Stormont must not be let off the hook for abandoning Northern Ireland homes to oil markets as well as its failure to have a fit for purpose energy strategy…

No dedicated heat pump grants. No smart meters. Excessive profits extracted by the owners our electricity network and sent south. While the rest of these islands modernise their energy systems, Northern Ireland’s devolved government has spent four years producing plans and achieving almost nothing; and ordinary families are paying the price

Northern Ireland has a heating problem unlike anywhere else in the United Kingdom. According to the most recent official figures from NISRA, 61% of households rely on oil central heating as their primary source of heat, compared to a UK average of just over 5 per cent.

These homes sit entirely outside Ofgem’s energy price cap and over the last two weeks we have seen first-hand, that when global oil prices spike, there is no regulatory buffer in place to prevent supplier price gouging and as the war in the Middle East has sent crude prices surging to $120 a barrel, some households have reportedly been quoted this week close to £1,200 for a 1,000-litre oil fill, double the cost of a fill in January 2026. For many families across NI this is money they do not have, the only saving grace is we are coming out of winter and the need for heating will diminish in the coming months.

The institution with the greatest power to do something about this and move us away from fossil fuels towards sustainable energy, is Stormont, and like pretty much everything it does, it has spent four years consulting, drafting, and gesturing, procrastinating and literally doing nothing. The homes of ordinary people remain as dependent on a barrel of crude oil as they were twenty years ago.

That cannot continue, and just like the Lough Neagh algae, and the failure to invest in Water Infrastructure, those responsible cannot be quietly let off the hook.

A Damning Verdict from the Audit Office

The Northern Ireland Audit Office published its verdict on the Department for the Economy’s Energy Strategy in October 2025, and it was withering. Despite spending £107 million since 2020 and employing 134 staff,  a department that would rank in the top 2 per cent of Northern Ireland companies by headcount and budget, the strategy achieved just 1 per cent progress against its flagship target of an 8,000 GWh reduction in energy use from buildings and industry. The Audit Office called the failure “staggering”.

Across four published Energy Strategy Action Plans from 2022 to 2025, auditors found only 74 distinct actions; many vague, untimed, and unmeasurable. Actions were dropped between plans and quietly reappeared the following year. Meaningful reporting against targets did not begin until September 2024, nearly three years into the strategy’s term.

Most damning for the hundreds of thousands of families burning oil: there was no meaningful plan to fund or incentivise heat pump uptake in homes. None. Four years of strategy, and the one technology that could free families from oil price volatility did not merit a single concrete action.

No dedicated grants at scale = no route out

Elsewhere in the UK, a homeowner who wants to install a heat pump can access the Boiler Upgrade Scheme, which provides grants of up to £7,500. That scheme runs until 2028. In the Republic of Ireland, over two million smart meters have been installed; more than four in five households; and new builds are routinely fitted with heat pumps as standard.

Northern Ireland homeowners who want to make the same switch face an almost entirely unsupported journey. The Northern Ireland Sustainable Energy Programme admittedly does offers offer grants for a limited number of heat pump installations, but it is on a first come first served basis, it is trivially small relative to the problem: roughly £8 million a year to cover the energy efficiency needs of over 900,000 electricity customers and this budget is also meant to fund insulation upgrades and other initiatives etc.

The 2025 Energy Strategy Action Plan promises to “continue work” on a support scheme for low-carbon heat in homes. This is precisely the language the Audit Office criticised: non-committal, uncosted, and devoid of any delivery date. Families cannot heat their homes with a consultation process.

Last in Western Europe: The Smart Meter Scandal

The failure on heat pumps sits alongside an equally revealing failure on smart meters. Great Britain began its rollout in 2011 and now has 40 million installed. The Republic of Ireland completed its national programme, with more than four in five homes covered whilst Northern Ireland has not deployed a single smart meter under any mass rollout programme.

Energy analysts have noted this will likely make Northern Ireland the last region of the UK and Western Europe to do so; with the first installations not expected until later in 2026 at the earliest.

For many people here, the closest encounter with a smart meter remains the cheerful Octopus Energy advertisements that float across from GB radio stations, extolling the savings available to customers who can shift their usage to off-peak hours. Northern Ireland listeners will be familiar with the pitch by now: cheap overnight electricity, real-time usage tracking, rewards for flexibility. It is, in its way, an unintentional public information campaign; a regular reminder, broadcast into our radios from across the water a reminder of the consumer benefits that Stormont’s inertia has decided we are not yet ready to have, and ranks alongside the ads for Uber the taxi service which is commonplace in the rest of the world but which NI Citizens can only experience the convenience of, when we are on our holidays in the UK or Europe.

