Education is key to unlocking real electrification benefits

This article was originally published by Utility Week in July 2026.

Opposition to new electrical infrastructure, especially overhead lines, is rising at a time when the electrical grid is in dire need of upgrades. While stakeholder engagement for projects is important, Stephenson Halliday Associate Director Zachary Ford argues that a larger UK public education campaign is needed if we are to unlock the benefits of electrification.

The UK’s grid infrastructure is in danger of rapidly becoming obsolete, with a backlog of projects and limited storage. Serious improvements and reinforcements are required across the network to simply maintain the status quo, and the electrification of transport, heating and industry are significantly increasing demand for electricity and electrical transmission infrastructure. Some UK authorities already have an electricity deficit, and the grid struggles to distribute power from renewable sources effectively.

Grid reinforcement and new connections are needed. Undergrounding cables is often prohibitively expensive, so this will mean overhead pylons are likely the choice going forward (a 2025 independent report by Mott MacDonald in conjunction with the Institution of Engineering and Technology (IET) put undergrounding cables with a lifetime cost of 4–5 times the cost of overhead pylons, averaging £5333/MWkm compared to £1186/MWkm for overhead lines).

When we attend public consultations with respect to proposed overhead lines, the common narrative we hear is “too much infrastructure here, not enough elsewhere”. Often this is driven by the perception that a particular locale or community is being exploited for the benefit of others. While there is little to support this point of view, misinformation spreads, often via social media channels, and is then repeated at consultations.

Other common misconceptions are that the technology is outdated and will be obsolete before it is even built, that it is not necessary or that nearby infrastructure will significantly affect property prices, among others. One of the most perplexing is a continuing disbelief that undergrounding cables is significantly more expensive than overhead lines. This is pervasive despite the fact that if it was cheaper to underground then operators would prefer to do so.

The lack of visibility of how the grid works is fuelling these views. Project-level consultations we attend are reactive and site-specific, aimed at listening to feedback and suggestions from the public, not education. We regularly simply become a face of the developer the person can vent at. While we can explain the need for the project and the technology used, we cannot get involved in arguments or tell the public they are wrong or misinformed. If an individual states climate change isn’t real, we will listen to them but not engage in the discussion.

The consultations are not a forum for correcting systemic misconceptions about energy networks. To do this, a coordinated national campaign led by government, district network operators and industry is needed.

This campaign could explain that the modern world is very much plugged in, emphasising that everything from education to gadgets and appliances and, increasingly, running a car requires electricity and that current infrastructure simply cannot cope with this demand. The National Infrastructure Commission recently estimated that electrical demand will double or even treble by 2050, and with that power comes the need to distribute it. Failing to upgrade the grid in this way could eventually result in rolling blackouts or sudden power outages.

In this public education campaign, there should be a reference to the UK’s current reliance on energy from vulnerable sources and the impact that world events such as Russia’s war on Ukraine and the United States’ conflict with Iran have on the cost of British energy. There is a strong case to be made for self-sufficiency in electricity, which again requires new infrastructure.

There are clear benefits of new and reinforced infrastructure. We generate large amounts of renewable energy, and more capacity is coming online by the day, increasingly supplemented by large volumes of residential rooftop solar panels. However, energy from large energy developments currently cannot be distributed effectively, leading to the situation where wind farms are paid to switch off as the grid doesn’t have capacity to get that energy to where it is needed. Air conditioner usage, a significant draw of power, is already surging in summer in the UK, and with extreme heat events more common it is vital that grid upgrades are carried out to be able to support this.

These points should be compared to historical examples of how old infrastructure is now a recognised part of our landscape. The Pontcysyllte and Avon aqueducts are listed buildings, and the Ribblehead and Glenfinnan viaducts are nationally recognised structures, despite cutting across stunning landscapes. While many would dismiss the idea of pylons being thought of similarly in the future, surveys show that people, especially younger generations, generally find windfarms and T-pylon line designs to be aesthetically pleasing.

There is precedent for a campaign like this. Between 1945 and 1964, the Electrical Development Association (EDA), the industry’s central public relations arm, promoted electricity and its use. Through advertising and public engagement, it discouraged the use of electric fires in the late 1940s when electricity supply was very tight and later encouraged the use of off-peak appliances, such as night storage heaters, to get the public to engage in load-shifting to help balance the needs of the national grid.

Limited amounts of public education, such as the National Energy System Operator (NESO) giving free electricity at high periods of supply and money back for load reduction at peak use periods, are already being undertaken, but these are isolated and relatively small in scope. These old EDA campaigns can give us inspiration on how we might approach this at the national level to educate the public on what upgrades our electrical grid needs, how that must be delivered and why it is important.

This is as much a communications challenge as it is an engineering one, and without closing this gap in public perception we risk regulatory delays and planning objections to new energy infrastructure, limiting our ability to take advantage of the benefits of electrification of heating, transport and industry.