s0101124, 10.03 Briain needs an unprecedented expansion of the electricity gra
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Britain | The Great Rewiring
Britain needs an unprecedented
expansion of the electricity grid
That means a bigger role for the state, whoever wins the election
IMAGE: NATIONAL GRID
Jan 4th 2024 Share
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OR DECADES the electricity grid—the mix of inverters, pylons, substations
F and transformers that connects sources of energy to consumers—has
barely featured in British politics. Fuel burned, turbines spun and
transmission lines hummed as energy moved from power plants to urban
centres. Distribution grids took over from there, carrying energy over the last
mile into factories and homes, so machinery could whirr and kettles boil.
pn Th tks, Britain’ hi
Clean ommetition e system works. Britain's grid has
Carbon intensity of electricity long been one of the most stable in
Grams of CO; equivalents emitted the world, according to the World
per KWhof electricity wee eas
a Bank. The British grid is also one of
China the world’s cleanest (see chart),
a 600 emitting a third less carbon dioxide
= than the German grid did in 2022.
Other G7 = “Liberalisation and privatisation
cous el Bic 200 — have delivered the outcomes you
ee 5 want,” says Guy Newey, a former
70 2~« bt policy adviser who now runs
Source: Our World in Data Energy Systems Catapult, an outfit
IMAGE: THE ECONOMIST that helps startups.
But the grid’s days of quietly
efficient obscurity are over. The demands of decarbonisation, needed to slow
down climate change, have propelled it up the political agenda. The
Conservatives have promised a grid whose operation causes no net emissions
of carbon by 2035. Labour has pledged to do the same by 2030.
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That is an enormous undertaking. Renewable sources of power, such as wind
turbines and solar panels, must be plugged into the grid; so must banks of
batteries to smooth out variable supply. Britain must increase the amount of
grid infrastructure that is built every year by a factor of seven, says Adam Bell,
formerly the government's head of energy strategy, now of Stonehaven, a
consultancy.
The current system is not equipped to meet this challenge. Regulatory
processes are geared to slow and predictable change. In an independent
review of the grid commissioned by the government and published in August,
Nick Winser, an energy grandee, wrote that it currently takes between 12 and
14 years for new transmission lines to go from conception to being switched
on. If this sort of sluggishness persists it will torpedo both parties’ grid
ambitions, not to mention Britain's hopes of meeting its climate targets.
It will also hurt the economy. Housing and data-centre developments are
being held back by the lack of available connections; the queue of connection
requests is gigantic. British electricity looks dear compared with
neighbouring countries. “Reducing emissions comes after the economic
benefits of solving the grid,” says Sam Alvis of Public First, a consultancy. “It’s
the number one thing that British business needs to compete.”
Some action is already being taken. On November 27th Ofgem, which
regulates the electricity grid, changed the way it handles requests to connect.
The old system was a first-come-first-served affair, in which everyone just
waits their turn. A 1Gw solar farm in the Midlands was recently added to the
queue, with a connection date brushing up against 2040. The new rules
introduce strict milestones for grid-connection proiects—whether land rights
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have been secured, s say—and give the grid operator, National Grid Eso
(NGESO), the power to kill both new and existing requests which do not meet
them. The idea is that this will eliminate speculative “zombie” projects,
which bag a spot in the queue in order to be bought out.
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Mr Winser’s report made 18 recommendations to speed things up further. In
one way or another they involve moving away from the case-by-case
processes of identifying need, carrying out a preliminary design, gaining
regulatory approval and planning permission, buying components and hiring
workers. All grid infrastructure should be built according to a single plan, he
concluded, with the government, regulators and grid operators united behind
it. The state, in other words, needs to start playing a bigger role.
This shift is also under way, most obviously with the nationalisation of
NGESO. The creation of the Future System Operator (Fso), as the new
government-owned grid operator will be called, is one of the primary goals of
the Energy Act that received royal assent in October. The government is due to
buy the operator this year from National Grid, a private company which
builds and owns physical grid infrastructure. This is to avoid conflicts of
interest as NGESO develops a countrywide plan for the transmission network
to efficiently connect far-flung renewable generation with pools of mostly
urban consumers.
