NGESO customer seminar – Glasgow

A number of our team attended the National Grid ESO’s customer seminar in Glasgow, where they met NGESO stakeholders in-person and learn more about the upcoming connections process reforms.

Some of their key takeaways from the conference:

💡Due to the vast levels of new connection applications over the last 12 months, the Two-Step offer process is now not expected to deliver the earlier connection dates that had been hoped for.

💡NGESO plan to apply the ‘First Ready, First Connected’ approach to existing contracted projects as well as new connection applications, aiming for these reforms to be introduced in January 2025.

💡The current proposal is to introduce a ‘gated’ approach to the connections queue, where projects will be required to provide proof of land ownership or a land option agreement in order to obtain a queue position and potentially an accelerated connection date.

💡Existing contracted projects will be given a grace period to demonstrate compliance and will then have the option to either retain their existing connection date or request an accelerated connection based on the reformed queue.

💡These reforms are subject to further industry consultation and approval by Ofgem.

💡Initial analysis by NGESO suggests this proposal could halve the connections queue by removing stalled projects.

Electric Land welcome these reforms to accelerate the connection of viable renewable and energy storage projects in order to meet the UK’s target of decarbonising the power sector by 2035. Our pipeline of ‘shovel ready’ projects awaiting earlier grid connection dates are well placed to benefit from these reforms and contribute to reaching the UK’s decarbonisation goals.

Do get in touch with the team to discuss further.