In late February 2026, UK energy prices moved 30% in four days. Suppliers pulled pricing. Businesses that thought they had time to plan suddenly didn't. What followed was a long-term shock.

UK inflation hit 3.3% in March, the largest jump in petrol and diesel prices in three years. The IMF has forecast that Britain will take the largest economic hit of any advanced economy from sustained high energy prices.

But here is what we have known since we started building tem in 2021: the volatility itself is not the whole problem. The problem is that the system was designed to pass it straight through to businesses, without warning, without explanation, and without any structural reason for it to work that way.

Energy is not a commodity story anymore

When prices spike, the instinct is to read it as a market story. Global gas. Geopolitics. Forces beyond anyone's control. That framing consistently lets the real issue off the hook.

The UK energy market was built in a different era, for a different grid, under different assumptions about geopolitical stability. The pricing rules that govern what a British business pays for electricity were written when the UK ran on fossil fuels and global supply chains felt predictable. Those conditions no longer hold. The rules largely still do.

What this means in practice is that 47% of UK businesses raised prices in the last energy crisis to absorb costs they couldn't control. 23% reduced their operations altogether. The market has a design flaw, and they were the ones who paid for it.

Businesses shouldn't have to speculate on commodity markets to know what their energy will cost next quarter. They shouldn't have to build contingency funds for charges that appear on a bill without warning. They shouldn't have to put hiring on hold or delay investment because a pipeline disruption somewhere in the world has pushed their unit rate to a level nobody quoted them last month.

It’s framed as a cost-of-doing-business story. But it's a sovereignty story. A competitiveness story. And right now, for a lot of businesses, it is a survival story.

What suppliers do when the market moves

In a volatile market, the standard supplier model has one move: protect margin by passing cost on. Widen the risk buffer in the unit rate. Shorten quote validity windows. Pull fixed pricing until the market settles. The customer absorbs the uncertainty, the bill arrives with no explanation of where the new number came from, and the supplier's position is protected.

That is not dishonesty. It is just how the model works. When a supplier buys on the wholesale market and prices accordingly, the cost has to land somewhere when the market moves. It almost always lands on the business.

What tem set out to do from the beginning was build an infrastructure where that isn't the only option.

What the last few months looked like from where we sit

We stayed open. Every day through every market movement, tem kept quoting. We didn't pull pricing. We didn't widen our buffers in ways that buried market stress inside the unit rate. We worked to hold our prices as close to the true cost as our model allows, because that is what the model is for.

We also went further.

Because of how our generator portfolio was positioned, we were able to give customers a free week of energy: not as a marketing gesture, but as a specific, deliberate decision to return value to businesses carrying costs they hadn't planned for.

We absorbed more than £7 million in TNUoS charges, the cost of moving electricity across the national grid, rather than pass them on at a moment when businesses were already under pressure.

We opened P442 across new tenders and renewals, a mechanism that has existed for two decades but that most business energy customers have never been told about.

We did these things not because they make a nice-looking list, but because they reflect why tem exists. The gap between a business that is struggling and a business that is closing can be measured in weeks during a fast-moving crisis. We are not interested in being a supplier that is technically open while making it structurally harder for customers to act.

The paradox at the centre of the market

Most suppliers promise to help businesses save money on energy. What most of them are actually doing is buying through the wholesale market and passing that volatility on, with a margin applied and the components hidden inside a single unit rate.

The promise of savings and the reality of how the price is built are in direct tension. A supplier cannot meaningfully protect a business from wholesale volatility if the only tool they have is a contract priced off the wholesale market.

This is not a problem that customer service fixes. It is a structural problem, and it requires a structural response.

tem's pricing infrastructure is built around domestic UK generation. It gives us a different cost base and different incentives. We are not decoupled from the market, but we are not simply priced at it either. That difference is what gave us the ability to stay open, absorb shocks, and keep building certainty for customers when much of the market couldn't.

This is what we're here for

Somewhere in the last six weeks, a business put something on hold because of energy. A hire. An investment. A decision that needed certainty before it could move.

We built tem because that should not keep happening. Not because energy crises can be wished away, but because the system does not have to transmit every shock directly onto businesses that had nothing to do with causing it.

British businesses should be spending their energy on growing, competing, and building things. Not absorbing the consequences of a market design that nobody has seriously updated in forty years.

That is the argument we have been making since 2021. Every day since February has made it harder to ignore.

If you want to understand how your current contract structure exposes you to what happens next, talk to the tem team.