Transmission is a real problem and just like Nuclear, we haven’t improved it in the past 30 years.
So both eastern green link projects (offering more capacity) are due to be finished in 2029, “ok” I think “but surely we’re doing some work onshore to improve the existing network in the meantime..”
> Due to ongoing project work for increased power flow from North to South across two Transmission Owner (TO) regions and the interaction of the outage plans, increased capacity across the boundary will be limited and intermittent till 2029
So basically no transmission, onshore or offshore is going to be improved until 2029, but we’re still green lighting wind farms in Scotland. I’m amazed someone has the foresight to increase generation but not transmission until now, how were these green lit in the past knowing full well this bottleneck existed.
Maybe it’s controversial, but id argue for stopping more generation until transmission or storage is sorted, otherwise curtailment is going to be even higher in the next few years.
I suspect part of the foresight was exactly to create this situation, where the problem is framed as lack of transmission capacity. Because the alternative - building transmission capacity before it was needed - is even less politically feasible. Public money can only be spent when the need is so blatant it can no longer be ignored, and then everyone sits around and says "well why didn't we do that sooner".
From the article, it looks like the problem is partially caused by significant parts of the transmission network being temporarily shut down due to ongoing upgrades. These could probably have been started slightly sooner, but they are already underway, so I don't think your point is weel supported.
It's not just the cost of building. There's huge NIMBY opposition to the construction of transmission lines:
https://www.politico.eu/article/uk-government-electricity-py...
Of course, the same arguments killed the construction of onshore wind in England, which would have prevented needing the new powerlines (or at least not so much).
> just like Nuclear, we haven’t improved it in the past 30 years.
That's plain wrong.
Transmission system have massively evolved compared to what they were 30 years ago. Typically, at the TSO I know, the way people work looks nothing like it was 30 years ago.
Nowadays, every 5 minutes, we simulate the whole network for each of the consumption forecasts we have (one per 15 minutes) in the next two hours, plus the effect of every network loss, plus we simulate whether the planned workarounds fix the situation.
There are also newer generations of automated protective mechanisms on the lines, new automata, a new SCADA, etc. The network has also been expanded significantly with several new interconnections, more interactions with our neighbours, etc.
On the "market" side, we have plenty of new tools that allow us to do what's explained in the article's introduction, since the system didn't work like that before Europe's electricity market reforms.
And that's just a very small part of what changed.
> Maybe it’s controversial, but id argue for stopping more generation until transmission or storage is sorted
It doesn't work like that. Transmission evolves over time according to needs. It makes no sense to "freeze" for a time to let TSOs adapt. What needs to be done, however, is maybe give the market a little bit less deciding power, and give the TSO a little better feedback loop to force market operator to provide workable solutions.
Also maybe the political forces pushing renewables with LCOE analysis need to understand that generation build cost is only a fraction of what's paid for an electric system.
The real problem isn't curtailment but misaligned incentives that subsidize curtailment. In short, wind providers are being payed royally (many billions) to NOT produce wind energy. There's no incentive for them to be more efficient. Worse, because of the incentives, energy companies are just installing wind wherever they can without regard for the local infrastructure and demand. They get guaranteed pricing regardless of whether their energy is used. Not their problem if they have to throw double digit percentages of their energy away. They get paid anyway.
It's not a question of "efficiency"; as the original article points out, they're at the mercy of the transmission market. It's not their problem because .. it really isn't their problem and they can't solve it.
> installing wind wherever they can without regard for the local infrastructure and demand
Alternatively, installing it where the energy and topography is, and the local planning environment allows it. We wouldn't be in quite such a bad position if the Tory government hadn't banned onshore wind in England.
> they're at the mercy of the transmission market
There is no such thing as a transmission market. The grid is a regional monopoly, and it doesn't "market" its capacity.
The issue here is that when too much power runs through a line, if you don't turn it off, it does [1]. Building more lines isn't exactly fast, or cheap, and it wasn't really a major focus of the people setting up subsidies for new production.
