Insights
The End of Energy Extraction
Why the UK’s energy middlemen are running out of road.
Published Last updated
6 min readSomewhere between your light switch and the national grid, an army of middlemen is quietly taking a cut.
Every month, British businesses pay their energy bills believing the money flows to the people who generate or deliver their power. In truth, much of it passes through a chain of brokers, intermediaries, and contractors, each taking a margin, few adding much value. It is a system that has grown not by design but by habit, a patchwork of convenience that long ago stopped serving the customer.
The result is a market optimised for extraction, not performance.
And that era is coming to an end.
1. The Broker Illusion
Brokers like to describe themselves as deal-makers. They “find the best rate”, “scan the market”, and “negotiate on your behalf”. But peel back the promise and you find a model that depends on opacity.
Most brokers add a hidden commission to the supplier’s tariff, often a few pence per kilowatt-hour that quietly multiplies across an entire contract. Call the supplier directly and, more often than not, you will be offered the same rate without the middleman’s cut. Everyone inside the system knows this. Almost no one outside it does.
It is not malice; it is inertia. The same dynamic once powered software resellers in the 1990s until Microsoft moved to direct cloud subscriptions and the channel disappeared overnight. Energy broking is on the same path. As data becomes open and tariffs dynamic, the middleman’s information advantage evaporates.
Transparency, not salesmanship, will define the next era.
2. The Installer Incentive
If brokers extract value from transactions, installers extract it from materials.
Most come from roofing or electrical trades. Their business model rewards volume, not optimisation: more panels, more scaffolding, more labour. Their design tools are configured to sell, not to ask the awkward question: how much generation do you actually need?
Few consider export rates, system degradation, or integration with future batteries. Once the scaffolding comes down, the relationship usually does too.
The irony is that many installations could have delivered better returns with less hardware. The smartest system is often the one that produces just enough, paired with storage, tariffs, and behaviour that make every unit of energy work harder.
But optimisation takes time, and time eats margin. So the incentive tilts towards volume. Sell more, move on, repeat.
3. The Missing Middle
Between brokers and installers lies a vacuum, a kind of no-man’s-land where customer outcomes go to die.
No one is responsible for ensuring that the contract, the panels, and the battery are tuned to one another. No one monitors whether the system is performing as designed. And when something feels off - a spike in bills, a mismatch in export payments - the customer is left in the worst possible place: trapped between parties who each claim it is not their problem.
Energy has become everyone’s business but no one’s job.
That is the structural flaw in Britain’s commercial energy market. We have people selling contracts and people installing equipment, but almost no one managing the space in between, where optimisation, intelligence, and trust actually live.
4. The Coming Battery Wave
Now a new actor is arriving on the stage: the battery.
At first glance, it looks like a saviour. It can store cheap power overnight and release it when prices rise. It can hold your midday solar to power the evening shift. But without a coherent operating strategy, a battery is little more than a shiny spreadsheet entry, a capital expense with a marketing halo.
Used well, though, it transforms the game. A battery is the first truly programmable energy asset most businesses will own. It listens to the market, learns your patterns, and makes small decisions that save big money. But it only works when someone is paying attention, not an installer chasing the next job, and not a broker chasing the next commission.
This is where expertise, not equipment, delivers the gain. The competitive edge will belong to those who can orchestrate generation, storage, and tariff signals as a living system. Everyone else will wonder why their payback period doubled.
5. The Finance Fog
Add money to the mix and things get murkier still.
Power purchase agreements, operating leases, hire purchase, the alphabet soup of finance options now shapes how technology reaches rooftops. Each model has its own logic and risk, but few buyers ever see an impartial comparison. Finance is sold to close a deal, not to optimise lifetime performance.
So we end up with fragmented decisions. The tariff was chosen by a broker, the panels by an installer, and the funding by whoever called first. None of it adds up to a coherent strategy. It is like building a house with three different architects who never met.
The more capital floods into the energy transition, the more we need custodians, not salespeople, to help businesses make joined-up choices.
6. The Shift to Intelligence
Something else is happening quietly in the background: Britain’s electricity market is going real-time.
Half-hourly settlement means every business will soon buy and sell power in 30-minute slices. Dynamic tariffs, demand response, and grid services are shifting energy from a fixed commodity to a living market. Contracts that once lasted three years will soon flex every half hour.
In that world, a static broker has nothing to sell.
What matters is not the price you agree today, but the decisions your system makes tomorrow.
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Data replaces deals.
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Intelligence replaces intuition.
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Operations replace intermediaries.
7. The New Model
The next decade will belong to operators, people and platforms that run energy like finance runs money: continuously, transparently, and always in the customer’s interest.
Call it Energy Operations.
It is not a supplier, a broker, or an installer. It is the missing layer that ensures all three make sense together.
Energy Operations means watching every site as a portfolio, optimising against tariffs, weather, and behaviour. It means turning kilowatts into insight. It means catching problems before they become bills. Most of all, it means aligning incentives: the operator only wins when the customer does.
We already accept this logic elsewhere. No one hires a different accountant for each invoice or a separate IT technician for every laptop. Yet we still let dozens of unrelated actors govern how our power is bought, used, and stored. That is not a system; it is an accident.
The energy transition cannot scale on accidents.
8. The End of Extraction
The story of modern business energy is really a story of attention.
For years, the market rewarded whoever could get between the customer and the current, not whoever could make that current flow better. That extraction mindset created profit, but not progress.
Now the market is changing shape. Data is dissolving opacity. Customers are waking up to the fact that the value lies not in buying energy, but in managing it.
Soon, every business will have a choice: keep feeding the extraction machine, or start running energy as an intelligent operation. The former is easy but expensive. The latter takes thought, but thought is where efficiency begins.
Energy does not manage itself. And the people who only sell it will not survive much longer.