Crunch point for connections reforms
As the evidence window officially opens for the rejigging of the transmission connections queue, there are concerns about how quickly developers will respond and the quality of their entries. Utility Week hears from senior figures at the National Energy System Operator, networks and developers about what the next three weeks are likely to hold.
By Tom Grimwood, insights editor
Crunch point for connections reforms
As the evidence window officially opens for the rejigging of the transmission connections queue, there are concerns about how quickly developers will respond and the quality of their entries. Utility Week hears from senior figures at the National Energy System Operator, networks and developers about what the next three weeks are likely to hold.
By Tom Grimwood, insights editor
It’s been just over two years since what is now the National Energy System Operator (NESO) fired the starting gun on its programme to rapidly overhaul the connections process to cope with an unprecedent surge of applications.
The new process, which in energy industry timescales has been rushed through development at breakneck speed, requires projects to demonstrate both ‘readiness’ to connect and ‘strategic alignment’ with the government’s plans to pass the second of its two gates and receive a place in the queue.
With the full opening on Tuesday (8 July) of the evidence submission window for the initial queue re-ordering exercise, the programme has now reached a crunch point.
Frustrations have already emerged over teething issues with the NESO connections reforms portal, with complaints about the file size limit and missing data, among other problems. NESO has acknowledged that some customers are “experiencing technical issues” and said it is “working hard to resolve them.”
It was clear before the portal went live that NESO and networks were feeling the pressure to get this right. At Utility Week’s Reforming Grid Connections conference last week, they had a clear message to developers: don’t delay; get your entries in early.
“There’s undoubtedly a level of anxiety and a huge amount of pressure because it has to deliver,” said John Twomey, director of customer and network development at National Grid Electricity Transmission.
The evidence submission window for distribution-connected projects opened on 20 May – more than a month earlier than the window for transmission projects.
But speakers agreed that the early signs were not promising. “I’ve talked to a lot of DNOs over the course of the last couple of weeks and the volumes are lower than expected and the failure rate is higher – around 50%,” said Twomey. “That feels like a surprise.
“If I try to put a positive spin on it, we’re still early in the process and there’s time to work out what are the critical things going wrong.”
Matt Vickers, director of connections reform at NESO, said that’s exactly what is happening. He said NESO has “taken some lessons from that evidence gathering process” and worked with distribution networks operators (DNOs) to find ways of improving it.
The submission window for transmission projects will now be open for three weeks. Vickers said: “It will be hugely helpful if you can submit as early as possible in that process because otherwise it means everything’s back ended, and if everything’s back ended, that makes it harder for us to get through.”
“If you fail those initial checks, you get one chance to rectify that and submit again,” he added. To incentivise people to submit evidence early he stressed that for applications in the first two weeks of the window there will be two business days to re-submit, falling to one day thereafter.
Paul Glendinning, director of energy systems at Northern Powergrid, said that out of the 350 projects the DNO was dealing with at the time of speaking, only 200 had started the evidence submission process and just 35 were “fully checked and moving through.” He said around 35 were “putting the odd thing right” and 100 were “still working through the list”, perhaps “double checking and triple checking their entry.”
Alana Cairns, transmission customer liaison manager at SP Energy Networks, said the distribution arm had “seen only 15% of evidence so far.”
“What we’re doing is making sure that if you submit anything early enough… we’re going back with feedback within a day or two. And that’s the benefit of coming in early.”
Read the manual
The other clear message to developers was to get things right: read the available guidance and follow it to the letter.
Mark Adolphus, director of connections and sustainability at UK Power Networks, explained: “Evidence submission 101 is read the manual and that will assist in providing a good first application in a way that increases the opportunity to get a clean first pass, which is in everybody’s interest.
“We’ve got 420-ish schemes within scope of connections reform, and I wrote to all of them two weeks ago in words of few syllables, explaining the implications of a late submission or flawed submissions.”
Adolphus said many of the questions UKPN has received had answers that are “quite clearly set out in the guidance that has been published”.
He was backed up by Spencer Thompson, chief executive of the independent DNO Eclipse Power, who said: “Read the manual, because it is all in there. The process is pretty good, but some of this connection to the grid is complicated, so it does need translating on a regular basis, and sometimes you have to go through that several times.”
Vickers said developers need to pay attention to the “really simple stuff” like “making sure you fill in the mandatory fields; making sure you don’t have spelling mistakes or things that don’t match up.”
