Is Britain's Grid Ready for Clean Power 2030? - Roadnight Taylor

I'm your host, Ed Porter. Welcome back to Transmission. You might think that the Greek connection queue in Great Britain is first cam first served. It isn't. Connections of form was meant to bring clarity instead projects that were declared protected and pushed to the front are still missing their connection dates as new issues have arisen with contract disputes. Now, storing projects, this really matters. It hits what gets built and if we can deliver close to clean power 2030. Catherine Cleary, a two-time guest, electrical engineer and grid connection consultant from Road Knight Taylor, has watched that misconception cost developers time and money and has the insight into what's actually determining who connects and when. If you want to find out more about how grid connections are affecting battery build out globally, sign up for free to access co-modo energies AI analyst. Let's jump in. Catherine, welcome back. It's been a year and a half since you were last on Transmission and we're excited to have you back again to talk about grid connections. Thanks very much for having me. It's a pleasure. Okay, let's dive straight into it. So what is one thing that people get wrong about the grid connection queue? I think that the, oh my, two things. The first one's really quick. I think people sometimes think you join a grid connection queue, you submit your application, get an offer and that's it. And so someone else magically takes care of it and your connection gets delivered. And I think that that illusion has been shattered over the last couple of years. People people get now that what can go wrong with a connection, the sort of delays that the work involved, naturally delivering it. People often say, I've got a grid connection. I've got a grid connection. What they mean is I've got an offer. You know, I've got an offer that says in 2033, you know, if a lot of things go right, we'll have some of these tests. Exactly. I provide the capital, then it can match. So I think kind of oversimplifying it is probably a pretty common, common error. I think the other thing, which has really cropped up in the last sort of year or two, is that I think people have sort of assumed that a grid connection queue is a list of projects in the order they connect. And it's not. And this is a really important point. You know, if if you apply for a nuclear power station that's going to be located in, you know, orcney, and I apply for a 20 megawatt battery project that's going to be located in some a set, you know, I can have applied two years after you. And I should be getting a connection date well in advance of you. You know, we're going to need to build an awful lot of infrastructure for that nuclear power station. So actually, you know, the connection queue is an order in which you applied, but it's not necessarily going to be the order you connect. And that used to be really obvious. And I think we've lost that over the process of the queue becoming so enlarged. We've got so many people in the queue that actually we've ended up with this, you know, quite bizarre scenario, where maybe the 20 megawatt battery has to wait for some of the same reinforcements as the nuclear power station. Do you think that's just a British thing? Do you think we're just like so? We're so amazing. We're so, we're so, we love the concept of queues so much that we just we will happily wait behind the nuclear power station until it's our turn. I think there is something in that and even the phrase first come first served, which we used to describe queues kind of suggests that, you know, whatever first, I'm getting connected first. Wait for me, you know, yeah. Yeah. And that's that is not technically true. You know, so I think I think hopefully we'll see as an output of connections reform that beginning to be reflected a bit more, you know, that actually how quickly projects can be accelerated or maybe just not delayed is going to depend on what type of project they are and where they are in the country. And there are some funky loot polls in this right. So if you have like a is it 4.9 megawatt project, you could add that to an existing site and you don't have to kind of go through the very formal part of the queue. So I guess we have a transmission queue, which is what we're really talking about when we're talking about the machines reform, the big stuff and the big delays. You know, so you know, if I'm a 20 megawatt battery project, I still at the moment have to wait for maybe upstream transmission reinforcements that 4.9 megawatt number that you mentioned is the kind of the golden limit. If I'm if I'm less than 5 megawatts, if I if I round to less than 5 megawatts, then I don't need to wait for those transmission reinforcements. So yeah, there is a threshold at the minimum threshold. You can kind of sneak in a little bit with those with those smaller projects. Okay, there is some caveats saying it's not a golden rule for everything. Okay. Okay. Great. And then last time you were on connections reform was still a design exercise. And you laid out what you thought a good outcome would look like. Now TMO 4 plus or connections reform is live and the gate to offers are going out or have gone out. How close is what's happening to the version you hope for? So I mean, I think it's probably I think my words last time possibly were about speed and pragmatism. You know, so like let's let's get something, you know, okay, and let's get it out quickly. It hasn't been fast. So I think that's quite an understatement. And connection reform is taking a long time. It's very complex. And, you know, and it's been really, really hard to be honest for parties who rely on grid connections, you know, as they're kind of like root to market. It's been a really, really rough couple of years