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A £58bn revamp of the UK’s energy grid is needed to connect a raft of new offshore wind facilities to be built off the Scottish coast, the regulator has said.
National Grid’s Electricity System Operator (ESO) anticipates that Britain’s electricity needs will rise by nearly 65% by 2035 as heat and transport are increasingly electrified in a bid to decarbonise the grid.
But the current infrastructure is reaching its capacity and is unable to transport much more electricity without reinforcing the network. Investment in renewable energy generation has exceeded investment in transmission capacity over the past decade, resulting in bottlenecks in the electricity network.
The grid’s current capacity was largely set in the 1950s with the development of the ‘supergrid’. This once-in-a-generation expansion consisted of building several large ‘motorways’ to transport electricity from a core set of fossil fuel generators in the centre of the country to homes and businesses across Britain.
Over the last 70 years, this network has only undergone relatively small upgrades, but the recent influx of renewable facilities and increased electricity demand means the ageing network is no longer fit for purpose.
In October, a report from Centrica found that the queue for connecting new projects to the grid was massively oversubscribed, with some green energy projects taking years to be able to connect, hampering external investment.
Some of the energy generated is also being wasted as the grid cannot transport it to where it can be used. This forces the ESO to ask wind farms to switch off to prevent the grid becoming overloaded.
The government has set an ambition to have a fully decarbonised electricity system by 2035, but the ESO warns that without urgent investment, the UK will struggle to meet this target.
Its new proposals would facilitate the connection of an additional 21GW of offshore wind that is planned following the ScotWind leasing round in 2022.
Once built, the projects will enable Great Britain “to have the single largest offshore wind fleet in Europe and exceed the offshore wind capacity of the United States of America by the mid-2030s,” the ESO said in its report.
The design also facilitates the connection of other forms of low-carbon electricity generation, including the Sizewell C and Hinkley Point nuclear power plants, which are due to start generating in the coming decades.
