tem absorbs £7m TNUoS shock, urges overhaul of UK non-commodity energy charges

New updates have been reported about tem.

tem, an AI-native energy transactions scaleup, has stepped in to cover £7m of unexpected Transmission Network Use of System (TNUoS) charges for its customers after a 60% increase hit UK business electricity bills from 1 April 2026. The company warns this spike, driven by National Energy System Operator decisions and mounting grid investment needs, exposes a systemic failure in how non-commodity costs are set, forecast and passed through to end users.

According to tem, many suppliers invoked passthrough clauses and pushed the higher TNUoS charges directly onto businesses, often with little warning, leaving sectors such as manufacturing, hospitality, retail and care facing unbudgeted cost surges. tem says its intervention prevented customers from paying tens of thousands of pounds more per year, underscoring the financial exposure created by poorly disclosed non-commodity cost (NCC) mechanisms.

NCCs, including levies and network charges, now account for roughly 50–60% of a typical business energy bill, yet are set externally, adjusted annually on short notice and inconsistently presented in contracts. tem argues that the £7m it has absorbed relates to just one regulatory update on a single line item, signalling how similar shocks could cascade through the market and damage newer suppliers and energy technology entrants who cannot easily absorb such volatility.

CEO and co-founder Joe McDonald is calling on the Department for Energy Security and Net Zero and Ofgem to implement three reforms: publish six-month NCC forecasts with an enforceable plus-or-minus 10% accuracy band, make grid operators financially liable when costs breach that band and standardise the disclosure of fixed versus passthrough costs in energy contracts. He contends that businesses require stable, transparent pricing and that more accurate forecasting of externally set charges would support both major consumers and innovative providers like tem.

tem positions these events as validation of its technology-led model, which aims to replace opaque wholesale practices with transparent, efficient energy transactions for its 2,600-plus UK customers across more than 4,000 sites. Having already facilitated over 2 TWh of transactions and attracted backing from several institutional investors, tem is using the TNUoS episode to argue that regulatory clarity on NCCs is now critical to protect business users, encourage competition and avoid the network operating as what it describes as an open chequebook for infrastructure spending.