with a lot of uncertainty and that uncertainty is still there. So I think, you know, there are definitely huge things that that grid reform has achieved, but it hasn't been a kind of panacea. And it's not over yet. You know, so we're still feeling it. So I suppose if you'd asked me that 18 months ago, I think I would have hoped you were out the other side by now. Yeah. So we're not being quite as pragmatic and quick as you'd hoped for, but there has been some progress, right? So people are getting offers like the we have moved on to some degree. Yeah, absolutely. So, so I guess what has been successful is the kind of TMO 4 plus idea, the sort of ideology was worked up into methodologies. So those methodologies have now been implemented and we've got a kind of process by which customers are now receiving their gate to offers. And the first ones of those sort of started coming out early this year. Nees are very happy because they've kind of got to the end of their first tranche of offers, which was projects with connection dates in 2026 and 2027. But I think we're, you know, we're still seeing some hiccups kind of even there. So those are golden tickets. Like if you get one of those offers, is it just like, okay, everything's going to go smooth sailing from here? Or are there like, are there problems? Yeah, so yeah, golden tickets, it's a good way of phrasing it, isn't it? Because the 2026 and 2027 connection dates, they gave you the highest level of protection. So you were protected, cause 2B project and the, also 2A and 2B. And the, I guess the reality of what's happened, people really expected, therefore their gate to offer to look exactly the same as their grid connection offer had before. They were saying, you look, I've built half the thing, you know, we're expecting to energise it next year. Don't change anything. You know, thanks very much. Just have the same thing back again. Exactly. That's not quite what we've seen. So some gate to offers that have come out are very simple and are basically copies of what was there before. We've also, they've seen a lot of gate to offers come out with technical errors in them. So that means that Nees have done a great job of issuing the offers. Okay. But they need to be able to address the kind of technical queries. What does a technical error mean? Well, so I mean, that could be anything from, you know, perhaps like just a typo that says, oh, sorry, did you want 1000 megawatts? We gave you 100, you know, they're quite, they're quite important things in these contracts. So, so they can be kind of purely typographical errors. Sometimes they're sort of errors in the technical assumptions that have been used. Someone's picked up the wrong data and that's literally given you the wrong technical solution. Surely this is an easy fix, right? Surely that's like, I'm sorry, I applied for 1000 megawatts. Like you've typed in 100, like let's just get this whip round and get it fixed. Yeah, I think and that's probably the nub of a lot of frustration is that in isolation, all of these things are pretty straightforward things to fix, you know, and from engineers perspective, you just look at it and go, yeah, that's fine. I know I know what's gone wrong here. I can reassure you offer. Yeah. Absolutely fine. What happens is I think when we've seen, you know, when you try and do these exercises on mass and your issuing several hundred offers, actually that kind of quality assurance process isn't there. And that means that you're suddenly, you know, you've issued 250 offers. Great, but 240 of them have got errors on. And now you're having to come back and kind of reprocess that. So that hasn't been great. And I think it's something that hopefully Nisei will kind of have a bit of learning from for the next ones around. Actually, it's really worth putting in place that good QA process. You don't want things to have to come back to you. You could go a little bit slower and it could be faster and delivery, even though, yeah, you kind of do you have the way for that QA process to run? Yeah. And I think, you know, obviously in particular with things like transmission offers, so transmission offers and distribution gate to offers are both kind of coming out at the moment. Distribution offers, you know, tend to be delivered by a sort of slightly tighter team. You know, that those teams within those DNOs have done that job for a long time. There's been slightly less kind of change over of staff. Whereas Nisei, you know, as a kind of like new organisation have grown hugely. We've got lots of lots of staff who don't have that kind of deep history and connection. So it's perhaps understandable that there's been a little bit more error prone kind of contracts that have come out. I think, yeah, resolving those issues quickly, we're still seeing customers, you know, you get three months to accept and offer transmission, but we're seeing those customers who raise these kind of technical queries, needing that three months to be extended because Nisei can't resolve the query within three months. And so big picture, right? We're pushing towards Clean Power 2030 at a very good goal, but perhaps something that there's a question mark around sort of how deliverable it is. But with the connections of form, are we starting to sort of quietly fall behind the pace we would need to hit in order to do Clean Power 2030? Yeah, well, I suppose, I mean, I guess it's no secret that there was quite a lot of publicity around this statistic that came out earlier this year, which was that 62% of those 26 and 27 projects at transmission couldn't be delivered by their protected date. So that, you know, the TO basically wrote to Offgem and said, we don't think we can do this, you know, either because we're slow, the developers slow, maybe we're both slow, because this connection to full