Ofgem has approved £642.1 million for a major upgrade to the electricity grid between Suffolk and Essex, while knocking more than £60 million off the amount National Grid originally wanted to spend.
The Bramford to Twinstead project is part of the wider Great Grid Upgrade and will add 18km of new overhead line, 11km of underground cable, a new substation at Twinstead Green and upgrades to the existing Bramford substation.
East Anglia is seeing growing amounts of renewable generation coming onto the system, but the grid does not always have enough capacity to move that electricity to where it is needed. When that happens, generators can be paid to switch off while other power stations are paid to turn up elsewhere.
Those constraint costs eventually find their way onto consumer bills, so strengthening the network should help get more homegrown electricity through the system and reduce some of the cost of managing congestion.
Ofgem has fast-tracked the scheme through its Accelerated Strategic Transmission Investment framework, which covers 26 strategically important transmission projects needed as Britain shifts towards a much more renewable electricity system.
But the regulator has also made clear that faster approval does not mean handing network companies a blank cheque.
National Grid Electricity Transmission had asked for £702.7 million for the project, but Ofgem cut £60.6 million from that figure after deciding the full amount had not been sufficiently justified.
Beatrice Filkin, Ofgem’s Director of Major Projects, said: “Britain needs a bigger, stronger electricity grid to connect more homegrown clean power, strengthen energy security and reduce the bottlenecks that can add costs to the system. The cost of building this infrastructure now will be less than the longer-term cost of doing nothing.
“But every penny invested must deliver value for consumers. We’ve assessed NGET’s proposed project budget and cut £60.6 million from it, making sure this vital upgrade can go ahead whilst also protecting consumers from any unnecessary costs.”
The decision comes as Britain faces one of the biggest electricity network build-outs for generations, with new offshore wind, solar, storage and other generation needing to connect to a transmission system largely designed around older power stations.
Getting that infrastructure built quickly is now central to the clean power programme – but the cost of doing it is increasingly under scrutiny because the investment will ultimately be recovered through consumer bills.
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