyond the 1,400 MW reserve the security standard requires. NESO issued its first-ever summer Electricity Margin Notice, for the following evening. The institution paid to keep the grid secure — NESO — denies there was a risk in insecurity, has commissioned an investigation into itself paid for by its own management, and is being overseen in that investigation by the regulator that co-authored the policy now on trial.
What the engineers say
Three allegations have been made, attributed to multiple control-room whistleblowers, including people on shift on the evening of 23 June. The Times has seen supporting documents; the analyst Kathryn Porter has summarised the public material on her Watt-Logic site. They are specific enough to be tested, and serious enough that the test cannot be left to those under examination.
First, that on 23 June the operator failed to meet the grid security standards put in place to prevent blackouts. The internal reports shown to The Times list five separate constraint breaches across the transmission network, each exceeding the limit by hundreds of megawatts and the largest reaching 700 MW, occurring with “no available pre or post-action mitigation options.” A second NESO document, a Significant Event Report written hours after the incident, was more direct: “During the incident, system constraints were breached and system security was compromised.” NESO confirmed to The Times that both documents were genuine.
Second, that NESO’s corporate affairs team interfered with operational decisions — putting the reputation of the operator, in Claire Coutinho’s words in the Commons on 15 July, “above security of supply.” Allegedly, certain stabilising actions were not taken because the press notice they would have generated was judged worse than the operational risk.
Third — and this is the tell — that operational decisions are being recorded in live documents with no version history, so that nothing survives a freedom-of-information request. The instruction, in the whistleblowers’ account, came from senior managers. Coutinho quoted it from a letter she wrote to the Information Commissioner, Paul Arnold, on 7 July: senior managers “have instructed operators in the control room to keep ‘live documents’ with no version history.” You do not destroy the audit trail of decisions you are proud of.
These are allegations. They are also, in their specifics, the kind of thing a competent investigation would either substantiate or clear within weeks. The question is not whether the engineers are right. It is whether the bodies now responsible for finding out are capable of finding out.
The response machine
NESO’s denial was emphatic. A spokesperson on 7 July: “All operational decisions are taken by authorised personnel within established procedures, and it would be false to say otherwise. NESO does not instruct its employees to avoid retaining records.” A fuller statement the following week: “During an unprecedented period of extreme heat and tight margins across Great Britain and Europe, the electricity system operated securely. No customer demand was disconnected, frequency and voltage remained within statutory limits, and no lines or cables were overloaded.”
Then Fintan Slye, NESO’s chief executive, held an all-staff call on Monday 13 July. The Times obtained a recording. Slye told staff: “There have been a number of allegations in the media, most prominently probably by the shadow secretary of state, Claire Coutinho. None of which are true.” Hours later, NESO announced the commissioning of an “independent” investigation — against the recorded finding of its own Significant Event Report, written hours after the incident, that “system constraints were breached and system security was compromised.” The firm appointed was Eversheds Sutherland, instructed on 9 July by NESO’s Director of Legal, and reporting to Jayne Scott — the independent director who chairs NESO’s audit and risk committee. Slye and the NESO chair, Paul Golby, are kept informed. The firm is paid by the body under investigation.
Coutinho’s response in the Commons on 15 July: the investigation is a “complete sham.” It will not look, she said, into “whether the grid is being run securely, or whether there was a breach of security standards on 23 June” — and does not grant anonymity to control-room operators who want to come forward. Sir Julian Lewis, chair of the Intelligence and Security Committee, made the same point more sharply: the investigation, he observed, will be paid by NESO’s senior management. Would it not be better, he asked the Minister, “for Ofgem to engage whoever is going to conduct this inquiry, not the very people whose own careers will be on the line if the whistleblowers are vindicated”?
Around 16–17 July, Ofgem announced it would oversee the independent investigation. NESO’s analysis, Ofgem said, would go “directly to Ofgem and independently of NESO’s executive management.” An independent panel — Jayne Scott, the chair of NESO’s Audit and Risk Assurance Committee, and Akshay Kaul, Ofgem’s Director-General — would receive Eversheds’ materials directly. “All NESO staff who feel they have relevant information,” Ofgem said, “will be able to speak directly to Eversheds completely anonymously.” The Energy Minister, Michael Shanks, told the House the regulator would “monitor both the progress and the outcome of the investigation.”
Relief all round. Until one asks: who is Ofgem?
The regulator that chose a side
Ofgem’s original mandate, set in statute in 1989 and 2000, is single and unambiguous. Its principal objective is to protect the interests of existing and future consumers — “furthered wherever appropriate by promoting effective competition.” That is what a regulator does: it referees between suppliers, protects customers from abuse of market power, and stands at arm’s length from the policy the market is delivering.