He said DNOs have “seen cases where people aren’t doing that,” for example, “trying to be extra precise” and putting in “extra decimal places where it is not required.”
Despite calling for developers to submit evidence early, Vickers said: “There’s a lot riding on all of these applications, so do take the time. Give yourself the time. Do the prep. Take the trouble to check what you what you’re doing, because there is a very limited opportunity to address that in such a tight window.”
Glendinning said one of the common areas of failure to emerge so far has been “red line boundaries not matching grid coordinates and red line boundaries not matching the minimum acreage requirements”.
He said the latter issue has been “catching out the people who haven’t really planned their project properly. This idea of finding a field and banging an application in for X megawatts and hoping for the best… that is catching the people who have not developed their project deep enough to understand what it is they’re trying to do.”
Along similar lines, Vickers said: “Let’s bear in mind that we’re not looking for zero here. Some projects will self-select and say 'actually it turns out I’m not ready so I’m not applying'. That’s fine.”
“That is part of the point of reform,” he added. “Some projects are not ready and will fail because they can’t show that they’re ready. Naught is not the target we’re aiming for.”
“Some projects will self-select and say 'actually it turns out I’m not ready so I’m not applying'. That’s fine.”
Matt Vickers, director of connections reform, NESO
Unanswered questions
However, many developers would no doubt argue that it’s not always as simply as just reading the manual correctly, as did Graham Pannell, an audience member and head of grid and regulation at BayWa r.e.
Pannell suggested there is genuine ambiguity in the guidance provided by NESO and the networks. He quoted a passage from J.R.R. Tolkein’s ‘The Hobbit’ in which Bilbo Baggins greets Gandalf with ‘good morning’ to which Gandalf responds: “What do you mean? Do you mean to wish me a good morning, or mean that it is a good morning whether I want it or not; or that you feel good this morning; or that it is a morning to be good on?”
“My point is that if you’ve got hundreds of millions of investments that will live or die based on a single submission, you are not going to press go until you know exactly what does the word ‘good’ mean,” Pannell explained.
He continued: “Personally, I’ve got at least a dozen questions live with the NESO that remain unanswered, and they are not: ‘How many decimal places?’ And while they remain unanswered, I can’t submit.”
Pannell said around a half of BayWa’s projects are “slam dunks” with another quarter where he could make submissions for while making informed guesses. But he insisted that in the case of the final quarter he can’t submit evidence because he lacks the information he requires.
Speaking earlier in the event, Vickers said NESO has established a “triage process” to prioritise enquiries that are of most immediate concern: “The focus right now is going to be on projects who are connecting in 2025, 26, 27. We need to put our focus on those.
“We don’t want this to put anything that’s in flight that needs answers right now at risk. We have a process, which needs to get slicker because it’s not been as slick as it needs to be… to keep things in flight.”
He said NESO has taken on more resources, but they remain limited and “there are thousands of projects out there.”
Vickers acknowledged it has become more difficult to get in direct contact with NESO staff: “Some of you might say: ‘It feels like it’s got a lot tighter. We used to be able to talk a contract manager. You’ve changed that.’” But he said this is a “deliberate” change to ensure “fairness” and “consistency”. Given the number of enquiries they are dealing with, Vickers said they have sought to centralise their responses to queries, answering them where possible through guidance, frequently asked questions, and webinars that are accessible to everyone. That said, Vickers admitted: “There have been teething troubles.”
Adolphus from UKPN also acknowledged frustrations expressed by customers over a lack of consistency both within and between DNOs: “Now I know I’ve got variability across UKPN. I’ve got 30-odd project managers, and I’d like to think they’re all robots giving exactly the same answer to exactly the same query. The reality is that isn’t what happens.”
He said: “What we continually hear from customers is their frustration that they’re dealing with six different organisations across the UK as well as the National Energy System Operator, but the answer that you get from UKPN is different from the answer that you get from SSEN.
“Sometimes we’re the good guys and they’re the bad guys, and sometimes, we’re the bad guys and they’re the good guys, and I can imagine that is frustrating for a customer that’s operating nationally.”
With only a few months until NESO starts issuing connections offers, it will soon become apparent whether they have been successful in ironing out any kinks.
“What we continually hear from customers is their frustration that they’re dealing with six different organisations across the UK as well as NESO.”
Mark Adolphus, director of connections and sustainability, UK Power Networks
