Bristol City's Leap Of Faith.
Mandatory connection. Unknown buyer. The Money Trail. Who Ultimately Benefits?
How were you made aware of this?
Take a moment with that question. Because the answer matters as much as the story itself.
There was a council committee meeting. Thursday, 26 March. The environment policy committee. An update was given. Not a press conference. Not a public announcement. Not a letter through the door of every property in the zone that stretches — and we will come to the geography in a moment, because you will want to know the geography — from Bedminster and Brislington to Clifton and St Pauls.
A committee meeting.
Reported weeks later by a local democracy reporter. Published on Bristol Live. Seven comments.
That is how you were made aware. If you were made aware at all.
And here is what was in that update. What was said in that room, to those councillors, that Thursday evening in March, that you were not in.
Vattenfall — the Swedish company currently building and operating Bristol’s heat network — is being sold. The council’s own executive director of growth and regeneration, John Smith, confirmed it directly: “We anticipate another company coming in and taking on the responsibilities that Vattenfall have.”
A new firm. Unknown. Unannounced. Expected to take over the building and running of the city’s heat networks.
And his reassurance? “We don’t see it as having a negative impact.”
That sentence contains no information about who the new company is. No information about their financial structure. No information about what protections exist for connected buildings during the handover. No information about what happens to pricing commitments made by Vattenfall that the incoming operator has not agreed to honour.
It contains a feeling. We don’t see it as having a negative impact. From the same council. With the same track record. That lost £35 million on Bristol Energy the last time it went into the energy market.
You remember the kettle.
If you read the last piece — the one about net zero, the one that ended with “net zero, it comes to nothing” — you remember the kettle. Plastic. Made from oil. The personal contradiction. The thing you boil water in on the morning you’ve decided oil is the problem.
That was the contradiction at the personal level.
This is the contradiction at the institutional level.
And it is considerably more expensive.
Here is what is being proposed. And I want you to understand the full geography of it before we go any further. Because the phrase “a central zone” does not capture what is actually being described.
The Central Bristol Heat Network Zone — as it is named — would stretch from Bedminster and Brislington in the south to Clifton and St Pauls in the north. It includes areas that do not yet have a heat network. In those areas, large buildings would be required to build provision for a future connection. Not a current connection. A future one. They would be legally obligated to prepare for infrastructure that does not yet exist, from a supplier that has not yet been identified, at a price that has not been set.
Were you aware of that?
City Hall itself is being connected. Its boiler replaced with a pipe running under Park Street. Sixteen blocks of council flats are potentially affected. The council is not exempting itself. It is also not asking the people in those sixteen blocks what they think. Not yet. The consultation details have not been revealed. They are expected in the autumn.
And in that same committee meeting, Conservative Councillor Mark Weston said something that nobody appears to have highlighted in the coverage.
He said: “There’s no certainty on what prices will be. Connection costs in some cases seem to be prohibitively high. If the cost of connection is millions, then we have seen this all too often — the thing that gets sacrificed first is the amount of affordable housing delivered in the project.”
A Conservative councillor. In a committee room. Saying the quiet part out loud.
A Green council, in a city with a documented homelessness crisis, is proposing a policy that its own committee members are warning will reduce affordable housing delivery. One paragraph. Near the bottom. Seven comments.
How were you made aware of that?
We told you this was coming. In February, we wrote about what was already happening to heat network customers in London — residents handed a collective bill of nearly £200,000 for heat they had already paid for, told retrospective charges had accumulated on accounts they didn’t know were in deficit. People who had paid on time, in full, every month. A tribunal eventually found in their favour. The debt stayed on their accounts. Nobody got their money back.
We said Bristol was building the same system. With the same flaw. At greater scale.
We were right. We would rather have been wrong.
So let’s make sure you understand what this actually is. Because the way it gets described — decarbonisation, net zero, low carbon heat, the future — is designed to make scrutiny feel churlish. Like you’re arguing against clean air. Like you’re the problem.
You’re not the problem.
