Renewables projects face 10-year wait to connect to electricity grid

Increasingly, developers of large-scale generation and storage schemes seeking to connect to the electricity grid are being given connection timescales of 2028 and well beyond. Swathes of the country are already affected by capacity constraints on the transmission network and the delays associated with National Grid’s planned reinforcement works risk the UK not meeting the Government’s 2035 electricity system decarbonisation target.

We flagged this issue to Financial Times (FT) and are delighted that Gill Plimmer ran with the story. Read here.

They quoted Catherine Cleary and Pete Aston wrote the initial brief for the FT. It’s great too that representatives from our clients Vattenfall, RES and Lightsource bp were quoted.

There are plenty of opportunities to make positive changes – not least, National Grid needs to work with the DNOs to find solutions to connect these renewable generation schemes earlier, and Ofgem needs to urgently reform the way super-grid transformer reinforcements are charged for.