process has taken so long. So, I mean, I think that should give you an indication. Those are the projects that are the most advanced and the majority of them are not on track to hit their dates. So, you know, I don't think that's kind of a secret, I think 2030 is a real challenge. And we've allocated these projects to 2030. We've said, you know, you are in the clean power 2030 plan, you're strategically aligned. But that doesn't guarantee you a date, a connection date pre 2030. So, no, I'm expecting we will see even more slippage over the next few years. Okay. And is it purely kind of the, it kind of, it feels easy, perhaps, to point at connections and say, this is the problem. But at the same time, is it also that actually to do the work of clean power 2030 and to get this many connections live just actually, even it was perfectly organised and perfectly technically planned, we would still really struggle to deliver it because it's a huge amount of work. Yeah, I think that's a really good point. Like, we shouldn't necessarily sort of like point connections or form and say, well, that's the problem. You know, actually delivering transmission infrastructure is hard, you know, and it always has been, you know, we've kind of, I guess, growing quite used to needing to kind of proactively manage those sorts of delays. And the delays happen on both sides, don't they? So, you might, it might be that it's a TO struggling to get consent for their overhead line, but it might equally be a generator, you know, who's got loads of opposition to some of their, you know, cabling works or something like that. So, I think we're kind of used to that process and what we're trying to do is, you know, I guess, accelerate those connections against a backdrop of maximum kind of process uncertainty due to connections reform, really high volumes of connections and probably realistically, you know, increased opposition from things like the planning space and so on. So, yeah, I think, I think it's a, a multitude, a bit of a perfect storm, really, a factor of things popping up. And maybe just with that perfect storm, let's add in an extra bit of storm because we've got a long duration NG storage that just came through. So, we have extra projects now that are going to be squeezed into the queue somewhere, a little bit of a queue jump, maybe because they need to come online by 2030 slash 2033 of their sort of pumped hydro, and that already feels tight. So, how does that, how does that queue jump work? I think that's, it's really interesting actually and really naively. I looked at the list of projects, which I mean, it's just a mind-it-to-position at the moment, isn't it, from off-gem's perspective. But that kind of minded to you. And my first thought was, well, where are they on a grid, you know, on a grid kind of deliverability readiness level? And actually, there's a complete spread, you know, some of those are gate one projects. They don't have a place in the queue. That really surprised me. I thought, wouldn't that have been one of the criteria, you know, actually that you need to show you could deliver grid by 2030. I think we should be really cautious about assuming that we can squeeze projects in or accelerate projects. I think, you know, let's be realistic. We want to try our best to deliver the projects that we've got in the new queue, you know, as close as possible to the dates that they were originally intending to meet, knowing that we're going to slip a bit. But I think the idea of sort of saying, oh, let's, you know, Chuck's a moron, and I'm sure we can deliver those in the next, you know, 2030s, four years away. That's not long. But somebody's going to get bumped, right? And they've been in that queue, they were ahead of those projects. And they have to get bumped if you're going to get these projects online by 2030. I mean, yeah, that's quite, that's an interesting, you know, you're assuming they definitely get bumped, get the projects online by 2030. I think I'm perhaps assuming it's fine. The sky that we're going to get these LDS projects online by 2030, you know, I think. There's going to be a loosening of the rules, you know, the finish line's going to get a bit of a. I think you'd need different criteria, you know, to say actually, you know, well, maybe we want LDS projects that are, you know, I guess, yeah, good economically, but also really deliverable. We can actually deliver those. Because they're a bit more progressed or something. I love that your first reaction on seeing the LDS outcome was like, what is the deliverability of things from a queue position? I'm very, I'm an unabashed good engineer. Yeah, I love that. Okay, let's then stick on with storage. So we have around, let's say we're trying to build 30 gigawatts of battery pipeline in theory. I think we think the number by 2050 is, is a high number, but let's just take a rough government number of 30 gigs. Do we have the kind of engineering capability to deliver it? And should we be looking at sort of shortcuts perhaps, things like Baye sharing or other workarounds that allow us to put battery storage onto other existing connections to sort of buy a bit more headroom to go a bit faster? Yeah, so I guess battery storage has had loads of attention because of the, I guess, over subscription compared to the clean power 2030 kind of predicted figures from the government. And I mean, that's sort of a bit of a problem of connections or forms own making. We came up with these protection clauses, which were to try and give investors an industry certainty. And then we sort of said as an industry, or we don't really like the outcome of this, we've protected too many battery projects. This must be a problem. I think my answer to that from a grid perspective is that that's only a problem if those extra battery projects are driving reinforcements. The