> It's not their problem because .. it really isn't their problem and they can't solve it.
It's not their problem because their subsidies scheme means they will get paid anyway.
[1]: https://www.reddit.com/media?url=https%3A%2F%2Fpreview.redd....
The german economic ministry has recently proposed exactly that. Slow the addition of more generation while the grid catches up. As expected this proposal did not go over super well.
Yeah, this whole "let's sell off state-owned infrastructure on the Free Market" hasn't worked out so well: not only in the UK, but also elsewhere in Europe, the handsome profits of those moves have pretty much evaporated, investments in upgrades have been severely lacking, and now everyone is pointing fingers due to the inevitable capacity meltdowns.
(Note that I'm not opposed to privatization in general, and it has worked out very well in other sectors, noticeably Telecoms, but I'm not aware of it bringing long-term happiness anywhere when it comes to Energy)
For things where there is not a natural path for competition, state owned, or how it is done in the US state of Nebraska a separate political subdivision, makes more sense. You are not going to have multiple power lines and connections coming into your home to enable natural competition
I'm all for free market with some subsidiaries for backup generation for electricity generation. But transfer should be only publicly owned companies. Be it national for national grid and regional owned by suitable entity say municipality or group of them.
Same goes for water and sewer. Maybe garbage could be mixed model. In big enough towns having multiple competing companies for removal is not unreasonable competition. Same could be said for part of bus networks.
> Same could be said for part of bus networks
The only part of municipal/ regional bus network that is suitable for privatisation in a high labour cost country is contracting out operations. Ticketing, route planning andscheduling all should be under a central governmental authority. There is a reason that, outside of London, England has some of the worst bus services in the developed world
> the inevitable capacity meltdowns
Capacity is constantly being hit by very large population growth. Just like water and housing. Money available is lowered by state-enforced price caps. Purchase prices are raised by state-mandated net zero rules that subsidise green sources.
> Capacity is constantly being hit by very large population growth.
Is this really true in the UK? Electricity production in the UK peaked in 2005. It's down 20% on that today. The issue here is that in 2005 electricity was primarily produced in large power stations reasonably close to where it was consumed, while in 2025 it's increasingly produced in locations far from population centres. The actual ability of the grid to deliver power to the last mile isn't really a problem. The problem is that most of the houses are in the South, and increasingly large amounts of generation are in the North.
> Capacity is constantly being hit by very large population growth
Europe has not been 'hit by a very large population growth' by any stretch of the imagination in recent years. Capacity issues are mostly due to deprecating natural gas, which has lead to an increase in solar, but that's just a minor issue when you look at industry migrating from furnaces to heat pumps.
> Just like water and housing
Water is squarely an agriculture thing and housing has been a shitshow forever. But thanks for bringing those up as well -- it's like a dogwhistle trifecta!
> state-enforced price caps, state-mandated net zero rules
Most parts of Europe lack those entirely. There are (less and less) 'green subsidies', sure, but funnily enough, the increasing cost of fossil fuels is doing most of the work here.
> Capacity is constantly being hit by very large population growth.
What population growth?
https://www.worldometers.info/world-population/uk-population...
The UK has experienced the 2 largest annual growth on record in the last 5 years, with +755k mid-23 to mid-2024 alone [1]. Even your link shows about 11% growth since 2010 and higher growth rates since ~2004.
So we can argue about what "very large" means, but population growth is significant.
[1] https://www.ons.gov.uk/peoplepopulationandcommunity/populati...
> about 11% growth since 2010
So much less than 1% a year.
> we can argue about what "very large" means
Yeah, you can argue that less than 1% a year is "very large". I'm not sure anyone else will be convinced.
There are two things we can do with energy, move it across space or move it across time. Moving it across space requires transmission infrastructure (which is state owned or rapacious corp owned -- very slow to build or upgrade; rent seeking, regulatory capture). The other option is to move across time, which is using batteries. Cars are rarely driven more than ~20 mins/day which make them the ideal energy storage devices. We could even say their primary purpose is energy storage. Just like today's 'phones' are no longer for making calls but for content consumption. When all cars are EVs and can do V2X (vehicle to grid, to load, to home, to anything), it becomes a gigantic, resilient, distributed energy reservoir.
