Hospitality’s 2026 energy shock: It’s time to build your defences

And now it’s about to face another assault on its margins. From April 2026, the industry will be hit with a new wave of energy charges that could redefine its cost base for the rest of the decade.

The government is changing the way large businesses pay for the national grid, and the biggest shift is coming through the Transmission Network Use of System (TNUoS) residual charge.

According to the National Energy System Operator’s (NESO) most recent five-year view, TNUoS demand residual revenue is projected to rise from £3.84bn in 2025/26 to £7.52bn in 2026/27. By the end of the decade, that figure is expected to reach £11.57bn.

Worse still, because these are flat charges applied per site, per day, multi-site operators – hotels, restaurant groups and food retailers – will be among the hardest hit.

There’s no clever technology or tariff trick that can make it disappear. For a sector already operating on wafer-thin margins, this shift could be a genuine tipping point.

But there is one charge that the hospitality industry can time-shift its way out of – the Capacity Market (CM) Supplier Charge.

This charge spikes when the system is under stress, typically early evenings in winter when demand is high and supply is tight. Unfortunately, this also happens to be when hotels, bars and restaurants are at their busiest.

That’s where a technology already proving its worth across other energy-intensive sectors comes in: battery storage.

Commercial-scale battery systems allow operators to purchase and store electricity when it’s cheap – often when the grid is flooded with renewables – and use it later when demand and prices surge.

In practice, that means your site can quietly switch from grid power to stored power during those expensive half-hours when charges spike. In essence, you cut costs without changing how you operate.

It’s the same principle airlines use with fuel hedging or hotels use with dynamic pricing: shifting when you buy, not what you buy.

The next five years will reward businesses that actively manage their exposure to volatile energy markets – and battery storage makes that possible.

TNUoS charges may be unavoidable, but the time-dependent ones can be outmanoeuvred. With the right supply contract, your battery system can even generate revenue by supporting the grid when it’s short on power.

And this isn’t just theoretical. Industrial users have been doing it for years. Now that the technology has matured and the economics fully stack up, the hospitality sector can benefit too.

The April 2026 reforms are locked in, but projects like this have long lead times. Planning, grid approvals and installation can take months, which means waiting until next year could be too late to make a big difference.

The first step for hospitality businesses is simple: understand your load profile. When do your sites peak, and how steep are those peaks? A good supplier will help you model this, test the business case, and design the right operational approach and contractual setup to make it work.

And doing this well isn’t about buying hardware – it’s about integration. The battery, the contract and your site operations all have to align. You need a supplier who sees the full picture: who trades power intelligently, understands the timing of these charges, and builds products that make flexibility pay.

The businesses who prepare now will protect margins, strengthen resilience and build a cleaner, more dependable energy strategy. In a sector defined by agility and innovation, battery storage may prove to be the smartest investment hospitality businesses make this decade.

Because in 2026, the businesses that stay standing won’t be the ones that spend less on energy. They’ll be the ones that manage it better.