NGESO 5-Point Plan

Niel Dey and James Bennett recently attended National Grid’s conference.

Niel, Development Engineer, summarises below NGESO’s 5 point plan shared at the conference.

In 2021, the UK government made the landmark commitment to decarbonise the UK’s electricity system by 2035.

In addition to decarbonising existing power generation, electricity demand is expected to increase 50% by 2035, a large proportion of which is driven by electrification of housing and the uptake of electric vehicles.

The UK energy industry has acted swiftly by developing large numbers renewable energy and battery storage projects, however there is one issue that puts our country’s net-zero goals at risk: connection delays, with new projects being offered connection dates of more than 15 years in the future. This matter is now entering the wider public consciousness as reports are appearing on mainstream news outlets and raised to the top of the UK Government’s agenda.

NGESO announced their 5-point plan in March 2023 outlining specific initiatives to tackle this issue, with an initial expectation that 70% of projects’ connection dates will move forward between 2-10 years.

We are pleased to see the start of these being implemented and look forward to realising its impact on Electric Land’s pipeline of renewable and storage projects and adding a significant contribution to the UK’s climate targets much sooner.

In addition, NGESO have also announced this month the connections reform consultation which is looking at wholesale changes to the entire connections process.

The NGESO 5-Point Plan

1: TEC amnesty

8.1GW of existing projects have been allowed to leave the connection queue without incurring penalties for doing so.

2: Construction Planning Assumptions (CPAs) Review

Update of background modelling assumptions to reassess existing connected and contracted projects more realistically to identify untapped capacity and bring forward connection dates.

3: Treatment of Storage

Change how Battery Storage Systems’ impact on the system is calculated to reflect operating patterns more accurately and free up available capacity.

4: Queue Management

Develop new contractual terms for connections to manage the queue more efficiently, to advance projects that are progressing and remove those that are not.

5: Non-Firm Offer Development

Enable battery energy storage projects to connect to the grid more quickly through the provision of non-firm connection offers. This means they may be instructed to reduce their output on rare occasions but will benefit from much faster connection timescales.

We are looking forward to more conferences with NGESO, in particular to see how their 5-point plan progresses. To read the full article by NGESO, please click here.

To talk further on this topic or our developments please do get in touch with the team.