What if everyone in energy just told the truth?

There is a familiar choreography in the UK energy sector when the difficult questions arrive.

Why are bills still high?
Why has this project stalled?
Why has policy shifted again?
Why does net zero now look slower, costlier, more contested?

The answers often come in a particular register – smooth, careful, professionally neutral. Language that soothes rather than illuminates. A kind of verbal anaesthetic that dulls the edge of scrutiny but rarely increases understanding.

No one in our sector lacks intelligence and very few lack integrity. But we do operate inside a communications environment that punishes candour and rewards caution.

Which raises a serious question for our industry:

What if we just told the truth?

Trust isn’t gone but it has changed

To understand why this question matters now, it is worth stepping back from energy and looking at trust in business more broadly.

The latest Edelman Trust Barometer (2026) shows that business remains the most trusted major institution globally – ahead of government and media. But that headline masks something more fragile underneath.

Trust in business sits at around 64 per cent globally – just inside “trust” territory, but only just. It is not deep trust. It is conditional.

At the same time, expectations of business leaders have risen sharply. Around three-quarters of people now expect CEOs to play a role in addressing societal challenges and rebuilding trust, yet fewer than half believe they are doing so effectively.

In other words, the issue is no longer whether business is trusted.

It is whether that trust is being used well.

And perhaps most importantly, trust is no longer evenly distributed. People tend to trust what they experience directly – their employer, local institutions, visible reality – far more than abstract corporate or political narratives.

That gap between what people are told and what they see is where credibility is won or lost.

Why this matters more in energy

This shift matters in every sector. But it matters more in energy.

Because energy is not a discretionary purchase. It is not a brand preference. It is a system people live inside; financially, physically and politically.

The UK energy transition is not a morality play. It is an engineering, financial and political balancing act.

Affordability.
Security of supply.
Decarbonisation.
Speed.
Industrial strategy.
Consumer fairness.
Investor returns.

You cannot optimise all of them simultaneously.

And yet much of our public language still implies that we can.

That gap – between the reality of trade-offs and the rhetoric of alignment – is precisely where conditional trust becomes scepticism.

If business now operates on borrowed trust, then energy is where that trust is tested most visibly.

Energy is a system of trade-offs. We should say so.

Much of our public language still suggests we can deliver rapid decarbonisation, falling bills, grid resilience, industrial competitiveness and perfect political harmony – all at once.

When that promise smacks into objective reality it inevitable leads to disappointment – and regular disappointments easily hardens into distrust.

Imagine if we spoke differently:

• “This intervention reduces unit prices, not total bills.”
• “This project no longer clears the hurdle rate at current input costs.”
• “We can build this faster, but it will cost more.”
• “We are prioritising system stability over short-term bill reduction.”

None of those lines are inflammatory. But they are specific – and specificity builds credibility.

Where honesty has worked

There are recent examples in our sector where candour has strengthened rather than weakened credibility.

When Ørsted announced it would discontinue Hornsea 4 in its current form, the explanation was direct: cost inflation, supply chain pressure and higher interest rates had fundamentally changed the project economics. There was no attempt to dress this up as a strategic pivot or a visionary repositioning. The message was simple: under current conditions, the numbers do not work.

Investors did not celebrate the decision. But they understood it.

Similarly, when Vattenfall paused Norfolk Boreas, the rationale was framed around the hard arithmetic of input costs and viability. Again, not welcome news – but intelligible.

That is honesty as market signal.

We are also seeing more specific candour emerge from the system operator itself. National Grid ESO has, in recent public communications, been explicit about the scale of grid constraints and connection delays – acknowledging that parts of the network are effectively at capacity and that some projects face connection timelines stretching many years under the current queue.

Rather than presenting the transition as frictionless, the messaging has increasingly focused on sequencing, bottlenecks and the practical reality that grid build-out will take time.

This is not reassuring in the traditional sense. But it is credible.

In each case, the outcome may disappoint. But the explanation feels grounded.

The lesson is not that honesty eliminates criticism. It is that it reframes it. From suspicion (“what are you hiding?”) to argument (“I disagree with that trade-off.”)

That is healthier.

Where honesty becomes a disaster

We’re not advocating full confessional mode here. Candour fails when it is careless, context-free or devoid of empathy.

The business world provides a textbook example. During the Deepwater Horizon crisis, BP’s CEO Tony Hayward remarked, “I’d like my life back.” It was no doubt an honest expression of personal strain. But in the context of environmental catastrophe and economic devastation for Gulf communities, it landed as self-centred and tone-deaf.

The line became reputational shorthand – not because it was untrue, but because it misread the emotional reality of the moment.

In energy, where bills, jobs and reliability are existential issues for households and communities, empathy is not optional. “Truth” delivered without human awareness reads as indifference.

There is also a harder reality: certain information in our sector can destabilise markets or negotiations if disclosed prematurely. Grid resilience, liquidity, counterparty stress, security matters – these are not topics for performative transparency.

So, the alternative to evasiveness is not radical disclosure.

It is disciplined candour.

The social media distortion

If this were simply about traditional media, the calculus might be different. But today’s communications environment has a structural bias against nuance.

Social platforms reward engagement. Engagement is often driven by outrage. Nuance travels slowly; conflict travels fast.

A carefully balanced explanation of a policy trade-off becomes, in clipped form, “CEO admits profits come first.”
An admission of uncertainty becomes “Industry has no plan.”
A timetable adjustment becomes “U-turn.”

Pile-ons are not always malicious. They are often the emergent property of algorithms amplifying emotionally resonant fragments.

For communications professionals, the rational response is obvious: minimise exposure and avoid specifics. Default to language that cannot be easily weaponised.

And so, we retreat into abstraction.

But over time, abstraction becomes the problem. When every answer sounds sanitised, audiences assume the unsanitised version must be worse.

We end up with a public sphere dense with commentary and thin on understanding.

A practical framework for leaders

For boards, policymakers, communications teams and marketers, this is more of an operational challenge than an abstract philosophical one.

Before any major announcement or interview, ask:

1. What is the simplest true sentence we can say here?
2. What trade-off are we making, and have we named it?
3. What uncertainty exists, and when will it reduce?
4. Would a sceptical customer recognise this as their lived reality?
5. Have we paired clarity with empathy?

Robust honesty does not mean exposing commercial secrets or weakening negotiation positions. It means resisting the reflex to replace clarity with abstraction.

It means trusting that the public can handle complexity if we explain it plainly.