Who said what? The ESA guide to Party Conference 2026
By Policy Lead Guy Clark
Who said what this conference season? How likely is it to matter? How should my business engage? These are the questions we’ll be breaking down in the ESA 2026 Party Conference Roundup, bringing you the major energy announcements from the last two months.
Party: Labour
Polling: 28%
Priorities: Net Zero, devolution and greater public control
The two major energy stories to come out of Labour Conference demonstrated the party’s ongoing support for the Net Zero economy while reflecting the Prime Minister’s twin priorities of greater public control and regional devolution. These were the much-anticipated launch of Great British Grid and Miatta Fahnbulleh’s surprise announcement of the devolution of the Warm Homes Plan.
GBG will be a new branch of GBE: a publicly owned company to compete with existing transmission network operators, drive down costs and speed up connections so businesses can expand and grow more quickly. Welcome news, but with a budget of £4bn at most, its impact may not be immediately transformative. The Warm Homes Plan will now be administered by mayors, local government and communities rather than Whitehall, according to the Energy Secretary, who re-branded it “The Great Home Upgrade” in her speech. This is in fact the name of a long-running campaign from the New Economics Foundation, where Fahnbulleh was previously Chief Executive, showing the influence of the thinktank’s ideas on present government policy. Giving local authorities control over the funding may mean the funding is better targeted and more aligned with local priorities. However, the move raises questions over how exactly the funding pot will be split between authorities and whether existing timelines may now be pushed back to accommodate the change.
Burnham also reiterated his commitment to breaking the link between gas and electricity prices, though policy detail on this was not forthcoming. While the Energy Secretary publicly supports moving policy levies off bills and into general taxation, the Chancellor John Healey is reported to be sceptical, and likely to prioritise targeted help for the vulnerable rather than broad-based reforms at the budget. Perhaps – like Burnham’s other eye-catching commitments to scrap the pensions triple lock and found a national care service – such measures may need to wait until the next election.
Labour’s two announcements prove fertile ground for engagement from storage companies. Boosting the rollout of residential storage both aligns with the aims of the Warm Homes Plan and reduces the need for costly network buildout, exactly the problem GBG is trying to address – with commercial and grid-scale storage both contributing to the latter. It is also easy to see common ground between Andy Burnham’s broader devolution agenda, and the distributed, decentralised energy system that effective rollout of storage would enable.
Party: Reform
Polling: 23%
Priorities: anti-Net Zero, pro-growth
In contrast, opposition to Net Zero remains one of Reform’s key policy priorities. Deputy Leader Richard Tice – who disagrees with the theory of man-made climate change – encouraged delegates at the party conference last month to “enjoy the heat”. The renewable energy industry is seen as unnecessary by many in Reform, as well as an undeserving beneficiary of excessive government subsidy and as a driving factor in Britain’s high energy costs, which the party is determined to bring down. Tice promised a Reform government would reduce household bills by £250 in its first 100 days or he would personally resign. The party means to achieve these savings by boosting the use of fossil fuels and nuclear power, and with a bonfire net zero policies and levies.
Most relevantly for the storage sector, the party would the scrap the Feed-in Tariff, all non-nuclear activities of GB Energy and CfD rounds from AR7 onwards. It is even seeking to renegotiate or scrap existing CfDs. It is highly unlikely to have the legal powers to accomplish the latter, but it certainly indicates the direction of travel. Reform would also abolish all carbon taxes, the Z.E.V. mandate and the Renewables Obligation. Nigel Farage’s 2025 pledge to ban new BESS projects on safety grounds was not repeated at the conference, but certainly has not been withdrawn.
Reform is second in the polls and until recently was looking likely to form the next government. The “Burnham Bounce” has seen Labour overtake them recently, but the success of the upcoming budget – and of Badenoch’s Conservatives in drawing back voters – will have a big impact on how long that lead lasts. Burnham is looking secure for now, but there is still a very real possibility that Reform becomes the largest party at the next election and implements a handbrake turn in UK energy and climate policy.
They are also the most challenging of the major parties in terms of storage sector engagement, however there are areas of common ground. Some Reform figures, like Hull mayor Luke Campbell, support clean energy where it can bring down bills and support growth. Energy storage at the residential, commercial and grid scale does both and when presented purely on the business case, can align with Reform’s market-driven priorities.
Party: Conservative
Polling: 21%
Priorities: Cheap and secure energy, cheap and fast homes
Climate change is real but Net Zero by 2050 is “impossible” according to the Conservatives’ Plan For Britain. The announcements this week therefore amounted to a thoroughly Conservative approach to the sector – acknowledging a serious will to leave the world a better place for our descendants whilst prioritising deregulation and government spending cuts to cut consumer costs and boost growth.
