Grid Connection Risks Threaten UK Renewable Goals

Joint effort needed to tackle pervasive problem, potentially unlocking enough power to decarbonise energy system by 2035.

Decisive action will be required by the UK’s government and power sector to realise ambitious plans recently set out for renewable energy, as well as meet existing and proposed targets.

Since winning last month’s general election, the Labour party has introduced a variety of renewables-linked initiatives. These include relaxing the country’s onshore wind policy, increasing the 2030 offshore wind target from 50 gigawatts (GW) to 55GW, and announcing plans for rooftop solar panels.

The new administration has also unveiled a National Wealth Fund and confirmed GB Energy, both of which will combine and channel public and private sector finance to renewable energy projects.

However, the current transmission connection queue sits at more than 700GW, with projects taking 11-13 years to connect to the grid. The UK needs to rapidly expand its electricity grid to meet its renewables targets, with five times more electricity infrastructure required by 2030 than in the past three decades to deliver a net zero grid.

“Grid connection is perhaps the biggest barrier to the deployment of low carbon energy in the UK,” Tobias Burke, Policy Manager at energy industry trade association Energy UK, told ESG Investor. “Contracts for difference and capacity market contracts have gone a long way to encouraging investment in low carbon energy, but this would be undermined if grid connection times remained unresolved.”

The queue to connect renewables projects to the grid currently contains more than twice the amount of generation required to meet the government’s target of decarbonising the energy system by 2035. However, this potential is being constrained by slow connections, limited capacity, unhelpful planning regulations and market uncertainty.

“The UK’s grid is struggling to keep up with the surge of green energy projects joining the queue,” said Rachel Fletcher, Director of Regulation and Economics at Octopus Energy Group. “The grid connection queue has ballooned, with many ‘zombie’ projects that will likely never see the light of day.”

Persistent problems

In May, the Environmental Audit Committee – comprising a cross-party selection of members of parliament – published a report which found many planned renewable energy projects are being hampered by persistent problems accessing the electricity grid.

The report called on the government, regulator Ofgem, and National Energy System Operator (NESO) – which is set to replace the National Grid’s Electricity System Operator (ESO) later this year – to develop a detailed pathway and delivery plan setting out investment and rollout steps for the electricity infrastructure required to deliver the UK’s low carbon electricity generation targets by the end of 2024 at the latest.

It also recommended the government specify the level and type of both short-term and long-term energy storage will be required in a net zero energy system by the end of 2025.

“The first range of reforms should be in place by January 2025, with further reforms and significant investment being planned to further alleviate the congestion,” said Burke. “There will undoubtably be a need to go further than current efforts to reform the queue, which are expected to cut the connection queue by half.”

The government previously said that a more efficient and locally responsive energy system could lower costs to consumers by up to £10 billion (US$13 billion) a year by 2050, underlining a further potential benefit of addressing grid connection issues.

Industry has welcomed Labour’s commitment to tackle grid connection delays, which the party’s manifesto described as the “single-biggest obstacle to the deployment of cheap, clean power generation and to electrification of the industry”. However, the party is yet to fully expand on measures to tackle the problem.

“Ultimately, we need to be able to connect green energy projects in a year, not a decade,” said Fletcher. “This will help cut people’s energy bills and unleash investment into Britain’s colossal green energy opportunity. It’s crucial to keep up the urgency and momentum.”

Acceleration efforts

Earlier this year, the National Grid ESO proposed a £58 billion investment in the UK’s electricity grid between 2030 and 2035 – in addition to £54 billion of grid works already planned by 2030. The National Grid has nine ways it is working with industry to accelerate grid connections.

In December, the ESO flagged that applications for green connections representing 573GW of power generation had been made, far in excess of the current installed capacity of approximately 70GW. These proposed infrastructure projects could add as much as £15 billion to the UK economy and create more than 20,000 jobs each year.

Separately, in March, Blackfinch Energy’s Horsey Levels Solar Farm in Somerset became the country’s first to benefit from the National Grid’s Technical Limits acceleration programme, which aims to streamline the integration of renewable energy into the national grid.

“A number of smaller projects have seen their connection times sped up, and the pace of new connection requests has begun to slow from the significant rates seen at the beginning of the year,” said Burke. “There is much more work to be done [and] the new government will need to maintain the pace and commitment required to deliver over the coming decade.”

While Burke acknowledged that work is ongoing to deliver reforms and investment at pace, with overall timelines gradually improving and some projects offered accelerated timelines to connect, the most significant impacts will “not be seen for some months to come”.

He urged the new government to coordinate workstreams to ensure consistency in locational and energy market investment signals, as well as stressing the “critical” importance of coordination between the government, Ofgem, NESO, and wider industry actions requiring delivery as part of a strategic approach.

Renewable developers need to be given access to a greater amount of network data, said Fletcher, to be able to conduct their own network analysis and come up with proposals to help optimise grid capacity.

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