The Price of Nothing, The Cost of Everything

On Southwood, Boswall, Porter, and the Enclosure of England

There is a man called Ben Southwood who understands things about Britain that most of her ministers prefer not to. He is the sort of figure who accumulates quietly and is now the editor of Works in Progress, a journal published under the auspices of Stripe that concerns itself, earnestly and rigorously, with why the modern world cannot seem to build or grow or think as well as it once did. He lives in South East London. He tells us he likes natural wine and chicken thighs and hard science fiction. He reads the thermal dynamics of power grids the way other men read the racing pages, and when he finds something important, says so without ceremony.

In August 2025, he said: “if you are not following Robert Boswall, you are missing out on some incredible recent threads on energy and energy policy”. Then he quoted the opening line of one such thread, which has the quality of a sentence that ought to be carved above the door of every energy department in Whitehall: Negative electricity prices are not a sign of abundance; they’re the butter mountains and wine lakes of the power grid: a subsidy-induced glut.

It is a line that deserves to stop you cold.

Robert Boswall works in commercial development at Last Energy, a company that builds small modular nuclear reactors. He appears to own a mind disposed to look at the energy transition not with the millenarian fervour of its advocates nor the reflexive hostility of its opponents, but with the patient, slightly mournful precision of someone who has actually done the arithmetic. His threads circulate among that peculiar tribe of online people who care about supply curves and interconnector flows and the structural economics of intermittency, a tribe small but growing, and considerably more important than its size suggests.

The point he has been making is this: that the spectacle of negative electricity prices, those moments when the grid is paying generators to take their power away, is routinely presented by the cheerleaders of the energy transition as evidence that renewable abundance is at hand, that we have crossed some threshold into a new dispensation of cheap, clean power. It is nothing of the sort. It is precisely what the EU’s old Common Agricultural Policy produced when it subsidised farmers to grow butter and wine in quantities no market would ever have requested not a harvest, but a distortion; not wealth, but waste in the form of surplus.

The analogy is surgical. Under the CAP, European farmers received payments decoupled from demand. The result was not abundance in any meaningful sense. It was food rotting in intervention stores, a colossal transfer of public money into private pockets for the production of things nobody particularly needed. The butter mountains were not a triumph of agriculture. They were a confession that the price signal had been destroyed. And so with wind and solar: the negative price is not a gift. It is a symptom.

Into this conversation enters Kathryn Porter, and her voice changes its register entirely — from the mildly sardonic to the genuinely alarmed, and from the theoretical to the acutely operational.

Porter is an independent energy consultant, the founder of Watt-Logic, and one of the few people in Britain who combines a master’s degree in physics with deep experience in financial risk management at institutions including Barclays Capital, EDF Trading, and Centrica. She is equipped to look at the energy grid not merely as a policy problem but as a physical system with hard engineering limits, and as a financial asset carrying risk profiles that conventional analysis consistently and dangerously under-prices.

Her recent contribution to this debate is precise and devastating. Surplus solar, she notes, is already causing grid stability problems in summer. The frequency data from last year’s May Bank Holiday showed it plainly. The National Energy System Operator has warned of similar issues this year. And yet when the surplus arrives and the price dips below zero, certain voices begin to celebrate: solar is free, they say. Look, the market is paying us to use power. Is this not abundance?

Porter’s answer is blunt. It is not free. Not even approximately free. The solar operators generating that surplus electricity are receiving £65.23 per megawatt hour, guaranteed under the seventh Allocation Round of Contracts for Difference, locked in for twenty years. Twenty years. A Whitehall commitment of a generation’s duration, at a strike price that, once you account for the grid costs of connecting dispersed generation, the backup costs of maintaining dispatchable capacity for when the sun does not shine, and the balancing costs that intermittency imposes on the system every single day, remains more expensive than simply burning gas. And gas, Porter observes with the weary precision of someone who has made this point many times to people who prefer not to hear it, at least works in winter. Solar creates gluts in June and contributes precisely nothing to peak demand in December, when the days are short and cold and the heating goes on and the lights blaze and the grid is stretched to its most threadbare.

This is the central monstrous arithmetic at the heart of the whole enterprise. Consumers are paying, through bills, through levies, through every one of those layers of cost that sit above the wholesale price and have risen faster than wages for a decade, for a technology that generates surpluses at the moments it is least needed and absences at the moments it is most needed. The frequency anomalies of the May Bank Holiday, those quiet technical tremors that most people never hear about, are the grid’s way of expressing distress: too much power, delivered at the wrong time, by generators whose contractual obligation is to the subsidy schedule rather than to actual demand.

And against local opposition, this is the detail Porter introduces that carries an almost unbearable irony, Ed Miliband continues to approve new solar on farmland. Against local opposition, while the grid is already struggling to accommodate what has been built, the Energy Secretary presses on. The Contracts for Difference machine turns. The strike prices are struck. The twenty-year commitments accumulate. And the May Bank Holiday frequency curves spike and dip, unnoticed by everyone except those paid to watch them, or who have chosen, against all social reward, to pay attention anyway.

