The decade-long queue squeezing Britain's power supply

National Grid

Up and down the country, the story is the same. Wind farms, solar farms, batteries and even waste power plants – none can get connected to the electricity grid fast enough.

This is a big problem, for obvious reasons, when the Government wants to make Britain’s power network “carbon neutral” by 2035. Particularly when experts say that target is already a colossal challenge.

Now, against a growing drumbeat of complaints as the issue becomes more politically fraught, the former state monopoly that owns and operates the grid in England and Wales is scrambling to demonstrate it has not fallen asleep at the wheel.

It may be too late to soothe Westminster. In his recent review of the Government’s net zero ambitions, Tory MP and former energy minister Chris Skidmore warned that “slow, ponderous bureaucracy” around grid connections was hampering the green transition, holding up firms who were gunning to add their power plants to the network.

At the same time, ministers and MPs are being regularly told that the delays are now the single biggest barrier facing renewable developers. Many companies wanting to connect are dismayed to learn they will have to wait until the 2030s.

“If you talk to anyone in the clean energy sector, that is all they want to talk to you about,” Merlin Hyman, chief executive of energy research centre Regen, told MPs last month.

National Grid on Wednesday announced interim plans that it says will finally start to tackle connection delays in the short term, while it is working with regulators on a solution for the problem in the long run.

According to the company, up to 70pc of applications to connect to the grid ultimately come to nothing, meaning that the current queue of more than 600 projects is unnecessarily cluttered.

The Grid wants to overhaul the system so that companies putting in applications have to show real progress on their schemes – for example a planning permission – to keep their places.

But while it hammers out reforms with regulator Ofgem, it is proposing a new two-step application process in the interim which will screen out or delay projects that are getting nowhere after a nine-month period.

Julian Leslie, head of networks and chief engineer of National Grid ESO, says: “We’re evolving our network to make it fit for the future, to deliver net zero and keep clean power flowing to the growing number of homes and businesses across Great Britain, fuelling our economy.

“We recognise the frustration some of our connections customers are experiencing and through this package of short-term initiatives and longer-term reforms we are determined to address the challenges with the current process, which was not designed to operate the sheer scale of applications we are receiving today.”

The efforts come as the issue is beginning to attract mainstream political attention, at a time when the FTSE 100 company’s role in the electricity system is already under growing scrutiny.

National Grid faced criticism in August 2019 for its handling of the worst blackout for decades, which left a million homes without power and commuters stranded on trains.

Yet the role of the electricity grid is set to become more, not less important in the coming decades.

Under plans to make the grid net zero, Britain’s total electricity generation capacity will have to rise from about 104 gigawatts today to 248 gigawatts by 2035.

This is to accommodate the huge shift of demand towards electricity, as consumers ditch petrol fuelled cars and gas heating for electrically-powered vehicles and heat pumps at home.

Phil McNally, an electricity markets expert and research fellow at University College London, says the Government’s target to make the grid carbon-free in just 12 years’ time is already a big ask – but there is no hope whatsoever if this red tape issue isn't solved.

“I think the target is achievable if the Government acts to remove these barriers,” he says.

“In terms of the renewables rollout – that is, offshore wind, solar, maybe onshore wind – there's confidence that those technologies can deploy at the scale required.

“But there's a whole array of administrative barriers that one hundred percent put that target at risk. They might seem insignificant by themselves but when they come together, they can really threaten the targets in terms of timelines and the overall scale of deployment.”

Long planning system delays and demands for cumbersome environmental assessments for each project are also dragging on delivery times. Industry body RenewableUK claims offshore wind farms can now be built three to five years more quickly than it takes to connect them to the Grid.

McNally says National Grid is often unfairly blamed on its own when the problem is really a multifaceted one that requires action from Ofgem, smaller distribution networks and the Government too.

“You always see a lot of finger-pointing, but primarily what you need is a statement of intent from the Government and a taskforce set up with all the relevant parties, as soon as possible,” he adds.

A proper fix will require not just regulatory tinkering but colossal investment, however, with £3.1bn of network upgrades planned over the next five years alone.

And grid capacity is an issue that is only set to become more acute for the National Grid, especially if Keir Starmer’s Labour Party wins the next election.

As part of his plans to ramp up green energy investment, Starmer has vowed to make the electricity network carbon neutral by 2030 – five years before the Government’s own, highly ambitious target.

A Labour source says the party no longer favours expensive nationalisations of the network, although National Grid’s electricity system operator (ESO) division is set to be brought into public ownership next year anyway under the Conservatives.

Starmer and Ed Miliband, the shadow energy secretary, are instead said to be laser-focused on working with the private sector to push through changes that will allow green energy projects to race through the planning system as quickly as possible.

That is why, no doubt, National Grid is keen to show it has no intention of standing in the way.