Bristol City Leap is the joint venture delivering the heat network. Vattenfall — for now — operates it. The short-term plan: heating and hot water to the equivalent of 12,000 homes by 2030. The long-term plan, written into Bristol’s own One City Climate Strategy: 65,000 buildings connected. Thirty-nine percent of every building in the city. More than half of Bristol’s total heat demand.
Were you aware that the government published the zone detail itself? A Department for Energy Security and Net Zero report — produced February 2025, co-developed with Bristol City Council — identifies five heat network zones across Bristol. The total heat demand from buildings required to connect: 475 gigawatt hours per year. The estimated cost of connecting them: approximately £650 million.
Required to connect. That phrase runs through the government’s own document. Not invited. Not encouraged. Required.
Once your building is connected, you cannot switch supplier. There is no competitor. There is no comparison website. There is no Energy Price Cap for heat networks. The only pricing standard is that costs must be “fair and not disproportionate.”
You already know what that means when there’s nobody to compare it against. You’ve seen it before. Every time you’ve ever had one option and been told the price is fair.
And were you aware of this — the part that the legal analysis states plainly: zone designation will create exclusive rights for operators. The law will impose obligations on property owners to connect. The law will deliver the customers. No competition required.
Exclusive rights. Written into the framework. For a private energy company. By a local council. Using planning law. Handed to a company that is currently being sold to an unknown buyer.
You do not compel people into a monopoly before you’ve resolved how the monopoly will price its product.
There is a body that exists specifically for situations like this. You may not have heard of it in this context before. You’re about to.
The Competition and Markets Authority — the CMA — is the UK’s principal competition regulator. Its function is to act when normal market conditions have been structurally removed. When there is no switching. No competition. No consumer choice. And under the Heat Networks (Market Framework) Regulations 2025, which came into force in January 2026, the CMA’s competition functions now apply concurrently with Ofgem’s regulatory functions across heat network markets.
That is statute. Not opinion. Statute.
The CMA looked at this sector before. In 2018 it concluded heat networks were not working well for consumers and recommended regulation. That recommendation sat on shelves for the better part of a decade. The regulation arrived in January 2026 — too late for everyone already connected, and apparently still not fast enough to stop Bristol proposing mandatory connection before the pricing question is resolved.
Ask yourself the three questions.
Is it practical? You are locking residents and building owners into a single-supplier energy arrangement before anyone has demonstrated the cost model is fair. In London — with the same model — it went wrong repeatedly. There is no exit once you’re in.
Is it logical? The entire rationale of competition law is that captive customers cannot protect themselves through market behaviour. A mandatory connection order does not just create a captive customer. It legislates for one.
What is the likely outcome? Bills. Disputes. Retrospective charges. The London pattern, at Bristol’s scale. And — if mandatory connection proceeds — potentially half the city with nowhere to go.
Now. The billing chain. Because this is where it gets quietly extraordinary.
Have you ever been told a company’s customer service department couldn’t help you because you weren’t their direct customer? And the person who was their direct customer — your landlord, your building manager — was the one you’d have to go through? And the waiting, and the referrals, and the delays, until the original problem had become something else entirely?
That is the architecture of the Bristol heat network. By design.
Vattenfall’s own material explains it. In Bristol, Vattenfall operates bulk supply — meaning the heat network serves to the building boundary only. The building owner onward charges tenants and residents. Vattenfall calls this a “third-party billing provider” arrangement.
The resident has no direct contract with Vattenfall. They deal with their building manager. Their building manager deals with Vattenfall. And Vattenfall does not register Bristol’s networks with Heat Trust — the consumer protection body for heat networks — because Heat Trust requires direct customers. Which Vattenfall, in Bristol, does not have.
So the chain runs: resident, to building manager, to Vattenfall, to Ofgem.
Every link is a buffer. Every buffer is a delay. Every delay, in the London case, meant more debt accumulating on accounts nobody knew were in deficit. This is not accidental. This is the architecture. And a mandatory connection order does not fix it. It extends it. To 65,000 buildings.
What Was Put In Place So You Wouldn’t Notice.
Now. The things that were put in place deliberately so that you wouldn’t notice them.
Because there are several. And they are worth naming one at a time.
