Can the massive network infrastructure investment needed for net zero be delivered without creating adverse impacts on public engagement or the environment? In a new report, Utility Week and Hitachi ABB Powergrids, explore the challenge.

With every passing month taking us closer to 2050 and that year’s net zero greenhouse gas emissions goal, the scale of the challenge presented by the energy transition comes into clearer focus – and so too does the scale of expectation and responsibility converging on our electricity network operators.

Tomorrow’s grid will stand as the lynchpin for many interdependent low or no-carbon energy vectors, from heat to road and rail transportation. In this world, the significance of electricity to our social and economic wellbeing is dramatically ramped up from an already critical position today, demanding massive capital investment in new and existing assets to ensure the future power system can keep up with the converging dependencies being placed on it.

In the current decade, responsibility for a large amount of this capital investment lies at the door of power transmission operators who must facilitate a boom in offshore wind capacity, underpinned by major new energy storage on land, and also lay the foundations for a new hydrogen economy to bridge the divide between power and gas infrastructure with industrial-scale electrolysers.

But this investment cannot be delivered haphazardly. To maintain legitimacy with the public and ensure that decarbonisation does not lead to broader adverse effects on the natural world, new and refurbished assets must be delivered with attention to details such as aesthetics and impact on biodiversity.

In a new report – Catch 2050: the Power System Investment Challenge in the Race to Net Zero – Utility Week, in association with Hitachi ABB Powergrids, explores this precarious interplay between the mounting pressure on utility capital delivery teams and the need to introduce new sensitivity and ingenuity into their processes.

With a particular focus on the pressing challenges facing transmission operators, the report draws on the expert views of industry leaders, regulators and former policymakers to profile the important work underway to transform today’s planning, approval and delivery regimes to ensure critical investments are made effectively, and at pace.

The report also profiles the significant steps many companies (including SSEN, see interview opposite) are taking to safeguard against any risk that the substantial visual impact of large-scale network infrastructure investment could alienate communities or individuals from the net zero cause, or create environmental detriment beyond the relatively narrow sustainability lens of decarbonisation.

To inspire networks to go further in this vein, the report includes international examples of network capital projects which have broken the mould when it comes to traditional asset design and ambitiously attempted to reshape public perceptions of the role assets can play in their communities – both urban and rural.

For Ian Funnell, chief executive of Hitachi ABB Powergrids, the combined challenges of large-scale infrastructure delivery, new technology, sustainability and social acceptability are an exciting mix.

“We’re going to be investing hundreds of billions into the energy sector over the next 30 years,” he says. “So it is one of the grand challenges of our time, and that’s what makes it so exciting. It is a technological challenge, but it’s also a societal challenge, because it covers almost every aspect of our lives… it’s fantastic.”

Interview

You’ve got to take the public with you

Among the contributors to Utility Week’s new report is Rob ­McDonald, managing director transmission at SSEN. Here he talks to Utility Week about the investment challenge ahead as he leads his organisation on its ambitious path to net zero.

SSEN Transmission managing director Rob McDonald is the first to apologise for the statistical blast, but large numbers are the only way to contextualise the scale of the challenge the network is stepping up to as it goes toe-to-toe with climate change and embraces a leading role in creating a more sustainable future for Scotland, and the UK.

In the T1 period, through connecting renewable electricity across Scotland, the business grew the value of its regulated asset base from £700 million to £3 billion. In RIIO-T2, it is forecasting further growth to £5 billion. Furthermore, under National Grid’s Future Energy Scenarios, its 8GW of connected renewable capacity today will reach 14GW by the end of the
RIIO-T2 period, and 22GW by 2030.

If delivering the massive capital investment programme required to underpin this growth weren’t enough, SSEN has spiced it up, adding another layer of challenge by signing up to the rigorous United Nations Global Compact Science Based Targets.

These targets set science-based requirements for operations and investments to meet stretching environmental specifications. “It’s a pathway to cutting carbon emissions consistent with the 1.5 degree warming scenario,” explains McDonald. “We are the only network company in the world [out of around 330 signatories] to achieve that accreditation. It’s really tough. We’re reporting against this in our business plan, which will see us reduce our own greenhouse gas emissions by fully a third by 2030,” he adds.

The accreditation is important for SSEN on a number of levels, but not least because it is helping the company maintain legitimacy in the eyes of the communities its serves as it rolls out a vast capital programme which will inevitably have an impact on landscape and localities. It’s critical to maintain a position in which customers can have faith that the network’s actions are driven by carbon arguments, rather than corporate ambition or self-interest, McDonald emphasises.

This means a lot of things in practice. Some are simple, like ensuring that, wherever possible, investment is overlayed on to existing sites or routes – “we try to avoid virgin territory wherever possible”, McDonald states. But also, when new ground does have to be broken, SSEN has made firm commitments to delivering biodiversity net gain.

But even with the strong commitments SSEN has made to delivering a “good” energy transition (one that avoids adverse social or environmental consequences), McDonald is clear that more needs to be done across the ecosystem of industry stakeholders to make sure that inefficiencies and inequalities are not allowed to snowball in the race for net zero.

Greater coordination is needed, he argues, to ensure renewable generation is connected in a cost-effective and sustainable way and not in the current transaction-by-transaction style.

“This is about getting all the key stakeholders together – developers, government (in Westminster and Holyrood), local authorities, Ofgem and other key stakeholders,” he says. “We need to pull together a strategic plan for the transmission system. We’ve delivered to date in terms of addressing net zero, but we need to move at pace. To do it at pace, I believe, we need a more coordinated view going forward.”