Report says £58 billion needed for National Grid to keep Britain supplied

An additional £58 billion will need to be invested in Great Britain’s electricity grid in the first half of the next decade to ensure that it can supply the power to keep homes and businesses going, a new report has found.

The Electricity System Operator (ESO) said that around 20,000 jobs could be created in the largest build-out for seven decades. Nine in 10 of these jobs will be outwith London and the south-east of England.

“Great Britain is about to embark upon the biggest change to the electricity network since the high voltage transmission grid was established back in the 1950s,” the report said.

It called for “swift and co-ordinated” progress, without which the country’s climate ambitions might be at risk.

The ESO is the organisation which runs the network. It is currently owned by National Grid, but will transfer into government ownership later this year.

New connections and more capacity will be needed as people and companies switch to using electricity for their cars or heating their homes.

This will require new capacity in the grid. But the new forms of generating energy – primarily through wind and solar farms – will also change the way the grid is shaped.

At one time the vast majority of Britain’s electricity came from massive coal-fired power plants built close to coal mines.

The power grid then moved this power into Britain’s cities and industrial areas. The grid of the future will instead source its electricity from locations spread out across the country.

This is by design. Sometimes it is windy on the east coast, but not the west, so having turbines in both places can keep supplies more constant.

But this means that the grid will have to reach places where it has previously only had small capacity, not least offshore.

There will have to be 86 gigawatts (GW) of offshore wind in Britain’s waters alone, the report said, up from 14 GW today. Today there is only 63 GW of offshore wind in the world.

That will help to satisfy a jump in demand for electricity. Britain’s needs are expected to rise by 64% by 2035, and to double by 2050, the ESO’s report said.

“Investment in renewable energy generation has exceeded investment in transmission capacity over the past decade, resulting in bottlenecks on the electricity network,” the report said.

This means that “energy is being wasted as the grid cannot transport it to where it can be used”.

For instance, if wind turbines in Scotland are producing more electricity than Scotland can use or export to England and elsewhere, then the grid has to pay wind farms to switch off some of their turbines.

This practice, known as “curtailment” in industry jargon, cost the grid £569.7 million last year.

Changes are required in the transportation of power.