The bulk supply model. Vattenfall’s decision to operate to the building boundary only — with building owners doing the onward billing — is not a technical necessity. It is a structural choice. And the consequence of that choice is that Vattenfall has no direct customers in Bristol. And because Vattenfall has no direct customers, it cannot register Bristol’s networks with Heat Trust, the consumer protection body. Which means Bristol residents are not covered by Heat Trust standards. Which means the consumer protection body for heat networks doesn’t apply to the city with one of the most ambitious heat network programmes in the country.
How were you made aware of that? It is sitting in Vattenfall’s own promotional material. They do not draw attention to it.
The timing of Three and Two Ltd. Marvin Rees incorporated his personal services company — the one that now lists Ameresco as a paying client — on 19 April 2024. His last day in office as Mayor of Bristol was in May 2024. The company was registered nineteen days before he left. Not after. Not once he’d cleared his desk. The company that would receive payments from Ameresco was incorporated while he was still the Mayor who had given Ameresco the contract. That is on the public record at Companies House. Nobody has explained it. Nobody in the mainstream coverage has asked about it directly.
How were you made aware of that? You weren’t. It requires someone to look up Companies House, cross-reference the Lords register of interests, and notice the nineteen-day gap. Nobody in the mainstream coverage did. We did.
The concession agreement is secret. The full legal document governing the relationship between Bristol City Council and Ameresco — including the profit share mechanism, the pricing review clauses, and the provisions for what happens if Vattenfall sells its operations mid-contract — has never been published. It is commercially confidential. The document that will legally compel your building to connect to a monopoly supplier, for twenty years, at prices with no cap and no benchmark, is a document you are not permitted to read.
How were you made aware of that? You weren’t. It is described as commercially confidential. That classification was chosen. It protects the parties to the agreement. It does not protect you.
The pricing standard has no teeth. “Fair and not disproportionate” sounds like a protection. It is not a protection. It is a description. There is no independent body that certifies what fair means before a price is set. There is no benchmark against which disproportionate is measured. The standard only becomes operative if a consumer challenges a price — through the billing chain designed to keep them at arm’s length — and persuades a regulator to rule in their favour. The protection exists on paper. The mechanism to activate it was not built.
How were you made aware of that? The phrase “fair and not disproportionate” was presented as consumer protection. It was not presented as a description with no enforcement mechanism attached. The difference between those two things is everything. And the difference was not explained.
Bristol City Leap Limited is classified as dormant. Look it up. Companies House. Company number 11673481. Registered at City Hall, College Green, Bristol. Nature of business: 99999 — Dormant Company. The legal vehicle at the centre of a twenty-year, billion-pound energy concession covering potentially half the city is, on the public record, dormant. No accounts showing commercial activity. The money — the £424 million in first-phase investment, the profit flows, the revenue streams — moves through structures that are not this company. Which means the financial picture of this venture is not visible through the entity whose name is on the tin.
How were you made aware of that? You look it up. Thirty seconds. Companies House. Public record. The classification is right there. Nobody pointed you toward it. Nobody in the coverage of this deal has written that sentence in an article aimed at ordinary Bristol residents. Until now.
None of these are mistakes. Mistakes get corrected. These have been in place, unchanged, since the deal was structured. Each one reduces visibility. Each one increases distance. Each one makes it harder for the person at the end of the chain — the resident, the tenant, the building owner — to see what is happening to their money and who is holding it.
That is not incompetence.
That is architecture.
And here is the thing about architecture: it produces predictable outcomes. Every single consequence described above was visible from the moment this deal was structured. The billing chain that distances residents from remedies — visible at signing. The dormant company that hides financial flows — registered in 2018. The pricing standard with no enforcement mechanism — written into the regulations before they came into force. None of this is a surprise to anyone who read the original documents. It is the design working exactly as intended.
Bristol City Council is not building a green future. It is building a monopoly and calling it a green future.
Who Ultimately Benefits. In Order.
Now ask the question that the coverage is not asking.
Who benefits?
Because here is what you already know, even if you haven’t put it together yet: somebody always benefits. The question is who. And the answer, followed honestly, is not the consumer.