customer is going to have to pay for, or that again, a delay other projects, or that we think maybe just aren't needed. So there's a really important look at what's the engineering implication of adding more storage. And I think it's quite an interesting question because some of that storage is co-located, for example, so it doesn't need another bay. It's not going to have a kind of adverse system impact necessarily. Some of that battery storage is maybe embedded in the distribution network. So I think the big broad numbers have been bandied around a lot. We've got 60 gigawatts, we only need 30, you know, we've got another 20 that might be protected in future windows. But actually, I think to work out whether that's a problem, you have to drill down into the, of those, are any of them really triggering extra system reinforcement? This is just a framing problem, right? So if you said you need to get, so the way that people currently think about it is we need 30 gigawatts. So we need to get 30 gigawatts of grid connection bays or slots that are available. So we need to add in these projects. I think if you reframed it and said, Catherine, I'm going to try and I'm going to ask you, can you sneak 30 gigawatts of batteries onto the system without adding any new connections? Would you be able to do it? I think you might, you might have a good going. Yeah, I think, you know, well, I think definitely, you know, there's a role for hybrid projects there, you know, so, so adding battery storage behind the meter of another connection. So you're not actually adding any more local connection assets, it doesn't need another bay. And Nisa made some quite big strides in terms of their connection modeling assumptions to sort of say, well, actually, we don't think that batteries most of the time will sort of add to system peak loads. So you don't expect batteries to kind of be triggering a big new 400 kV line, for example. So yeah, I think there is a big opportunity there, specifically with hybrid projects, bay sharing. So that would be a solution that would say, you're not a hybrid project, you know, I own the battery, you own the solar farm, you know, but we're five miles apart, could be share a bay. And I think that's that's something which at the moment, it's really sticky. I think it's kind of getting lip service. It's sort of been put in the, this is slightly hard to do pile. But it is important that we do it. I think, you know, realistically, so a 400 kV bay, so that's sort of, you know, your switch gear bay within a substation is rated, you know, for, you know, we could connect up to 1800 megawatts to one bay, you know, and we do, when we have large offshore wind farms, for example. So the idea that you're going to use one bay for one 200 megawatt battery project is really inefficient from an engineering perspective. So we have a bit of a kind of, I think we have a bit of a societal duty to say, that's not a very good engineering outcome. We should try and, you know, make these things share bays. And even if that needs a bit of the reason it's complicated is it does need some changes to the commercial ownership boundaries. So, you know, I'm not saying, gosh, why hasn't anyone done this already. I can definitely respect the challenges, but it's an important one. Okay. So low, I think the thing if you're hearing this, it's kind of low utilization grids are generally quite expensive. If you can bump up utilization, then you should get lower costs to consumers and things like bay sharing get quite exciting. But we haven't finished with grid geekery yet because we're going to go to CMP 470, which is the oversubscribed technology commitment fee, which is just the snappy title. One in a long list of fees. Yes, one in a long list of fees. So what is that doing? And what does it mean for developers? So this was a proposal which didn't actually come from research. That should be recognized. This was a anyone who's a cusp party. So any generator or demand is connected to the network can raise a cusp modification. And this came from a battery storage developer. And it was saying, look, we think that, you know, Nisa have said they've got a problem. They've got, you know, over six gigawatts, protective projects in the gate to Q. They only think they need 30. This is, I guess, a financial mechanism, a market mechanism for saying if we make those battery projects or they've said technologies which are oversubscribed compared to their kind of clean power 2030 targets. If we make them pay an additional premium for staying in the queue, then that would help thin the numbers out. You're only going to pay if you've got a real project. And so, you know, anyone with sort of speculative projects or so on, or projects that are no longer looking so good for development might pull out of the queue. And that helps kind of thin it down. I think I'm a bit skeptical as to whether that's just a sort of easy numbers answer to a problem which I'd like us to go back and look at that engineering impact. Do we need to thin it down? If we can actually, if it turns out that 60 gigawatts, 50 gigawatts of it, what we can get on with base sharing through hybrids, which doesn't have a network adverse network impact, then why why have another financial metric? And my worry is the financial metric kind of grabs the headlines and everyone says, "All that'll do the job. Let's not do the hard engineering bit." Yeah, and also like you can see the world where we go, the system suggests it needs 30 gigawatts. We slim down the queue from 90 to 30 and we go, "Great job done." And then we reassess the position and say, "Oh, actually, we need to 50 gigawatts." Well, I think that's a really good point, isn't it? Christ, where's the 20 gigawatts spare? We've lost it. How, how, you know, I'm sure the or the Relays of Floss if I can't