If the Tories have already paved the way for greater government control of the
grid, Labour would B0 further and faster. That is partly a matter of political
tpt economist convbriin/202401/04brtain-noacs-anunpracadentd-axpansion-of-he-lecciy id anoso101124, 10:03 Briain needs an unprecedented expansion of the electricity gra
economy. Labour is 1n a stronger position to ram througn more electricity
infrastructure because its own supporters are less affected by it. The plans
being drawn up by NGEso for the future grid happen to require pylons to be
tun through just a single existing Labour seat, according to Mr Alvis. The
party intends to increase the number of planning officers and to standardise
environmental surveys so that a given project can gain consent faster.
More radically, Labour also plans to set up a state-owned company called GB
Energy. This will run a purchasing consortium for all buyers of grid gear,
aping a successful Dutch system, in order to ensure that equipment is
procured upfront and on time. Some of that gear, Labour hopes, will come
from British factories.
GB Energy will also bid to construct some bits of grid infrastructure. Building
seven times more grid every year requires a commensurate increase in
investment; Labour sees this as its only way to have a net-zero grid by 2030. It
is a goal, says Andrew Sissons, a former policy official now at Nesta, a charity
focused on innovation, that implies an “almost wartime effort”.
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Part of the idea, says Mr Bell, is to hold down capital costs by using the
government's ability to borrow cheaply. This is a model the current
government has used to build nuclear power plants, risky projects that attract
high interest rates In the same wav GR Fnersv will nrohably trv to bid on
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riskier and more expensive grid projects. If it wins these contracts, then the
consequences could be material. “It is quite radical,” says Mr Sissons,
“because it implies some partial nationalisation of the grid. Those new bits of
grid infrastructure may end up in state hands.”
Private operators hope that they will also be allowed to bid against National
Grid and GB Energy to build lower-risk bits of the grid. Eclipse, an
independent distribution network operator (DNO) owned by Octopus, a
utility, thinks it could deploy £3bn ($3.8bn) of capital if it received a licence
for transmission work.
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There are pitfalls aplenty here for Labour. The most obvious is that there is
simply not much public money available for the kind of state-led activity it
envisages. Under the current model, grid upgrades are paid for by energy
consumers via bills. If the government ends up funding the construction of
electricity infrastructure directly, via the exchequer, it will find it has a fiscal
“tightrope” to walk, says Mr Sissons.
Asecond challenge is to ensure that the roles of all the state bodies are clear.
“What is absolutely needed urgently is a very clear articulation of what is the
responsibility of Fso, what is the responsibility of Ofgem and what is the
responsibility of the government,” says Mr Newey. “A messy set of
overlapping responsibilities could lead to finger-pointing.”
The third looming problem is that distribution networks, which bring
electricity over the last mile to consumers, are not yet part of any rewiring
hitps:www economist comibritain/202410 /04fbrtair-neads-an-unprecedented-expansion-ofthe-slactrcty gra eno1010124, 10.03 Briain needs an unprecedented expansion of the electricity gra
plan. pNos do not have good systems for monitoring their networks and
often know that they have reached capacity only when a substation blows
out. This could lead to a situation where the transmission grid has been
successfully decarbonised, but there is no way to plug in all the cars and heat
pumps which use that clean electricity.
Current plans
The best way to minimise these risks is to maximise the amount of efficiency
that can be squeezed from the existing grid. “The debate is about how much
emphasis you put on building, and how much you put on flexibility, so you're
making the most of your system,” says Mr Newey. Flexibility would mean
changing the way the electricity market is regulated to allow different prices
to be charged to consumers on different parts of the grid.
At the moment, for example, Scottish wind-farm operators are paid to switch
off their turbines when the wind blows strongly because the grid does not
have the capacity to send all the electricity they generate to consumers, “One
answer to curtailed Scottish wind farms is to build loads of transmission to
get it to the south of England,” says Mr Newey. But he thinks it would be better
to have location-based pricing which both encourages generation to be built
nearer demand centres and incentivises new sources of consumption, like
factories, to be built where power is cheaper. Utilities like Octopus agree.
Labour believes that the task of rewiring Britain is important enough and
urgent enough that public money and central planning are the only way to
achieve it quickly. Even if Labour's goal of making the grid net zero by 2030 is
arbitrary, speed is undoubtedly necessary. But the risk is that state
intervention dampens price signals, leaving Britain with an expensive,
overbuilt grid. The costs of that would, as ever, end up being paid by
consumers.
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This article appeared in the Britain section of the print edition under the headline "The Great Rewiring"
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