Ameresco. A US corporation on the New York Stock Exchange. Fifty percent owner of the twenty-year joint venture. Not chosen through open competition for each customer — delivered customers by law. And whose two largest institutional shareholders are Blackrock and Vanguard. Two of the so-called Filthy Four. US asset managers managing over a trillion dollars in fossil fuel investments between them. That is who the exclusive rights flow to.
Hold that thought. Because it matters to everything that follows.
Did you know Ameresco was sued for $2.2 million by school board members in Illinois? According to reporting by the Bristol Cable, they alleged the company secretly removed financial guarantees shortly before contracts were signed. The case was thrown out on a technicality. The allegation was never tested on its merits. Ameresco did not respond to press enquiries about it when the Cable asked.
Vattenfall. Currently operating the heat network. And — were you aware of this? — currently exploring the sale of its district heating portfolio. The Bristolian has reported that private equity interests are already circling. Which means the entity with exclusive rights to supply mandatory connection zones may not be Vattenfall by the time those zones are fully operational. It could be a private equity fund with no public interest obligation, no accountability to Bristol residents, and every financial incentive to extract maximum return from customers it did not have to compete for and cannot be fired by.
Have you noticed how that works? The commitment is made by one entity. The benefit is collected by another. And the consumer — who had no say at any stage — is the thread connecting them.
Lord Rees of Easton. Formerly Marvin Rees, Mayor of Bristol. The man who designed the City Leap architecture, ran the procurement, awarded Ameresco the contract, left office in May 2024, incorporated a personal services company — Three and Two Ltd — within weeks of leaving, and declared Ameresco as a paying client in his first House of Lords register of interests.
Nineteen days.
That is how long before leaving office the company was incorporated. Not after. Not once he’d cleared his desk and reflected on his next chapter. Nineteen days before his last day as the Mayor who had given Ameresco the contract, the vehicle that would receive Ameresco’s payments was registered at Companies House.
Were you aware of that? The man who gave Ameresco the contract is now on Ameresco’s payroll. Declared. On the public record. In Parliament.
We do not know how much he is paid. Lords declarations require the existence of the relationship. Not the amount. He has since spoken publicly about City Leap as a model for cities around the world. Whether those audiences were made aware of his declared financial interest in Ameresco is not recorded.
Cambridge Management Consulting — which helped shape the City Leap deal — is also a paying client of Three and Two Ltd. Former Deputy Mayor Craig Cheney is now a partner there.
Bristol City Council holds 50% of the joint venture. Would receive 50% of any profits — if profits materialise. The same council whose own cabinet papers identified “not realising the financial benefits, or incurring additional costs” as a key risk. The same council facing a potential Section 114 bankruptcy notice. The same council that already lost £35 million on Bristol Energy — the last time it went into the energy market.
“There’s no deal without risks,” said Rees when he signed. “They are a private company, so there has to be a return otherwise it won’t happen.”
He was right. The return has to come from somewhere. You already know where it comes from.
The Department for Energy Security and Net Zero gets to present Bristol as a showcase city. Proof of concept. Model for national rollout. Thirty-one other towns and cities in the pipeline.
And now the person who doesn’t appear on that list.
You.
The resident in a mandatory connection zone. Billed by your building manager. For heat from a company you have no contract with. Through a chain that places you furthest from any remedy. In a system whose ownership may change before the decade is out.
The tenant in social housing whose landlord connects and passes the cost on.
The building owner presented with an upfront connection fee, locked in for twenty years, with no price cap, no switching rights, and a concession agreement you have never seen.
Net zero provides the cover. The zoning law provides the compulsion. The consumer provides the money.
It is a revenue extraction model with a green energy policy stapled to the front of it.
The man who designed the architecture is now on the payroll of the company that benefits from it.
So. What can you actually do?
More than you might think. But the window is open now. Once the zone is formally designated and the buildings are connected, it closes. Here is what is available to you right now, while it is still available.
Contact the Competition and Markets Authority. You do not need a solicitor. You do not need a campaign group. The CMA has a public complaints process. Write to them. Tell them what is being proposed — mandatory connection to a single supplier, no switching rights, no price cap, exclusive rights granted by zoning law. Cite the Heat Networks (Market Framework) Regulations 2025. Use the phrase structural monopoly condition. Use the phrase exclusive rights for operators. Send it. If enough people do, the CMA cannot ignore it. One well-constructed complaint on the right desk cannot be brushed aside. The CMA has used its teeth on considerably larger targets.
