Our business is connections. We support the country's pursuit of Net Zero. We realise the transition to clean energy will take time as infrastructure and costs must be balanced. Fossil fuels will also play their role during the transition to ensure continuity of supply to UK plc.
DEC work closely with developers to realise their ambitions in the construction of energy plants, irrespective of either renewable or fossil source, to reinforce the network to add resilience.
Significant Investment
There has been significant investment in renewable projects over the past decade, with Britain breaking its record for ‘greening the grid’, with 25 hours coming from 100% clean electricity in December 2022.
This is one of the key findings from the Drax Electric Insights Q4 2022 report, which suggests that 2.9GW of extra clean power –sourced from biomass, hydro, wind, solar and nuclear – was generated in December.
Despite this surplus generation, fossil fuel generation was still required. Still, more importantly, this is continuously falling, helping the country move towards periods of totally net zero electricity generation by 2025, in line with National Grid ESO’s target.
But unfortunately, the pace of investment in our ageing transmission infrastructure has not kept pace, and now we’re facing a real challenge with connection dates stretching out well into the 2030s.
For example, up to 2.9TWh of wind power was estimated to be curtailed in 2021, costing Britain over half a billion £. Had sufficient storage existed on the network, this power could have been stored, usually during the night when power demand is low, and fed back to the grid at peak times. This would reduce the need for reliance on fossil fuels at peak times, further reducing the CO2 outputs – so it is a win regarding the cost to consumers and environmental impact.
Developed at Pace
As a result of the UK curtailment issue, the energy storage market has developed at pace over the past 3-5 years, with the UK way ahead of others in market development.
Significant investment has come in globally to meet the UK’s storage needs. However, we now have a log jam of ‘shovel-ready’ storage projects waiting on connection dates. In early January 2023, over 300GW of accepted connections were in the transmission entry capacity (TEC) register.
This results from transmission reinforcement and electricity market regulation around how the connection queue is managed (first come, first served) and how network analysis is undertaken (all import loads modelled on a peak day peak time scenario). In reality, this would not happen, as it doesn’t make commercial sense to charge batteries when power is at a premium – unless it’s in an area where the network needs frequency response to balance the network, in which case the asset would be supporting the network.
Also, some of the projects ahead in the queue may not be able to connect for some time, so we are blocking shovel-ready sites ready to go now.
National Grid is looking at fundamental changes to managing connection queues and how storage projects are modelled on the network. In late 2022, the National Grid ESO revealed a new initiative that offered those on the register whose projects were unlikely to reach delivery to leave the register at no cost or a reduced fee from 1 October to 30 November 2022.
Free up capacity
DEC hopes these initiatives will free up capacity on the network and allow the backlog of storage projects to move into development. Only time will tell.
The energy transition is a massive opportunity for the UK economy, home and abroad, to export our expertise.
We at DEC are looking forward to the challenge of delivering technical solutions to meet the country's climate targets.
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