remember who you but at least. you know that forecast is wrong, right? It's just a forecast, you know. So the idea that we're saying, oh, it's definitely gonna be 30 gigahertz. You know, that seems very presumptuous to me to not, the error bars on that must be quite large. And I think, you know, we do need the queue to reflect that we can't just have a queue of, I was listening to your Kate and Neil episode, by the way, and you say, and I think the term she used was sort of a queue of kind of ripe project, you know, like the idea that the project's in the queue are all kind of like perfectly ready to be connected. I think that'll be a disaster, because I think what you'd find is them going, I'm ready to be connected, you know, here we go, okay, yeah, if you could just wait for seven years. And you know, so that's not really how it works. You know, the queue has to gradually move as the connections become available and we build the infrastructure. But over those kinds of time periods, we see really significant changes in the market conditions. People will fall in and out of the queue. So I think that idea that we've got a number, and we need to come up with as many mechanisms as possible to get exactly that 30 gigahertz. It seems a bit flawed. - So you're, I'm trying to read the room. You're a fan of it as a concept, or you're a fan of it doing some of this work, but you think it might be an overly blunt mechanism and actually if given the free choice, you'd rather it being done from engineering festivals than. - I think we should do the engineering first. - Okay. - So I'm not really a fan of that. - Not really fast. - Absolutely. I said, like I. (laughing) But yeah, I think that we're probably prioritising the wrong solution there. - Okay, make sense. And you just not cuss into the conversation, which is the connection and use of systems code. - It is, sorry. - What is that? What is that mythical thing? (laughing) - So that's the set of commercial rules, effectively, which govern how generators, demand users, network operators, all interact commercially on the transmission system. So it governs charges, connections, yeah, processes. - So if you hear cuss now, now you know. - You already dropped CMP for six. I thought that was the thing. - No. (laughing) - Okay. Right, and those are the, I think the code modification proposals. - They are code modification proposals. - Yes, okay, very good. Let's move on. We're gonna go on to co-location. So we see co-location a lot in Australia, Germany, Spain, as a way of getting more out of the same connection. And we've touched on this a little bit in Bay sharing. But it feels like we're not necessarily pushing hard on this. Where do you stand on those co-located projects? - Yeah, so co-location has been a bit of a hot topic recently because there was the original TMO4+ proposals. I think, you know, it's fair to say with the benefit of hindsight, had some sort of unintended consequences and potential shortcomings in particular for hybrid projects. So if you're a hybrid project, so you've got two different technologies. Those two technologies were assessed completely independently as to whether or not they were ready and whether or not they were needed. So you could have a solar farm and a battery that were co-located and they were both ready. You had land rights for both of them. But when they went through the kind of churning the handle deciding are they strategically aligned with the Clean Power 2030 plan, maybe it came out that your solar was, but your battery wasn't. And what that means is that you get a gate to offer for your solar only. Your battery falls away to gate one. And that kind of breaks the hybrid model. Lots of people would have been like, well, but the business case for this project relies on there being a solar and a battery. So to now I'm a bit stuck, maybe I'm not even going to develop the solar, because I haven't gotten offered for the battery. And we see that in regions like Spain at the moment where people are looking at solar projects and saying, well, unless I've already committed to this, I'm putting the brakes on this. I don't want it. And this has got storage on it. I'm not going for it. And I mean, it sort of, it sounds a little bit bad. But then you begin to see the actual sort of project specifics. I mean, I think I had one that colleague mentioned last week, which was a very large scale solar farm and battery. They were going to be DC coupled. So that's where they share the inverters. So it's even more than just your business case relies on the other technology. Your fundamental technical connection arrangement relies on there being two technologies. I think they'd received planning consent for the battery. They'd gone through their kind of DCO process, you know, so quite an involved, significant process. I think they received consent for it a week after the window closed for connections reform. And so needed to say what ended up happening was they got a gate to offer for the solar and they didn't get a gate to offer for the battery. And you think, actually, is that kind of the right outcome? You know, we've got something which is not that battery wouldn't have had a kind of adverse technical impact, because it's sharing the same inverter technology. It doesn't have any kind of additional system impact. So I think there's a lot of legitimate frustration that we've shot ourselves in the foot here. And we've got loads of good hybrid projects that are either half in the Q and half out, where they've just gone, well, I can't deliver under these kind of conditions. But there are probably lots of photos that could have been taken of, like, sad concrete plints on solar sites that are ready for a battery at some point in the future. At some point in the future, yeah, exactly. I feel like I've heard that expression in about