Rachael Eynon shares views on GB connection reform and battery storage
ESS News spoke to Rachael Eynon, one of Roadnight Taylor’s Connectologists® and a former NESO staff member who worked on the design of the connections process, for a feature exploring how battery energy storage (BESS) connection reform is playing out in Great Britain and Germany — “Breaking the battery gridlock” (ESS News, June 2026 print edition).
The piece looks at NESO’s Gate 2 reform process, which has cleared 153 GW of BESS capacity from the connections queue, with 90.6 GW now holding Gate 2 status against a government target of just 29 GW by 2035. That oversubscription has raised questions about why battery storage has moved through the process more readily than other technologies, and whether the government’s targets themselves are still fit for purpose.
Rachael was asked for her perspective on the first of these questions, commenting that batteries are “potentially faster through planning and probably [receive] fewer objections” than other project types, which may help explain why so much battery capacity has reached Gate 2 relative to demand.
She also raised a question over the assumptions behind the government’s Clean Power 2030 Action Plan, pointing out that the battery cost figures it relies on are drawn from a 2018 Mott MacDonald report, meaning they may bear little resemblance to the realities of the 2026 market. NESO acknowledged the point when put to them by ESS News, noting that future strategic energy plans may help clarify whether additional battery capacity is needed beyond the current pipeline.
The article also covers Germany’s parallel reform journey, where the country’s four TSOs are moving from a first-come, first-served model to a new maturity-based connection procedure (Reifegradverfahren), against a backdrop of 211 GW of battery storage connection requests, roughly five times the capacity envisioned in official grid development plans.
This article appeared in the first print edition of ESS News in June 2026 (page 4), which is available to download.
