Projects, partnerships – and most importantly people: a look back at 2025
Vijay Tank, Chief Operations Officer for E.ON's UK Energy Infrastructure Solutions business, looks back on some of the successful projects and partnerships of 2025 - delivering affordable, sustainable and secure energy to homes, businesses and communities.
2025 has been a year of some huge successes for new partnerships, new markets, and innovative ways to drive the energy transition and help our customers at home and in business.
Of course, it’s also brought its fair share of challenges – whether they were changes in national policies or the impact of international events, competition in our markets or just overcoming some of the uncertainty involved in big investments or when delivering complicated and innovative technology projects.
Any of these obstacles could have easily damaged our momentum, but we didn’t let them.
This is what I love most about our business: it’s about having a purpose, something that positively impacts communities across the country, and overcoming whatever challenges stand in the way.
Here are some of my highlights of the year. A brief list of just some of the projects we’ve delivered and, behind them, the people at E.ON and our partners around the country who are driving the clean energy transition.
I have the privilege of leading a team of people who do great things every day, working with our colleagues and our customers, our commercial partners, even whole communities, with the same aim: to make energy more affordable, more sustainable and more secure for the future.
As we look ahead to 2026, I’m genuinely excited about what we can achieve together.
We celebrated our E.ON Control Solutions (ECS) business who work with some of the UK’s best-known retailers, leisure centres, hotels, hospitals and manufacturers – remotely managing and optimising thousands of business premises around Europe to make sure they operate efficiently and effectively.
By making best use of their energy and buildings data, ECS helps businesses to find ways of reducing their energy consumption, lowering their carbon footprint and reducing their bills. Tesco, TK Maxx and Boots are just some of the thousands of sites nationwide (quite literally!) that are managed from our ECS control room in Glasgow.
In February we announced a sustainability partnership with the Coventry Building Society Arena to drive continued decarbonisation at the city’s leading venue for business, sport and live events. It’s underpinned by the 15-year Strategic Energy Partnership announced in 2023, which commits the organisations to collaborate and transform the city's approach to carbon reduction, together.
Elsewhere in Coventry, we launched (pun intended!) an innovative pilot scheme using thermal image capturing drones to analyse the energy efficiency of thousands of homes. Working with tech startup Kestrix – described as the ‘Google Maps of heat loss’ – we have been using thermal camera drones and 3D heat loss modelling to allow better, and faster, targeting of energy efficiency improvements with the aim of making homes more energy efficient and, ultimately, cheaper to heat.
We celebrated a decade of renewable power generation at our Blackburn Meadows plant in Sheffield, at the same time announcing bold plans to expand the city’s heat network by adding 10km of new connections, opening new opportunities to capture and reuse waste heat from industrial sites in the Don Valley, and exploring hydrogen production as a lower carbon alternative to gas for heavy industries such as steelmaking.
Power for the people: how a brighter energy
future puts money back in people’s pockets
Talking of new sources for heat for cities, we took a trip to Berlin to see how innovative technologies are replacing fossil fuels and making sustainable heating a reality. The UK’s Ambassador to Germany, Andrew Mitchell, joined us for a tour of the heating plant in the south east of the German capital, where E.ON subsidiary BTB manages an innovative river water heat pump which extracts energy from the Spree River and provides a forward-thinking solution for heating which serves 80,000 apartments, commercial properties, public institutions and industrial and research buildings in this part of the city.
A bit closer to home, we celebrated a landmark in our work to support Nottingham University Hospitals’ journey towards net zero, completing the installation of around 12,000 double glazed windows at the Queen’s Medical Centre, making it a much more energy efficient building and a better environment for patients, staff and visitors. This £43 million project is continuing with new energy centres housing high-efficiency heat pumps that will extract heat from the air and draw from the natural warmth of the earth from 64 boreholes descending up to 250 metres (the length of seven Nottingham trams end-to-end) under the ground.
Creating cities for tomorrow: why communities
sit at the heart of the energy transition
In the summer we completed our activities to launch an Independent Network Operator (IDNO) business, designed to simplify smart connections and enable lower carbon technologies to connect faster to the UK grid.
Our new Utility Solutions business will be able to provide sustainable and tailored energy solutions for a wide range of customers such as large-scale solar connections, data centres, ICPs, developers, consultants, EV charging providers, landowners and energy storage projects.
One energy storage project coming to fruition is our battery storage site at the former Uskmouth coal power station in South Wales. Uskmouth is stepping into the future as a hub for flexibility, stability and smarter energy. In partnership with Quinbrook Infrastructure Partners, Uskmouth is being transformed into a flexible asset that strengthens the grid, balances supply and demand and helps manage the cost of energy for customers.
At E.ON we’re also partner in a project to demonstrate how a combination approach to sustainability can deliver on affordable, sustainable energy at scale while giving households power over green decision-making. The Thames Freeport ‘Becontree demonstrator’ is retrofitting 50 mixed-tenure homes combining fabric upgrades, off-site manufactured retrofit solutions, and renewable energy systems in the form of E.ON’s Next Gen Home proposition – supported by a blend of grants, private investment, and local authority funding – with a view to transforming more than 5,000 homes across the region in the coming years.
Investing in the UK: helping to create a secure,
sustainable and affordable energy system
Elsewhere in London – and from further afield – our work with Lendlease on a ‘shared’ energy system for the redevelopment of London’s Royal Docks was acknowledged as leading sustainability initiative at the UN Climate Conference in Brazil. The East London redevelopment project – home of the UK’s first ectogrid district heating technology network to serve the 6,500 new homes and business properties – was selected for inclusion in the Sustainable Business COP Case Booklet, a global showcase of private sector climate solutions curated for the UN Climate Conference COP30 Brazil.
We announced plans to join forces with Sheffield-based homeless charity The Archer Project to develop green skills and employment pathways for people across the city. This is part of our plans to expand our Don Valley district heating scheme, alongside wider energy solutions activity in the area. The Archer Project, based at Sheffield Cathedral, is a place where people experiencing homelessness can change their lives for the better. This collaboration will bring together a joint commitment to deliver fair access to green jobs, while supporting sustainability and energy resilience for the local community.