a thousand times. Yeah. So, so Nesau have kind of heard that criticism, I think. And they have come out with some tweaks to the methodologies. OK. So I guess that's worth saying, you know, TMA-4 plus was a starting point. But connections reform is evolving, you know, and this kind of process, this enduring connection process is still evolving. And they've sort of said, well, we think we probably need to do something about hybrid. You know, we recognize maybe we didn't get it right the first time around. So what they've proposed is that they will, in future windows-- so the next time there is a gate to window, which we were still waiting on that one-- they will prioritize a project which is hybrid will be prioritized compared to a standalone project within its own kind of category. So you've got 10 wind farms. They've all got planning consent. But one of them's got a battery on it. That wind farm plus battery will go to the front of those 10 projects. Hold on, isn't this pointless? They're going to the front of the queue. They're going to the front of the back of the queue, which is already too long anyway. Like this-- Yes, I should-- Your words, not mine. Yeah, I should be quite frustrated with that, I think. I think for a lot of people, that's sort of too little too late. Yes. The other thing that Nisa have done is they've introduced what they're calling a parent child concept. So that's where you-- if you've got two technologies, you can tell me so when you're applying. OK. This technology is the parent technology. And what that means is it could stand alone. So if you're only going to give me an offer for the solar farm and the solar farm is the parent technology, then I'm still interested to give me that offer. But the battery technology is a child, for example. And therefore, if I'm only going to get an offer for the battery technology, don't bother giving me the offer. It doesn't work commercially. So that's quite a good thing. And they've been quite flexible. They said, look, look, this is so that you can tell us as much about your kind of commercial viability as you want to. You could have two parents. You could say they could both stand alone. And then let us make the decision. But I think that kind of concept-- it's a good one. It's come from developers in the kind of feedback to consultations. But it probably needs a bit more fleshing through. And probably a lot of explanation to people. Still feels a bit too late. It just feels like we have this roadmap almost yes to 2030. But let's say we're not hitting 2030. And this ends up being the roadmap to 2035 or 2040, or quite a long way into the transition. We-- yeah, the back of the queue was a long way away. And so I think I'd worry about that. Just to go back on a few things, we had AC and DC coupling. So we have alternating and direct current. Most co-located sites are alternating AC. So that means that the solar has its own inverter. The battery has its own inverter. And then you connect to inverters. That's pretty standard in lots of places. DC direct current. So that's essentially the solar and the battery connect before the inverting. You have one inverter for the two technologies. That's much more common in places like Australia, do a lot of DC coupling. But just so for people sort of thinking about that and thinking, OK, how do these work? And then you also mentioned DCO. That's obviously the direct consent that comes through for people to get planning to move their project forward quite quickly. So yeah, just a clever bit of-- Stop, sorry. A bit of a-- That cranium, man. A bit of jargon. OK. And let's move on from co-location into the demand side. Because if generation was tough and we found a big queue, demand must be easy. So we are now getting lots of large new loads, like data sensors, trying to get connected. Is this a harder problem than connecting generation? It feels like actually what we need is demand. So shouldn't it be quite straightforward to get them on? Yeah, it's interesting, isn't it? I think, I guess, from a system operation perspective, like some more demand, sometimes might be useful. Some more controllable demand would be incredibly useful. But again, stepping back to that kind of engineering hat on, ironically, connections is really quite separate from system operation. In the connections world, we think, how do we plug you in? We don't really care what you do once you're plugged in. So demand, when it comes to plugging in demand, it's simple things. Like actually, the security of supply, so how resilient does your connection need to be for a data center is different to a wind farm. Like if you're Microsoft and you're building a massive data center, you really don't want it to go off. So that probably means you're going to have at least two points of connection, so two bays. You might want that resilience to be spread between different substations. So we build more infrastructure per megawatt for demand than we do for generation. So that's not-- that sort of needs to not be underestimated that when we say we've got 170 gigawatts of demand in the queue. If we were to actually try and connect all of that, we'd be building a lot. So one gig of demand is harder than one gig of generation? It requires more assets, or more local assets, to be built from the grid side. So that's one thing. I think the other thing is that, again, perhaps some of the quite relatively simplistic ways we assess the network when we look at someone wanting to connect. So again, you take that one gig of watts of demand, and maybe it's located in West London, someone wants to put a data center in that kind of slaw hub. Then what you're actually looking at is, if I add that one gig of demand to the system, there are going to be times when effectively what that does is use more onshore wind that's happening in Scotland, which