Submit a Freedom of Information request to Bristol City Council. The full concession agreement between the council and Ameresco has never been published. Ask for it. Ask for the profit share mechanism, the pricing review clauses, the exit provisions, and what happens if Vattenfall sells its heat network operations to a third party mid-concession. A refusal on commercial confidentiality grounds — for a contract that will legally compel your building to connect — is itself a story. Either way, you win something.
Ask your councillor a direct question. In writing. On the record. Do you support mandatory connection to a heat network whose pricing is unresolved, whose operator may be sold to private equity, and whose billing chain places residents furthest from any remedy? Ask for a yes or a no. Publish the answer. Publish the silence. Most of them have not been asked. Most of them would prefer not to answer publicly. That preference is information too.
Use the Energy Ombudsman if you are already connected and have a billing dispute. That route now exists. It did not exist before January 2026. Use it.
Respond formally to the consultation before it closes. The mandatory connection proposal requires a planning process and public consultation. Attend. Submit a written response. Put your objection on the record. An objection during consultation carries legal weight that a complaint after designation does not.
The window is now.
It will not stay open.
Bristol Live has seven comments on this story.
Seven.
You read the piece about the kettle. You understood the net zero contradiction at the personal level — the phone in its plastic case, the thing that came to nothing.
This is where it comes to nothing at scale.
Half the city. One supplier. Bills in dispute. Former mayor on the contractor’s payroll. Private equity circling. Mandatory connection.
Seven people have noticed.
Now you have too.
The Almighty Gob is a Bristol-based publication covering UK politics, institutional dysfunction, and the gap between what people say and what they actually do. Over 500 published pieces. No allegiances. No apologies. thealmightygob.com
IF YOU WANT TO TAKE THIS FURTHER.
This section is here because some people who read a piece like this want to do something with it — and the gap between wanting to act and knowing where to start is the gap where nothing happens.
You don’t have to use any of these. You don’t have to use all of them. But if something in this piece has raised a question you want answered, or prompted something you want to say on the record, these are the doors. They are all open. None of them require a lawyer.
If you want to raise a competition concern about the mandatory connection proposal: The Competition and Markets Authority takes complaints from individuals and organisations. Their contact page is at gov.uk/contact-the-cma. You don’t need technical language — describe the situation in plain terms: one supplier, no switching rights, no price cap, mandatory connection required by law. The phrase structural monopoly is worth including. So is Heat Networks (Market Framework) Regulations 2025.
If you want to see the full financial terms of the deal: A Freedom of Information request to Bristol City Council (good luck with this one!) can ask for the concession agreement between the council and Ameresco — specifically the profit share mechanism, pricing review clauses, and provisions governing what happens if Vattenfall sells its operations to a third party. Submit via the council’s FOI portal at bristol.gov.uk or through the national portal at whatdotheyknow.com, which also publishes the response publicly.
If you want to raise a billing complaint and you are already connected: The Energy Ombudsman now has jurisdiction over heat networks as of January 2026. If you have experienced billing problems — unexpected charges, lack of transparency, disputes your building manager has not resolved — the Ombudsman’s service is at ombudsman-services.org/energy. It is free to use.
If you want your councillor’s position on the record: Bristol City Council’s elected members are listed with contact details at bristol.gov.uk/find-your-councillor. A written question — sent by email, kept brief, asking simply whether they support mandatory connection before the pricing model is independently verified — creates a paper trail. A non-response is itself information.
If you want to understand the zoning proposal in the council’s own words: Bristol City Council’s heat network planning pages are at bristol.gov.uk under energy and environment. The government’s own Heat Network Zoning Opportunity Report for Bristol — the document that uses the phrase required to connect throughout — is publicly available at gov.uk and published by the Department for Energy Security and Net Zero.
Whatever you decide to do with this, the decision is yours. That is precisely the point.
Fantastic article. Really clear, and explains a topic that we should all be interested in.