For providing this service, all car (EV) owners must be paid to give the utilities permission to dump excess production and to supply energy back to the grid when needed. Right now, most of the electricity costs are from peak costs (mostly peaker electricity costs). There is no reason that this infrastructure can't be provided by the EV car owners.
Bear in mind that in the UK, a large chunk of the populations lives in either rented accommodation, high-rise flats, or both. And also, standard housing policy in London is for new developments to have fewer parking spaces than homes (to encourage public transport use over cars).
For many people in the UK, having an EV charging port on the side of your house isn't possible, because they don't have a house, or they don't have a parking space near their house.
FWIW, rental rates are very similar between the UK & the USA.
For central London, where I've lived for most of the last decade, yeah, there aren't a lot of parking spots per household, but that's also going to be true in NYC or any other built up older city. As for newer developments, I suspect they get more parking than older ones. My Victorian block has none.
As always, London is not the UK. Outside London it seems good in well off areas for EVs, and, of course, bad in the neglected rest of the UK.
Then the proposal doesn't affect them one way or the other.
But as public transport is electrified, it is perfect to be incorporated into the grid. Vehicles follow predicted schedules, they are used in a predictable way from the depots, so charging can be optimized, and knowing their schedule, the charge on the battery can be kept optimized as well.
That's fair, but also, a plurality of households have off-street parking, so the amount we need to solve for is already lower.
We DO need to solve for it though, because it's ridiculously cheap to drive an EV in the UK if you can have an L2 charger installed (2p per mile versus 20p per mile for even an efficient diesel/petrol car) and that should be made available to all.
Is the solution chargers in every lamp post? Or on every off-street parking, with billing tied back to your energy provider (allowing you to use smart tariffs like Intelligent Octopus Go)?
> EV charging port on the side of your house isn't possible, because they don't have a house, or they don't have a parking space near their house.
By a process of elimination, we determine that they must be using on-street parking other than near their house. Which is one of those sneaky subsidies that people don't even realise is a subsidy, a little area of publicly owned land that you can use without having to pay rent on.
Well, lots of terraced houses and flats do have a garage or off-street parking. Mine certainly did.
Depending on which research you believe, only 25% of homes don't have a dedicated space - https://www.field-dynamics.co.uk/25-drivers-no-off-street-pa... and https://www.racfoundation.org/wp-content/uploads/standing_st...
Lots of local authorities are installing on-street charging.
Basically, the vast majority of people in the UK do have off-street parking. Running a cable to a garage or from a street-lamp isn't overly expensive. Those who park on public streets also have lots of options for charging.
Very much yes, but I've seen PLENTY of the on-street parking spots around here (London), with the use of the adapted streetlamps.
Councils certainly would be easier to negotiate?
It seems to me that a bigger issue is lack of storage. With battery storage acting as buffers we would normalize/smooth out required transmission rates.
Some of the largest batteries in Europe have been built recently beside these two grid boundaries.
There's a nice diagram of the Scottish side in this article:
https://www.zenobe.com/news-and-events/blackhillock-battery-...
All I keep hearing is that storage is crazy expensive. Otherwise this would be a very obvious solution to everyone.
But storage has dropped in cost over the last 10 years, by a factor of around 5x.
And with cell chemistry that is more resilient to charge and discharge cycles (LFP) coming to fruition in the last 5 years (and at a lower cost than NMC) it makes sense that we're only now seeing large-scale investment - the yield curve has hit the sweet spot.
Opening a new wind or solar farm is much more photogenic than opening a new transmission line.
The B6 boundary: https://www.neso.energy/publications/electricity-ten-year-st...