The new Conservative guiding philosophy, “The Right Way”, prioritises cheaper and more secure power and articulates that renewables should expand where they align with that. The party has, for example, ruled out scrapping existing CfD contracts – which would damage investor confidence. However, to generate a swift bill saving (reportedly £200 a year) the Conservatives would first remove VAT, Carbon Taxes and renewables subsidies from energy bills. They would then go on to scrap future offshore wind auctions, along with GB Energy, the Climate Change Act, the Climate Change Committee and the Z.E.V. Mandate. Shadow Energy Secretary Andrew Bowie argued the above imposed high energy costs on the country, impossible regulatory burdens on businesses and growing dependency on imported Chinese technology. He backed the recent “Firm Foundations” paper, advocating a gas- and nuclear-heavy energy strategy – including increased North Sea drilling – which it claims would save £320bn between 2030 and 2050. Analysis from several sources – including RenewableUK – challenges that figure, however.
The direction of travel is the same at the residential scale. In proposals they claim would save £50,000 from the cost of a building a new home, the Conservatives plan to scrap the Future Homes Standard, along with Natural England and the Environment Agency – who they accuse of blocking new developments. The thinktank E3G has pointed out, however, that scrapping the FHS would leave consumers with approximately £1000 higher running costs annually.
The Conservatives are currently polling in third position and, if an election were held tomorrow, would seem to be in prime position to go into coalition with Reform, with whom they share a number of policy positions. However, in her conference speech Badenoch forcefully ruled out such a coalition. She cited allegations of collusion with Russia, financial misconduct and the emerging position among prominent Reform figures that people of ethnic minorities cannot be considered “English” as reasons the two could never work together.
Storage businesses engaging with the Conservatives should be laser-focused on the economic case. Cutting costs from new homes and piling them onto homeowners may not drive growth as much as is suggested. Boosting storage – especially LDES – will be key to driving down constraint costs from the existing fleet of offshore wind farms, even before more are added. And there are innovative storage manufacturers looking to scale up in the UK, boosting jobs, growth and security of supply chains – all Conservative priorities.
Party: Green
Polling: 13%
Priorities: Community energy, home efficiency and radical economics
There were no storage specific announcements from the Green Party, but Zack Polanski laid emphasis on expanding community energy and maximising home energy efficiency in his speech – both policies with positive implications for the sector. They came alongside commitments to ‘break the link’ between gas and electricity prices, ban all new fossil fuel extraction, uphold the ZEV mandate and abandon a longstanding Green Party objection to nuclear power. Finally, the party are seeking to abandon the government’s ‘fiscal rules’ in favour of ‘fiscal referees’, a model first proposed by the New Economics Foundation in 2021. This would ditch simplistic and rigid rules centred on public borrowing and ratios of debt to GDP, in favour of an independent committee who could take a broader view of the macroeconomic picture domestically and globally before scoring the government’s fiscal approach. This would also come alongside greater public control of banking and finance. The green party claim this economic framework will abandon a purely pro-growth agenda and focus on improving people’s lives without pushing beyond the limits of our planet – following Kate Raworth’s model of Donut Economics. The green transition would be a focus of any increased government spending, however, if these measures were ever fully implemented, there is a likelihood of a Truss-style bond market meltdown.
After an incredibly successful year – with membership more than tripling from 68,000 to 230,000 – there are signs we may have hit peak Green Party. They have declined significantly in the polls in recent months, as Andy Burnham’s “good vibes” and lean to the left drew back voters alienated by Starmer. Zack Polanski’s recent defeat in the Holborn and St Pancras by-election only underlines this. However, as Polanski himself put it “Vote Green and watch Labour move.” The Green Party will continue to put pressure on Labour to maintain momentum on climate and energy, and even to consider some economic ideas more radical than they might otherwise have done.
Storage businesses engaging with the Greens are already strongly aligned on climate. The industry can also point to the significant benefits of community battery schemes and of empowering citizens through residential solar and storage to align further.
Party: Liberal Democrat
Polling: 8%
Priorities: Pro-growth, pro-Net Zero
Like many parties, the Liberal Democrat conference was dominated by a plan to “Get Britain Growing Again”. Energy costs and energy security featured prominently and in many areas the party appeared aligned with the Labour government. It seeks to break the link between gas and electricity prices, incentivise Consumer Led Flexibility, provide cheap loans to households for cleantech upgrades, upgrade grid capacity and reduce connection costs.
However, the plan goes further in some areas – explicitly committing to moving policy levies off energy bills and into taxation, extending CfD lifetimes to 25 years and actively seeking to move older energy generation agreements onto such contracts. Ed Davey also took the opportunity to publicly back the Jackdaw gas field – the first leader of a pro-Net Zero party to do so.
With 71 MPs, the Liberal Democrats have the largest House of Commons presence they’ve had in over a decade. They are polling at 8%, the lowest of all the major parties, but through effective strategic campaigning, they only needed 12% of the vote to get where they are now. With many pollsters predicting a hung parliament at the next election, Ed Davey’s Liberal Democrats may well end up minor coalition partners.
While the Liberal Democrats have little appetite for public ownership or devolution, they are broadly aligned with Labour in that they are both pro-growth, pro-Net Zero parties – engagement can therefore follow those common themes. Contributions to cost reductions and energy security are high priorities for the party, but they also value contributions to decarbonisation and electrification more than the Conservatives or Reform.
9 October 2026