is good from a system perspective. [BLANK_AUDIO] I still need to get it from Scotland to Slau. So that demand, especially demand in the South of England, can still trigger really quite significant upgrades. So ironically, you'd probably have your one gig of wind in Scotland and your one gig of demand in Slau, and they'd probably both have the same what we call enabling works, so that the kind of transmission works needed to facilitate those power plays on the system. - So if somebody, let's say you've got two data sensors, both one gig of what, one applies in Slau, and next one applies in Aberdeen the next day, but it's behind it from a sort of a cue perspective, does the system operator have the ability to say, oh hold on, actually would be pretty useful to have a bit of demand in Scotland, and having one right next to London is gonna be, it's gonna trigger all of these reinforcements across all these boundaries. Does it have the ability to kind of just slightly re-jig things in order to make the system run slightly more smoothly, or is it sort of bounded by the rules? - So we don't, it's a really interesting question. At the moment, the rules don't say, okay, well we're gonna cue jump this one, which might be helpful to the network. There are ways you could do that, you know, project designation, things like that, are kind of routes where you could begin to start look at strategic demand and perhaps ways of accelerating that. But at the moment, we don't generally do that. But instead, I guess it comes back to that fundamental, what is the cue? The cue is just the order that you applied and we studied you in, but we can still take that data center in Scotland, and it might get an earlier connection date, for example, than the data center in Slau. We haven't re-jigged their cue positions, just looked at what engineering works can do. - Works, how's it going to do? - Yeah, okay, that makes sense. - I think the one thing is, I would say, is that, you know, the kind of, the grid cue for demand is really significant, and I mean, the grid cue for demand, even in Scotland, is really significant, so a lot of people have had this idea, and I think what would probably be great is if you put a data center in Scotland that didn't mind not operating when it wasn't windy. - That would be fantastic, that's a real sort of-- - But I haven't found that kind of Netflix, like Punter Crowd yet. - Oh yeah. - Yeah, I mean, it's, we had a really interesting episode on thermal storage recently around the potential to sort of heat up concrete blocks to essentially be a demand load and reduce our reliance on gas during times of the year, and then at times when the electricity grid is scarce, or it's really tight, you say, well, look, we're just gonna stop running on electricity, we still have some of our gas system here, run the gas through the same energies coming into the system, but we are reducing our demand in peak winter, but we're increasing our demand in the middle of summer, let's say when we have industrial loads, and I really like that concept, but I'm not sure that that would get bumped in the queue, just because of how we think about these projects. - Yeah, I mean, but it is coming. I think that, so there is some really good noises that are happening now where we're beginning to see, I guess, really, because of how much pressure there is on transmission owners in particular, to give people earlier dates, and so we're seeing more sophisticated assumptions around how loads and how demands operate on the network. So whenever a customer applies the transmission owner, if there are transmission customer, would do a network study to work out what their impact is, how many things need to be reinforced, and they do that using, sort of, we call them construction planning assumptions, CPAs, and actually there's a lot of focus now on what those CPAs are, how time-based they are, do they just pick a couple of, we used to do this basically, you would say, what does a windy day on the system look like, what does a not windy day on the system look like, and what does a summer, Sunday look like? Just pick those three. Whereas now, actually, if we've got more flexible demand, more sophisticated demand, we can do much more sophisticated studies. - Okay, now as two engineers, we should never venture into the world of politics, but here we go. In the demand queue, you have obviously data centers that want to get connected, but you also have these technologies that are of very much public need, and I'm not to say the data centers aren't public need. Actually, I'm already tripping up over this question, but we have a need for electrifying heat. We have a need for electrifying transport, and we have the need to electrify industry as well. And so you've got these kind of, perhaps let's say we've got four things that are all trying to get electrified all at the same time. Should we be thinking about politics and policy in this question, or is it just actually, we should just be pure grid engineers, and it should just be done that way? - Yeah, well, I suppose I am a pure grid engineer, I suppose, so I probably steer away from the politics, but it is not, perhaps that's harder to do now. We've got NISO, our whole system, energy system operator. So they're already trying to more centrally plan, and they've got things like their strategic spatial energy plan, the regional energy plans. - The regional energy spatial plans? - Let's go about their resps, I remember the acronym. So I guess there is far more central planning, and that covers both demand and generation. So absolutely things like electrification of heat, even lots and lots of house building, for example, transport as well. I think my, it feels like a big system change to go from, you know what, you guys, if you're building a hospital or some houses or a new