The Grid's Real Enemy Is Smoke. So Why Are We Banned From Clearing the Fuel?

✅ Key Takeaway: Record wildfires are now a threat to Britain's electricity supply. The evidence on fuel load points to a remedy that policy is moving away from: controlled burning on the uplands.

The body that runs Britain's electricity grid has a new problem, and it begins on the moors. As reported by The Telegraph, The National Energy System Operator (Neso) now treats wildfire as a direct threat to the high-voltage network, reporting a sharp rise in fire incidents near its lines over the past two years.

Much of that network crosses the same heather uplands that turn tinder-dry in a hot spring — the ground our members manage.

Why pylons are not safe from fire

Steel and cable look fireproof. They are not. On Neso's account, a wildfire does not have to reach a pylon to cut the supply:

• Heat makes overhead lines sag toward the vegetation beneath them.

• Smoke and airborne particles let electricity jump to the ground in a "flashover": an arc like a lightning strike.

• That arc trips the safety systems, and the power cuts out.

• If flames reach the cables, the metal softens and can snap. Neso puts replacement at about £2.3 million per mile.

As the Moorland Association has said before, these lines do not need to melt to fail. They just need smoke.

The damage is already real. A major Highland wildfire near Inverness in 2025 struck overhead lines and cut power to rural homes and businesses, on the operator's account. A 2020 fire through woodland at Wareham in Dorset hit pylons and caused local blackouts.

The fires are breaking records

The trend does not rest on one newspaper. The Global Wildfire Information System (GWIS/EFFIS) records 2025 as the worst UK wildfire year since its records began in 2012, with around 185 square miles burned, well past the previous 2019 record.

The National Fire Chiefs Council recorded 564 wildfires in England and Wales between January and June 2025, against 69 in the same months a year earlier.

Climate change is loading the dice. A Met Office attribution study found the severe UK wildfires of July 2022 were at least six times more likely because of human-caused warming.

The fuel problem nobody is naming

Here is the part the energy headlines miss. A wildfire burns what is on the ground. The more old, dry vegetation that accumulates, the more fiercely it burns and the more smoke it sends toward the grid.

This is where the evidence points somewhere uncomfortable for current policy. NatureScot's 2025 review of the burning evidence (Research Report 1302) found evidence that fuel load and structure are decisive in how a fire behaves, and that managed burning can be used to reduce that fuel load and the resulting hazard.

Peer-reviewed peatland fieldwork (Davies et al., 2016) shows that the more surface fuel present before a fire, the more severe the burn. Peak District heather moorland, mostly managed by rotational burning, has seen fewer wildfires than comparable unburned moorland (McMorrow et al., 2009).

The 2018 Saddleworth Moor fire, in long-unburnt heather and peat, showed what happens when the fuel is left to build.

Policy is pulling the wrong way

Against all this, the direction of travel is to burn less. The Heather and Grass etc. Burning Regulations 2025 extended the controlled-burning ban so far that Parliament was told prescribed burning is now effectively prohibited across roughly 676,000 hectares of English moorland.

Removing a recognised fuel-reduction tool, without UK evidence that wetter ground alone will stop these spring fires, is a gamble.

And the stakes now include the transmission lines that the drive to decarbonise the grid depends on, threaded straight across the uplands most exposed to fire.

Why this matters

Wildfire has stopped being a problem that ends at the moor edge. It is now a risk to the power supply that rural communities, and the whole country, rely on. The fuel building up beneath Britain's pylons is the fuel land managers are increasingly forbidden to clear.

Restore the licensed tools to manage it and you cut the fire, the smoke and the blackouts. Take them away, and no one should be surprised by what burns next.