Last updated:
20 Apr. 2026
Wales – like the other nations of the United Kingdom – has made significant progress in scaling up its renewables sector and decarbonising its power supply. However, this growth is failing to keep pace with the decline in non-renewable energy sources or with the growing demand for electricity driven by the electrification of industry, home heating, and transport. It has also found that Wales’s planning pipeline is substantially less developed than those in England and Scotland. As a result, Wales’s capacity to meet its electricity needs from domestic sources is declining – with 2024 marking the first year in which the country imported power from the rest of the UK. After decades in which the country has been a net exporter of electricity, Wales is falling behind England and Scotland and is now on course to become dependent on imported electricity for the first time.
Without ambitious action to grow its share of homegrown renewables, renewables’ share of the electricity mix forecast to fall on current buildout rates. Meanwhile, Wales’s dependence on gas is forecast to grow, leaving it highly exposed to price volatility in global fossil fuel markets – even as the conflict in the Middle East raises concerns about a replay of the 2021/2022 energy crisis, which had direct economic costs to the Welsh economy of £5.6 billion.
For policymakers in Wales, the country faces a clear choice: either to invest in its renewable resources to rebuild generation capacity and energy independence or to accept growing reliance on imported gas and English electricity – with all the costs, volatility and lost economic opportunity that that entails.