The power lines follow the two main road links, the A1 and the A74/M6. I suppose that's not surprising from an access point of view. What is surprising is that the solution to NIMBY opposition is to route offshore and underwater, at considerable expense - and still getting opposition at the landing points. Fortunately one of the landing points is Torness, which already has a scenic nuclear reactor and associated transmission infrastructure.
I do understand the argument that the Borders is "unspoilt", but also .. hardly anybody lives there because it's an odd economic dead zone. Run another line of pylons within sight of the existing ones and call it a day.
I also wonder to what extent building more storage on either end would help. That's got to be brought into the equation. Don't say pumped storage because all the suitable geology for that and one of the biggest existing installations is also in Scotland, we need some in the Midlands.
And should probably be asking why new high usage AI datacenters are still happening in London.
The new T-Pylons[1] they've installed in the south-west aren't even as much of an eye-sore as the old fashioned ones either
[1] https://www.nationalgrid.com/stories/energy-explained/what-i...
> And should probably be asking why new high usage AI datacenters are still happening in London.
Companies won’t be incentivised to move to Scotland unless there is regional power pricing in place, and both Conservative and Labour governments would rather shoot their own kneecaps off than offer tax incentives for companies to move to Scotland.
That said, there are two AI datacentres opening in North-East England. That’s still a long way for the power to travel, but I feel part of the reason is to soak up surplus wind power even if it’s not actually cheaper.
I recall at the Torness tour that the guide, who's a local, remembered at public the planning meetings that they were told the building wouldn't really be visible from the A1!
At least they painted it grey to match the sky...
Many years ago I used to work with a very senior project manager from Scottish Nuclear who was responsible for Torness - he had some great stories about various accident scenarios they considered. One was that the refuelling machine would fail causing it to act like a gun shooting irradiated fuel rods into the sky - every time I go past Torness on the train I check for flying fuel rods....
I don't understand why borders have to be considered unspoilt if most of it is the shore soaked with untreated sewage, so with limited allure to the tourists (considering that taking a swim can land you in the hospital).
Not necessarily defending this branch of NIMBYism but contaminated beaches can be cleaned and made usable within a few years if there’s the will and funding to do so. Building energy infrastructure is much more permanent and will alter the landscape for several decades. IMO it’s still worth building the transmission but it’s not logically incoherent or anything to protest it (as it is to protest new infra in existing right-of-ways).
I guess the shores don't have right-wing lobbies.
Here is a really good write up of this topic from 2023: https://archy.deberker.com/the-uk-is-wasting-a-lot-of-wind-p...
Beat me to it. UK must construct additional pylons. Unfortunately this too is controversial:
https://www.politico.eu/article/uk-government-electricity-py...
it is insane to me that they rejected moving to zonal pricing. zonal pricing would give incentive to move power demand closer to production, create costs to nimby-ism, and give the benefits of lower costs to those who live closer. but it might make energy cost more down here in the south east and (in particular) London while benefiting the North and Scotland so we can't have that
Sweden used to have a single zone even though most generation is in the sparsely populated north and most consumption is in the slightly more populated south. Then they had to move to a zonal model because of pressure from Denmark who complained of the unfair competition for industry wanting to be in nearby Sweden and there was a move to a (IIRC it was actually UK-inspired) "nord pool" 'fake auction' energy market. It sucks for consumers :(
This is covered in the article. The uncertainties brought about by zonal pricing are not really worth it, given that the main obstacle is the need for network reinforcement. The UK is just not that big! Introducing a complicated market reform which will be obsoleted within a few decades doesn't make sense.
Footnote 8 covers this.
Basically it shifts risk to developers and we want developers to install lots of green energy over the next decade.
There's other machnaisms to incentivize demand closer to production, though whether they are being used optimally is debatable.
They abandoned it because it does not solve anything and it is political suicide. Most people would have ended being forced to pay more than they already pay without alternative, so would not have helped solve grid constraints, either.
Could you explain more? It appears economically self evident to me that it would improve the situation but I'm not in the industry and there's probably much I don't understand.
