The lack of capacity in the UK grid and difficulties connecting clean energy technology to the grid is one of the biggest hurdles in our race to low carbon power supply, according to Jonathan Hick, Fund Manager at Triple Point.
The need to adopt greater levels of renewable power has never been more prevalent. The impact of geopolitical events and tragic global weather disasters has exposed weaknesses in our energy supply security, and highlighted the catastrophic effects of rising temperatures.
However, the UK’s power infrastructure is not yet capable of facilitating the necessary connections, or able to transmit the additional power, from renewable sources.
Triple Point Fund Manager, Jonathan Hick, alluded to the deficiencies at the UK Investor Magazine Virtual Investment Trust Conference.
Mr Hick manages the Triple Point Energy Transition trust which invests in a diverse range of renewable power assets including hydropower, battery storage and low carbon gas facilities.
The Triple Point trust’s ‘holistic’ investment approach ensures they have exposure across the entire renewable power supply chain, from generation through to consumption.
UK Grid Upgrades
The UK government’s incoherent policy on renewables has seen measures to ban more onshore wind farms and lacks any meaningful plan to increase low carbon energy supply.
Such a scenario seems ridiculous in the current climate, but the realities are the current infrastructure of the UK grid does not have the capacity for new large scale renewable projects.
According to Jonathan Hick, the manufacture of a wind turbine would take around a year, but the necessary connections points to feed the power into the grid won’t be available for up to 7 years.
So, if Rishi Sunak was to tomorrow back up his recent comments at COP27 with a legislative agenda that saw the commissioning of large scale onshore and offshore wind facilities, or help to increase the number of solar plants, the grid is not ready to take the power.
For example, National Grid says they have seen a quadrupling of connection applications in the last four years in the Midlands and Mid-Wales region and the earliest connection date is now 2030.
This means with all the will and money in the world to invest directly into new renewable facilities in this particular region, we wouldn’t be able to increase the UK’s power supply for 8 years – over that already agreed.
This isn’t to say there isn’t progress being made. This region has 17 gigawatts of contracted connections over the next decade, most of which is solar.
As new connections are agreed, enabling works to increase the capacity of the network are required. These could be additional overhead lines, underground cables and general reconductoring work.
National Grid say they will invest £40 billion in the critical clean energy infrastructure between 2022 and 2026 but it’s not clear what impact that will have on the capacity for additional clean power connections.
The current scenario means opportunities are being created in downstream clean energy infrastructure such as clean power storage and distribution, rooftop solar, and EV charging points. This supports Triple Point’s holistic approach to the energy transition.