Gridlock: Why It Can Take 11 Years To Connect Solar Farms To The UK Network

Wedoany.com Report-Nov 4, On the south bank of the Mersey, Britain’s first factory dedicated to manufacturing electric vehicles may one day be powered exclusively by wind and solar farms.

Stellantis, the European carmaker that owns the Ellesmere Port site, has begun work to fit four megawatts (MW) of solar power capacity across 500 sq metres (5,400 sq ft) of its rooftop space, enough to power the equivalent of 8,000 homes.

Those solar panels will help to cut the emissions from the factory, making its Vauxhall, Peugeot and Citroën vehicles even greener. The spare electricity it generates could help to make Britain’s power grid greener too – but not for another decade.

Stellantis is one of many manufacturers to have been told that it faces a lengthy delay to connect its onsite renewable energy to the local power grid, with a connection not likely until 2035.

Related: Vauxhall owner to make decision on future of UK plants ‘in next few weeks’

The delay risks raising the cost of meeting its target to halve its carbon emissions by 2030 and to be net zero globally by 2038. Although it will be able to install solar panels, it will not be able to sell its spare electricity to the power grid without a connection, cutting off a useful stream of revenue that would help to make the investment economic.

Diane Miller, the plant director at Stellantis Ellesmere Port, said: “This delay means that our substantial solar array won’t be able to provide surplus clean energy to the UK grid and we are faced with very substantial additional costs to install storage batteries and other mitigation measures, which could have been invested in implementing even more energy reduction measures.”

This bottleneck in the country’s energy grids risks pulling the plug on Rachel Reeves’s mission to power Britain’s economic renewal, according to some of the UK’s biggest companies.

The chancellor promised this week to “fix the foundations” of Britain’s economy to unlock billions of pounds in private investment – but decades-long delays to connect new housing, factories, warehouses and datacentres to the national power grid threatens to short-circuit this much-needed investment.

Concerns about the logjam were first raised by energy project developers after they were told by Britain’s power system operator that a surge in the number of companies hoping to build new renewable energy projects meant they would need to wait up to 15 years to connect to the grid in some parts of the country.

This grid queue – which keeps growing – has raised fears over the government’s goal to double onshore wind, triple solar power and quadruple offshore wind by 2030.

New energy users have also been asked to wait until well into the 2030s to connect to the power grid. Housing schemes for thousands of new homes face delays of up to four years in some parts of the UK, a situation council leaders have described as an “infrastructure crisis”.

Fintan Slye, the CEO of the UK’s National Energy System Operator (Neso), told the Observer last month that the queue system was developed at a time when only one or two major energy projects a year applied to connect to the grid.

Today, the queue has passed 700 gigawatts of new power projects – 10 times Britain’s current power capacity – and with more projects joining, the wait is heading towards 800GW, Slye said. Many of these are understood to be speculative, un-financed plans, or so-called zombie projects, which stand in the way of viable investments. In some cases, the developers do not even own the land on which they hope to build their renewable power projects. “Today it is first come, first served and that effectively is the problem,” Slye said.

Neso has begun calling on projects that will not be ready to connect to the grid in the next two years to step aside. But deeper reforms are needed to ease the logjam in the power grids.

“These code changes can take quite a long time, and they are quite complicated changes as well,” Slye said. “We are working with code working groups at the moment with a view that early next year our proposals will be with Ofgem.”