Can Britain’s grid make the grade?

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The UK government has announced the approval of the Jackdaw gasfield in the North Sea·. That’s actually good news for the renewable energy transition, claims the government, which simultaneously unveiled a new “energy wealth fund” using North Sea fossil fuel revenues to support green energy projects.

In any case, for that transition to have any chance of success, the country’s power grid will need some serious work, leading figures in the sector are warning.

The race to get Britain’s grid up to scratch

“Personally, that was really hard to hear,” said Fintan Slye, the head of Britain’s grid operator, yesterday.

He was referring to the results of an investigation by law firm Eversheds Sutherland, triggered by an episode of severe strain on the British grid during a major heatwave in June.

The investigation warned of “a significant disconnect” between Neso’s control room team and its top leadership, with complaints that senior executives don’t understand “the reality of the pressures faced by those on the frontline”. Those pressures were becoming worse, witnesses told the investigators, as “increased reliance on renewables, which are less flexible, makes the job more difficult”.

Soaring temperatures during the late June heatwave drove increased power demand for air conditioning, while forcing gas-fired power stations to reduce output. Lower-than-expected wind generation added to the pressure, as did outages in the transmission network, forcing Neso to call on emergency assistance from France.

While a broader regulatory study is ongoing, there’s no evidence that the British grid came close to the kind of blackout seen in Spain and Portugal last year. But the episode has added to concerns about how grid operators are handling an imposing cocktail of challenges: the transition to cheaper, greener, but intermittent and widely distributed renewable sources, alongside rising demand from air conditioning, electric cars and data centres — all against the backdrop of an increasingly volatile climate.

At this week’s FT Live Energy Transition Summit, a suite of top names from the British power sector offered a window into how it is responding.

One key message was around the need for investment in skills and resources to manage a system fundamentally different from the grid of old. “We’re moving from a small number of very large fossil-fuel generators to a myriad different generators, and managing that is significantly more complex,” Slye said. “We need to . . . give the control room the tools, the processes, the visibility, the IT, the AI, that enables them to do that and to do it well.”

Then there’s the question of physical infrastructure. The International Energy Agency estimates that, to meet national clean power goals, countries will need to build or refurbish 80mn kilometres of power lines — more than half the distance between the Earth and the Sun.

Britain had only belatedly woken up to the urgency of this need, warned Keith Anderson, chief executive of ScottishPower, one of the country’s major players in both electricity generation and transmission. As the nation raced to invest £75bn ($100bn) in just five years, it was running into constraints from a sclerotic planning system, he said — and worries about securing necessary components, as other countries rush to do much the same.

Adding to the pressure is a coming wave of consumption from data centres, according to Akshay Kaul, head of infrastructure at energy regulator Ofgem, who warned that projected demand would reach “absolutely eye-watering levels” from 2031.

But while no one at this week’s summit questioned the need for a massive expansion of grid infrastructure, there was intense debate about the need for better exploitation of the existing transmission system. Much of this centred on the geeky subject of “dynamic line rating”, whereby operators can use sensors and data analytics to calibrate the amount of power that can be sent down a line safely at a given time, taking into account temperature and wind speeds.

Another crucial priority should be “bidirectional” power flows, enabling operators to use electric cars as power sources for the grid, argued Greg Jackson, chief executive of Octopus Energy, the UK’s largest electricity retailer. But the country’s transmission sector had perverse economic incentives to build new capital-intensive infrastructure, he contended, rather than make smarter use of existing assets.

Not so, insisted Zoë Yujnovich, boss of National Grid (which builds and maintains physical grid infrastructure in England and Wales, while Neso handles the real-time power flows). “We are absolutely appropriately incentivised to get more out of the existing grid.”

But she reiterated the need for large-scale grid expansion — an expensive programme that she said would nonetheless drive long-term declines in consumer power prices, by enabling greater usage of low-cost renewables. “Ultimately, we see ourselves as either the biggest enabler or the biggest constraint to economic development,” she said.

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