National Grid boss likens connections rush to Covid loo roll stampede

National Grid’s transmission boss has compared the current rush to secure grid connections to the toilet roll panic seen during the early stages of the Covid-19 pandemic.

Alice Delahunty, the grid’s UK electricity transmission president, said the barriers to obtaining a grid connection agreement are “incredibly low” which is exacerbating delays.

Delahunty added that “there have been so many headlines [around connections] that everybody’s piling in,” adding that for every GW being ejected from the queue through grid management operations, another three or four are joining it.

The current queue for grid connections has just topped 700GW.

On average 1GW is joining the queue per day which Electricity System Operator chief executive Fintan Slye described as “an absolutely staggering statistic”.

Of the projects waiting for connections, just over 500GW are for transmission and just under 200GW for distribution, Slye said while speaking at Aurora Energy’s Spring Forum.

Batteries and solar projects are “massively oversubscribed”, he said, adding that the most difficult issue is dealing with schemes already in the queue but blocking others that have a greater chance of being delivered more rapidly.

Delahunty added: “It’s much easier to get a grid connection in this country than to open a night club. No one’s going to check any of your credentials, just what your capacity is.

“Once you’re in, there’s nothing really to move you on, which wasn’t needed in the world of nuclear and coal power stations when the technology was a high enough barrier to entry and it was very visible when you were progressing or not.”

Earlier at the conference, Scottish Power chief executive Keith Anderson, called for a “harder, faster and much more aggressive” approach to clearing the grid connection queue.

While acknowledging that the existence of the queue is “good” in the sense that it shows an appetite to invest and build projects in the UK, he said the current mix is “all wrong”.

Last month, the ESO predicted that the queue to connect to the power grid could reach 800GW – four times the amount needed to decarbonise the energy system – by the end of 2024.

The projection was released in response to Ofgem’s decision to allow the ESO and National Grid Electricity Transmission (NGET) to extend by three months the deadlines for providing full offers to customers as part of the temporary two-step connections process they launched in March last year.

The decision means they now have until 1 June to issue these offers, most of which were due by the end of February.

Ofgem expressed disappointment in National Grid’s performance, noting that, even with the delay, the stopgap measure is expected to bring little to no improvement in connection times for the majority of affected customers.

The process, which applied to all new applications to connect to the transmission network in England and Wales for a 12-month period beginning in March 2023, was one of a number of actions that the ESO promised to take in its five-point plan for accelerating connections to the power grid.

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