Increasing the production of clean power from renewables such as wind and solar will be necessary for the UK to decarbonise its electricity system.

But while the deployment of cheap renewable energy generation has quadrupled over the past 10 years, investments in Britain’s transmission grid have remained flat and have even decreased since 2017, Scottish Renewables said in a new report.

Scotland is reliant on renewable energy more than other parts of the UK as its geography has allowed developers to build some of the biggest domestic wind farms.

In the future, more homes and businesses will be connected to heat networks and industrial sites and factories will house large batteries. There will also be a need for more electric vehicle chargers, heat pumps and solar panels.

To enable this, National Grid estimates that five times more transmission lines need to be built by 2030 than have been built in the past 30 years, at a cost of more than £50bn.

With wind...