The government is planning to revamp the UK’s energy planning system so that grid connections for “the most important projects” are prioritised over the current “first come, first served” process.
In its manifesto, Labour set itself a lofty goal of entirely decarbonising the UK’s energy grid by 2030 – bringing forward the already-ambitious 2035 target. But for this to be achieved, green energy infrastructure needs to be installed at pace.
The current infrastructure is reaching its capacity and is unable to transport much more electricity without reinforcement. In the last decade, investment in renewable energy generation has exceeded investment in transmission capacity, resulting in bottlenecks in the electricity network.
A 2023 report from Centrica found that the queue for connecting new projects to the grid was massively oversubscribed, with some green energy projects taking up to a decade before they can be connected.
The new measures proposed include speeding up the construction of...