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...