What unites the Boswall thread and the Porter analysis is a shared diagnosis: that the price mechanism, the most important information technology ever devised by market civilisation, has been systematically corrupted in the British energy sector, and that the corrupted price is now concealing rather than revealing the true condition of the system. The negative price at the margin looks like abundance. The subsidised solar strike price looks like investment in the future. The balancing costs, dispersed across every electricity bill in the country, look like nothing in particular. Each individual distortion is explicable in isolation. Together they compose a picture that is, in Porter’s word, not free, and that is, in Boswall’s framing, structurally identical to the wine lakes and butter mountains that the European Community spent decades and billions of pounds creating and then trying, expensively and humiliatingly, to drain.

But it is when you set alongside these energy arguments the government’s Land Use Framework, published in March 2026 after years of delay, and received in Whitehall with the self-congratulatory warmth that attends all documents of sufficient complexity, that the full shape of what is being done to England comes into view. And it is not merely an energy policy, or a food policy, or an environmental policy. It is something more fundamental: a quiet, comprehensive act of enclosure, conducted not with the bluntness of the eighteenth century but with the sophisticated machinery of financial markets.

The Framework’s language is the language of optimisation. Land, it tells us, is a “precious and finite natural asset” which must be made to “deliver multifunctional benefits.” Farmers and landowners should “stack” multiple revenue streams from the same ground: carbon credits from the Woodland Carbon Code, biodiversity net gain units sold to developers obliged to offset their concrete, nutrient credits from water quality markets, alongside whatever food the soil still produces between its various contractual obligations. A single field can now be, simultaneously, a solar generation site, a biodiversity net gain habitat bank, a carbon sequestration vessel, and perhaps, if the agrivoltaic panels are arranged at the correct angle, a location where a few sheep graze. Each of these functions has been financialised. Each issues tokens. The field has become a portfolio.

Environment Secretary Emma Reynolds, launching the Framework, declared there were no “false choices” between solar panels and farmland, that “the problem has never been scarcity of land, it has been a shortage of clarity.” It is a sentence worth dwelling on. The shortage, she implies, has been cognitive rather than physical. We simply had not understood that the same acre could do everything at once. Clarity, in this formulation, is what the state provides when it tells you that the thing you thought was a wheat field is in fact a bundle of tradeable environmental credits waiting to be unlocked by the right modelling framework.

This is not clarity. It is the administrative vocabulary of financialisation applied to the English countryside. The natural capital market, with its biodiversity units averaging £30,000 apiece, its carbon credits generated by peatland rewetting, its stacked and layered and bundled ecosystem services, is in structure identical to the derivatives market that preceded 2008: an architecture of abstractions, each one representing a claim on an underlying physical reality, each one tradeable, each one issued with the assurance that the underlying is sound and the market is liquid. The Contracts for Difference are the energy derivative. The biodiversity net gain unit is the nature derivative. The carbon credit is the soil derivative. And the Land Use Framework is the prospectus that makes the whole securitisation legible as government policy.

The Royal Society, without quite using these terms, identified the structural incoherence at the heart of the endeavour when it noted is classically understated terms, that the UK is “overpromised in terms of the amount of land required to deliver current policy targets.” An additional area the size of Northern Ireland may be needed by 2030 to meet net zero and biodiversity commitments simultaneously, rising to twice the area of Wales by 2050. The land simply does not exist to do everything that the various frameworks require of it. But the frameworks exist, and the credits are being issued, and the twenty-year commitments are being made, and the May Bank Holiday frequency curves are spiking, and somewhere in Lincolnshire a landowner is reviewing an offer from a solar developer that makes the CfD strike price look, against the background of inheritance tax changes and the new agricultural property relief regime, like the most rational thing he has been offered in a generation.

This is what Boswall means by the butter mountain, and what Porter means by not free, and what the Land Use Framework means by clarity. They are all descriptions of the same phenomenon: a political economy that has abolished the price signal in energy, is in the process of abolishing it in land, and is replacing it with a system of administratively determined values, strike prices, biodiversity units, carbon credits, that reflect not what things are worth but what the policy framework needs them to be worth in order to function.

A country that produces sixty percent of its own food, imports forty percent, and is now systematically converting its most productive agricultural land into a portfolio of financial instruments denominated in megawatt hours and biodiversity tokens, is a country making a wager on permanent global supply chain stability that the last five years have not justified and that the next fifty are unlikely to reward. The frequency data from the May Bank Holiday recorded the grid’s distress at what has already been built. Porter named it. Boswall gave us the metaphor. The Land Use Framework, in its serene administrative confidence that everything can be stacked and optimised and made multifunctional, is the document that explains why nobody in a position of authority is listening.

The butter mountains rotted. The wine lakes were drained. The fields of England are still there, for now. The question is only what we will eat, and how we will keep the lights on, when the twenty-year clocks on the current round of Contracts for Difference finally run out, and we open the Framework to find that the land it was managing has been optimised into something that can no longer feed us.