I would say that improving transmission seems like a much better solution but again I think zonal pricing can help there as it could then be more easily sold to the public as being able to import the cheaper (say) Scottish energy to your local zone, whereas at the moment there's no apparent direct cost associated with blocking pylon projects forever.
The majority of the population live in regions that would become more expensive. Additionally the majority of Scottish constituencies vote for their nationalist party, so the major national parties don't have any chance of getting seats from Scotland, where energy prices may fall slightly under such a scheme.
> The majority of the population live in regions that would become more expensive.
Yes, and if you are an individual, family, or even the vast majority of businesses you aren't going to move to Scotland over this, you are going to pay, no choice. So effectively this would have increased bills for most people, so bad politically, with only a marginal change to demand.
> Well, that brings us to the oft-ignored elephant in the room: transmission capacity.
This is a well-known issue in the UK, which impacts new solar and wind projects but also charging stations, and large-scale charging in general, and even new developments in areas of too much demand.
Yeah - I wondered about how "quiet" this driving force was. It's certainly a big issue, but the network operator (NESO) published a big paper after the government asked them to suggest how achievable net-0 by 2030 was, which really specifically called out the need for much larger transmission capacity.
I work in the energy sector and hear it mentioned a lot, but I don't really see it published in the media a lot.
In all honesty, most of the dialogue around energy is just unhelpful and partisan - a lot of it seems critical of the idea of a cleaner network, mainly on the assertion that it's making things more expensive. My understanding is that the opposite is true, but either way, I don't often see much discussion of anything past "clear energy bad".
> In all honesty, most of the dialogue around energy is just unhelpful and partisan
That's just the media. No interest in making things actually work, just in covering the fight, and quite often sponsored by fossil fuel backers or weird overseas media monopolists.
My understanding - from https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/articles/crkep1vx3mro - is that.
1. Gas-powered electricity generation sets the wholesale rate (for _all_ forms of generation) more often than not, and gas is expensive, especially after we had to find alternative sources in order to punish Russia for invading Ukraine.
2. Other than the wholesale rate, we need to _build_ all this clean energy, we need to attract investment, and it's our promise to pay for that CapEx over 15-20 years (the strike price) that we'll be paying for in our bills once gas is out of the picture, moreso than the actual cost of generation.
Also, Tories in 2023 failed to attract any investment, no capacity added: https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/business-66749344
Whereas Labour in 2025: https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/articles/cly8ynegwn4o
... we will find out if this worked, after the auction is finished and they announce the results (around November 2025 - February 2026)
How do other countries cope
Similar problem in Germany, also mostly on a north/south axis.
A mitigating factor is PV+storage coming online mostly in the south and balancing this out somewhat.
According to grid operators, total projected grid expansion costs of ~$250 billion until 2045, but the majority is required sooner rather than later (~$200 billion within the next decade).
See: https://www.netzentwicklungsplan.de/sites/default/files/2023...
Different geography.
The majority of the UK’s population is in the South; it has a lot of wind capacity in general but especially in the very North. So the problem is getting it from North to South, not helped by how mountainous Scotland is.
Not many countries where supply and demand are evenly distributed. Britain does have the significant difficulty of high population density in the Midlands and South England, but the main problem here sees to be in Scotland and North England, so this should be less of an issue.
Learned helplessness in the political class has more to do with it, I think.
Most countries have generation a long way from populated areas. They also typically have much better and more modern and being built out transmission architecture so it is less of a problem though.
> Most countries have generation a long way from populated areas.
Sweden and Norway are the only European examples I can think of. Power generation is often outside cities, yes, but closer. I'm 50 miles from a Nuclear power station, for example, which is not atypical. That's 1/10 the distance we're talking about.
Ideally it would be closer to the population, but I think the correct the way of looking at it is that there is a large, mostly untapped resource in the North which somehow has to be transported.
> This usually means turning wind farm output down in Scotland, because we can’t safely export it south, and replacing that energy in the South, typically with gas generation.
Thats super fucked!