The mandate became a step change in 2023, when the Energy Act rewrote the principal objective itself. Section 202 substitutes into both s.4AA of the Gas Act 1986 and s.3A of the Electricity Act 1989. The new test: consumer interests are taken to include the Secretary of State’s compliance with the Climate Change Act — the net zero target for 2050 and the five-year carbon budgets. Net zero is no longer a factor the regulator considers. It is part of what the regulator exists to deliver.
Ofgem lobbied for the change. Jonathan Brearley, then CEO, welcomed it on 26 October 2023 as “a world-first in giving us a legal mandate targeting net zero,” giving Ofgem “the powers to drive through the energy transition.” A regulator does not “drive through” the policy it referees. It enforces the rules against whoever is delivering it.
In May 2024 the government’s first Strategy and Policy Statement came into force. Its first priority: “Enabling Clean Energy and Net Zero Infrastructure.” The SPS binds both Ofgem and NESO. The regulator and the regulated now share a mission statement, written by the department that owns NESO. In April 2026 the DESNZ Ofgem Review proposed making the mission explicit — three equal principal objectives, including net zero, replacing the single consumer-protection test. The proposal is not yet law, but under this government it is almost certain to become so.
The personnel tell the same story. Brearley, before Ofgem, helped develop the Climate Change Act as director of the Office of Climate Change. He led Electricity Market Reform at DECC — the introduction of Contracts for Difference and the capacity market. He was appointed CEO of Ofgem in February 2020. On 6 March 2026 he became Permanent Secretary of DESNZ — the department that owns NESO, runs the SPS, writes the legislation Ofgem enforces, and signs off the clean-power plan both bodies are now delivering. The architect of the climate framework became the regulator enforcing it, then moved to run the department that owns the operator. The pattern is structural, not a single bad appointment.
Judge, sponsor, co-defendant
The specific conflicts follow from the structure. Ofgem and DESNZ jointly wrote NESO’s licence. Ofgem approves NESO’s business plans and performance incentives, and decided the “enduring regulatory framework” that took effect on 1 April 2026. Ofgem and DESNZ jointly delivered the connections reform underpinning Clean Power 2030. Ofgem is co-author of the policy NESO executes. The Ofgem Review itself flagged concerns about blurred boundaries between DESNZ, Ofgem and NESO, creating duplication and what DESNZ described as “person marking” of roles.
The precedents are not encouraging. After the 9 August 2019 blackout, Ofgem investigated, levied £10.5 million in voluntary redress from the generators — £4.5 million each from RWE and Ørsted, £1.5 million from UKPN — and found “issues surrounding National Grid ESO’s management of the system.” The ESO paid nothing. No licence breach was found against the system operator. After the North Hyde substation fire in March 2025, NESO reviewed the incident and, as Ofgem confirmed in announcing its own enforcement response, established that “the root cause of the fire was a preventable, technical fault” by National Grid Electricity Transmission. Ofgem then opened an enforcement investigation into NGET — three months after the event. The pattern: the operator and its regulator investigate outward. They do not investigate inward.
Now apply the pattern to 23 June. If the grid was run too hard that evening, the verdict is on the system Ofgem approved, the mission Ofgem shares, the incentives Ofgem set, and the operator Ofgem regulates and DESNZ owns. Ofgem, the body paid to referee that contest, has co-authored the policy now on trial, employs the personnel who wrote it, and stands between the public and an independent investigation it does not control.
Luck vs. the “near miss”
An industry that took the safety culture seriously would behave differently. For twenty-five years I worked in oil and gas operations, and before that in the Royal Air Force. In both jobs, the event the engineers are describing has a name: a near miss. An unplanned event that did not result in actual harm but had the potential to do so — a system pushed to the limit of its design envelope and rescued at the last minute by operator action or luck. The reason the name exists is that both industries learnt, after enough accidents that should not have happened, that the near miss is where the lesson lives. The accident is rare and unforgiving. The near miss is frequent and survivable. Investigate the near miss, fix what allowed it, and the accident may never come. Bury the near miss, and the next time the system is pushed to its limit there is no operator left to catch it.
The events of 23 June are a near miss by any operational definition I know. The engineers on shift that evening put the moment in plain terms to the documents shown to The Times: “We had not 1MW left to instruct, frequency response was depleted due to the prolonged unsafe low frequency and one fault on the transmission network or generation side would then cause a full blackout. It was unprecedented.”
In aviation the near miss goes into a reporting system. The relevant authority is notified. An investigation begins within days. The lessons are circulated across the industry. The reporter is protected, because the report is treated as the system working as intended. In offshore oil and gas, since Macondo and the Safety and Environmental Management Systems regulations that followed, a near miss triggers a formal review. The expectation in both industries is the same: the person who reports the near miss has done the system a favour, and the people who investigate it have no stake in the outcome.