Stormont’s Economy Committee was recently told that installing smart meters across Northern Ireland’s electricity network could cost well over £500 million once IT systems are included. That cost will fall on consumers through their bills, recovered over 10 to 20 years.

Smart meters are not a luxury add-on: they are the foundation of a flexible, renewables-driven grid. Without them, households cannot access cheaper time-of-use tariffs or participate in demand-response programmes. Northern Ireland’s target of 80 per cent renewable electricity by 2030 becomes substantially harder to achieve on a grid where no one knows what anyone is using in real time.

A smart meter rollout has been part of Stormont’s energy strategy since 2021. A cost-benefit analysis was commissioned in 2022. A design consultation followed in 2024. The 2025 Action Plan commits to initiating a “Smart Metering Design Plan”. Four years of work, and Northern Ireland remains at the design stage.

There are also serious questions about whether hard lessons from GB are being applied: roughly 10 per cent of GB meters failed to operate in smart mode due to incompatible communications infrastructure. Despite this documented failure, DfE’s consultation reportedly ruled out designing a bespoke system for Northern Ireland as “unnecessary”, opting for off-the-shelf solutions.

Profits Extracted, Consumers Left Behind

Against this backdrop of underinvestment in consumer-facing energy transition, Northern Ireland’s electricity network operator has been extracting significant profits. NIE Networks; which has owned and operated the North’s electricity transmission and distribution infrastructure since its purchase by the Irish state-owned ESB Group for £1.2 billion in 2010; reported a pre-tax profit of £180.8 million in 2024.

That represents a near-doubling of profit in a single year, following a 33 per cent rise in revenues to £452 million and of that profit, £53.6 million was paid as a dividend to ESB; the largest single dividend transfer to the Dublin-based parent since it acquired the business.

Manufacturing NI chief executive Stephen Kelly described the profit surge and dividend as “extreme”, particularly given the businesses facing massive energy cost increases and households still waiting for compensation following the catastrophic Storm Éowyn outages in January 2025.

NIE Networks has argued that its regulated profit level is set by the Utility Regulator, enables it to maintain a strong credit rating, and supports its ability to borrow for investment. That is a fair point as far as it goes. The company did spend £246 million on capital investment in 2024, and a major £2.2 billion network rebuild programme is underway. But the broader picture is uncomfortable: Northern Ireland consumers are funding a regulated monopoly that, in a single year, almost doubled its profit and sent £54 million to company outside of NI albeit an ROI company which will may warm the hearts of Irish Republicans out there, but not their homes.

At the same moment those same consumers are being told that funding a heat pump grant scheme or a smart meter rollout will take years more of design work and fall largely on their bills.

The question that Stormont has conspicuously failed to ask loudly enough is this: if NIE Networks can generate £181 million in profit in a single year from Northern Ireland’s electricity network, what obligation does that create toward the consumers who fund it; and toward the energy transition targets the Executive has legislated for? Regulated monopoly profits are not inherently illegitimate, but they demand scrutiny, particularly when the regulator and the Executive have demonstrably failed to translate strategy into action on the ground.

What Accountability Now Requires

Economy Minister Caoimhe Archibald has accepted the Audit Office’s findings and pledged to implement its recommendations. The NI Chamber of Commerce has called 2026 a year that must be “judged on outcomes, not intentions”. These are encouraging words. But warm words after damaging reports are a familiar pattern, and families cannot be expected to hold their breath through another planning cycle.

What is needed is specific and costed. The Executive must introduce a dedicated heat pump grant scheme; properly funded, simply designed, open to rural households, and backed by a supply chain plan that ensures enough qualified installers exist to deliver it.

The smart meter rollout must have a firm programme, a committed start date, and genuine accountability for delivery. And the Utility Regulator must face harder questions about whether the returns permitted to NIE Networks are truly aligned with the pace of infrastructure modernisation that consumers are being asked to fund.

Northern Ireland’s dependence on oil for home heating is the product of decades of underinvestment and most recently, years of Stormont inertia on a strategy it wrote itself, passed into law, and then quietly failed to deliver just like pretty much everything else it does an, incompetence which we will sadly observe in all its glory when Lough Neagh turns green in July.

Every winter without a functioning heat pump grant programme is another winter in which tens of thousands of families face the full force of whatever volatility the global oil market chooses to deliver.

That cannot be allowed to continue, and Stormont cannot be allowed to let it pass without consequence.