Ben Wilson: We published a paper last year called Delivering for 2035, which set out, this was last spring, which set out five areas where we think there needs to be focus to allow all of us to kind of plan for the future and then deliver. And we’re really pleased that most of the things that we outlined are now government policy and we need to push ahead on that.
The first one was planning, and there’s two aspects to that. There’s industry planning and we’re now going to be moving as an industry to a much more strategic approach to planning the utility industry. The government will publish together with the new system operator separating out of National Grid hopefully by the end of this year, a strategic spatial energy plan, which will identify what sources of supply, what sources of demand need to go where, and then what networks and batteries and other things we need to build to support all of that. And then the other side of planning is planning permission, right? And permitting. And as everybody knows, that is difficult. It can take us more than 10 years to build a new transmission line. Seven years of that is getting the planning and the permits and then three years to build. And so that is not fit for purpose anymore.
Second area is the ability to invest ahead of need. The system is full. There are a queue of people wanting to connect and we need to build, build, build and we’re a small part of the bill. So actually the risk of us not building now is much greater than the risk of us building. The energy regulator Ofgem has been really supportive, and we have a new regulatory regime called ASTI, Accelerating Strategic Transmission Investment, which is allowing us to raise our heads collectively, get early construction and pre-construction funding approved by the regulator, enter into strategic partnerships and start to build.
Third area is connections. There’s been a lot of reform of that which has been announced as new milestoning. So if projects fail milestones, they exit the queue. But that’s going to take time to work through. You know, we do need to build things. And if a community has to host energy infrastructure, they should get a fair deal for that.
And then the last area, but certainly not least is supply chain. You know, the supply chain capacity to deliver the energy transition does not exist globally. What that means is the supply chain needs to create new capacity, new factories, new facilities, new workforces. In order to do that, they need some long term certainty. We need to be able to go out and give five to 10 years, 15 years of forward visibility. That’s the big prize for us.