train network, you come and tell us when you want a grid connection and we'll slot you in the queue, kind of type thing. It feels like quite a big change to go from that to we think this rail improvement is more important than that hospital, and all of them are more important than this Microsoft data center. That feels like a very, very sort of, - The headline's gonna be bad, isn't it? - I think it might be. - It's gonna be, you know, data center gets three bays for 99.909% availability, yet hospital sits 100th in queue. - Yeah, and I think, I'd really question the need to do that. So what I would say is a difference is that in the demand space, particularly when it does come to things like, you know, perhaps more sort of like societal needs, like hospitals and so on, you don't tend to get the same amount of kind of gamification or speculative development. You know, I've never known an NHS trust think, you know, what will stick in 10 grid applications and we'll vlog them off to someone if you know, if we decide not to develop. You know, that does, as far as I'm aware, that doesn't happen. And so I think, you know, the response that we need is different as well. I think we can hopefully let those demand projects sort of come along when they are ready rather than requiring a top-down system approach. The data centers, I think, are where we've seen much more of that sort of speculative behaviour. And therefore, there are some proposals to look specifically at data centers and perhaps ways to raise the barf entry into the queue so that we don't end up with, you know, them sort of pushing out our hospital that really needs it. - Okay, so let's finish off with two more practical questions. So getting these projects online, it always used to be the case that the transmission transformer was the hardest thing to get your hands on and was going to be, people were talking about sort of the longest pole in the tent. So the thing that's kind of, there's going to take the longest to do. Is that still the case? Do you still see that problem coming through? - I mean, lead times for key, like, very large scale plant equipment are still very long. And that's a worldwide constraint, right? So it's not just a UK market that we're struggling with. I'm not convinced that really those are necessarily relaxed, but I think potentially they have stopped being the critical path, that longest pole in the tent, because we've started to see some other real challenges. I think the two I would highlight are, I mean, one of them as sad as it is is literally the contractual side, just getting offers signed, you know, we're seeing those kind of projects in the really near term have got 2026 or 2027 connection dates. They've got queries on their offers, you know, those typos we talked about, maybe more fundamental issues. And they're really not being able to get over that final line, maybe they're most of the way through construction, but they're not actually going to be allowed to operate, they're not going to be able to go through the compliance process, for example, unless they've got a grid agreement, which has their tech, right? You know, they're transmission capacity. So, you know, it sounds small, but it's happening to real projects. So we're seeing, you know, I've got a couple of 2026 projects on my desk at the moment who don't have a gate to offer yet. You know, they're pretty close to being energized, but they still don't have it. And it's really bumpy, right? Because if you miss your window, the team that are doing that work, they might be on other projects for the next two months. And so you might miss it by a day, but you might end up two months further back. Yeah, I mean, this stuff was already quite hard. You know, I like it definitely. I think, you know, anyone who's been like involved in sort of commissioning the grid compliance of large-scale transmission project, see, and be they batteries or other technologies, you know, will be aware of how stressful that is, you know, and you really are kind of day to day trying to manage that. So if you add in contractual uncertainty, which we have done over the last year, suddenly, you could have done the most amazing job on procurement, and you're still actually going to be delayed by some pretty frustrating paperwork. So that's one thing. I think the other thing which has changed is, you know, we are seeing more and more delays on transmission owners themselves, delivering reinforcement works. And sometimes, unfortunately, that news might be communicated quite late to a customer. So people. - That's sort of upstream of the project. - Yeah, so the project's done a good job. You know, they've got their transformer in place, for example. But perhaps the transmission owner says, "Oh, actually, there was a reinforcement work that maybe we thought we'd done a couple of years ago and it turns out we didn't actually do it, so we need to get back and do that now." And so those are kind of real examples of projects, sort of the amount to be connecting now and the delayed. - Incredibly frustrating, I imagine, for those projects. And one natural response to that might be, well, look, rather than relying on the current transmission owner, I'd rather get an independent transmission owner to do this. So I'd like to have my own sort of responsibility for this. Is are we making headway on allowing sort of independent transmission? - Yeah, actually. And so there is quite a lot of headway on this. And I think it's sprung from two different places. Yes, probably a little bit of frustration, perhaps, with some of the current processes and that lack of control. Also, definitely from a new type of customer, say these data centers, for example, they're much more constrained in at the moment what they can deliver themselves. 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