None of that is happening here. NESO’s own Significant Event Report, written hours after the event, recorded what its operators had seen; within days the public position was that the system had “operated securely.” The chief executive told staff the allegations were false, then commissioned an investigation into them — paid for by the management under examination. The engineers who kept the lights on are being managed for saying so.
That is the moral hazard. In a system whose institutional interest is the delivery of a particular policy, the near miss is evidence the system is not delivering. The regulator’s interest is identical. The policy’s interest is identical. The only people for whom the near miss is welcome are the operators on shift — and the lesson the near miss offers is that the system needs changes nobody above them wants to make. The institutional structure Ofgem and NESO have spent the last decade building does not just fail to investigate the near miss. It has every incentive to suppress it.
In my professions this exact pattern preceded every accident the public remembers by name.
The demand
Two things need investigating. Neither can be done by the bodies now doing them.
The allegations against NESO require an investigation that is independent of NESO, of Ofgem, and of DESNZ. It should be engineer-led, with statutory witness protection, with anonymity guaranteed for every control-room operator who wants it, with terms of reference that include the 23 June security question, and with publication in full. The Select Committee on Energy Security and Net Zero should take evidence in public. Parliament, not the energy establishment, should appoint.
Ofgem’s fitness to referee this question needs a separate review. The Lords Industry and Regulators Committee said in 2022 that the governance of the energy system was built for a more settled era. A regulator with a statutory stake in the policy’s success cannot referee claims that the policy is failing. The April 2026 Ofgem Review opened a route to fixing this; it has not yet fixed it. The route should be followed, and the timetable for the fix brought forward.
Independent scrutiny on this scale is already being assembled. The National Energy Audit — an annual review of the UK’s physical energy accounts, with methodology frozen in a public Terms of Reference before any figure is run and dissent printed in the open — is being assembled now, with its panel and working group under recruitment (nationalenergyaudit.org). It is not the answer to the question this essay poses. It is however the kind of institution that can become one, if the people staffing it are willing to follow the arithmetic wherever it leads.
A different future
The grid either was or was not run securely on 23 June. That is a question of physics and arithmetic, not communications strategy. The engineers who kept it holding that evening say the record of how close it came is being erased. Until someone with no stake in the answer is allowed to look, every official reassurance — NESO’s, Ofgem’s, the Minister’s — is the defendant vouching for the accused.
It does not have to be that way. But it will be, unless the institutions now running the inquiry accept what the numbers say.
The Energy Trap: Why the Renewable Energy Transition Can’t Work — And What Can is published by Swift Press in September.
To me this is indicative of the deep state imperative that Net Zero must be pursued come what may.
The authorities use spin and obfuscation to hid the truth. Substacker Biologyphenom captured a short video of Claire Coutinho quizzing minister Michael Shanks on this issue here: https://scotsparlclips.substack.com/p/house-of-commons15-jul-2026.
Shanks is “economical with the actualité” when he says the review will be independent and when he denies that this was a “near miss” situation (as you describe) which could have led to a blackout.
The following is a variant on a comment I’ve already posted under current posts by David Turver and Kathryn Porter:
Politicians used to talk about the “energy trilemma”, the balancing of affordability, security and sustainability, the latter referring to decarbonisation of the economy.
The authorities pushing our ruinous unilateral Net Zero policies no longer pretend that they are “saving the planet” by decarbonisation. Their stated purpose of Net Zero is openly and absurdly reduced to achieving their own arbitrarily set legally binding emissions reduction targets.
Publicly available official publications such as (i) the Energy Institute’s latest Statistical Review of World Energy showing that total energy supply dependency on fossil fuels (oil, coal, gas) is a stonking 86% globally and 79% for the UK and (ii) the UK government’s recent admission that the UK achieved a net reduction of just 15% on greenhouse gas emissions over the period 1996 to 2023 show clearly that Net Zero is pointless and unachievable, both globally and nationally here in the UK.
It is equally obvious that Net Zero is ruinously expensive as rigorously documented by energy analyst David Turver and is the cause of major ongoing deindustrialisation here in the UK. Energy analysts Richard Lyon and John Constable characterise the Net Zero reliance on unsustainable low-grade energy supplies from low-EROEI wind and solar as a catastrophically regressive policy which by the laws of physics is certain to lead to economic ruination.
So what on earth is stopping the authorities from admitting that the entire Net Zero endeavour has been a huge mistake which needs to be abandoned before any further pointless damage is inflicted on our energy infrastructure and economy, especially as most of the rest of the world, now including the USA, clearly doesn’t give two hoots about it? I can only conclude that malign deep state influence is being brought to bear for some inscrutable unfathomable ulterior motive.
It is very frustrating that there is no honest public debate with those at the top of the establishment on their reasons for pursuing unilateral Net Zero.
This is exactly what I said in response to the article on this subject yesterday morning by David Turver, only I said it in less words