Housing projects are being delayed for years because of an “infrastructure crisis” caused by lack of capacity in the National Grid, council leaders have warned.
Building schemes for thousands of homes are on hold, while new projects face delays of up to four years in some parts of the UK because of a lengthening queue of developers waiting to be connected.
Those hoping to build new wind turbines, solar farms or micro-hydroelectric schemes face even longer waits after a deluge of new connection requests, many of them from speculative schemes.
Ministers have asked the National Infrastructure Commission (NIC) to investigate, but senior members of the District Councils’ Network (DCN), part of the Local Government Association, say the delays are slowing down the UK economy. Bridget Smith, the DCN’s vice-chair and leader of South Cambridgeshire district council, said: “Nationally, we’ve got an absolute crisis in all infrastructure.”
Plans by Michael Gove, the housing secretary, to build 150,000 homes in Cambridge to create a British Silicon Valley were already being hampered by lack of water, she said. “And where’s the power coming from? Something fundamental has to change.”
Susan Brown, the leader of Oxford city council, who is also a DCN vice-chair, said that 90 new homes in the Littlemore district had been meant to have heat pumps. “The National Grid basically said ‘we won’t have enough power to connect them’ so half the houses are going to have to have gas boilers instead – it’s so frustrating.”
Brown, who is also chair of the Future Oxfordshire Partnership, said plans to expand the town of Bicester with 7,000 new homes and a commercial zone had ground to a halt.
“All of that has been paused, awaiting grid reinforcement,” she said.
Under the current first-come, first-served system, developers can pay to jump up the queue, but the Bicester project has a further twist of red tape because there are two developers – one for the housing and another for the commercial buildings.
“Competition rules mean they’re not allowed to broker a solution together,” Brown said. “That’s particularly mad because it means they are dancing around, hoping the other one is going to take the full cost of providing grid reinforcement. There are so many daft things in our system.”
Brown said that leaders in other areas such as Milton Keynes, Swindon, Cambridge and Peterborough – with whom she works as part of the Fast Growth Cities group – were reporting similar problems. “It’s really beginning to constrain our ability to grow our local economy, which is significant for UK plc because the Oxford-Cambridge wider area is a significant net contributor to GDP, and not many bits of the country are.
“It’s possible that we’re a little bit ahead of the curve across the country. If they’re not already experiencing [these problems], people elsewhere will be experiencing them very soon.”
Although demand for electricity from builders is not being met, plans to expand the electricity supply are also causing problems, as the National Grid has been swamped with applications to build solar and wind farms – far more than the country would ever need.
Two weeks ago, the National Grid’s electricity systems operator (ESO), which manages power distribution, said that the connections queue had “grown at unprecedented pace”.
Great Britain’s power stations together generate 75 gigawatts of electricity, and the mainland is expected to need about twice as much by 2050 as people switch to electric vehicles and heat pumps.
But in January alone, developers submitted projects that would add 49GW, and the ESO said the queue could reach the equivalent of 800GW by the end of the year – more than four times as much as the country would ever need.
Being swamped with applications has made delays even longer, and Ofgem has had to approve a three-month delay until developers even find out when they can get connected. David Wildash, the ESO’s interim director of engineering, said in a blogpost that “we recognise that the outcome of this process is not what was envisaged at the outset. The outcome will be hugely disappointing to our customers.”
The delays come after Ofgem had already taken action last year to remove so-called “zombie” projects – those that had been approved but had stopped being developed – from the connections queue.
Nick Winser at the National Infrastructure Commission, who last year issued a report recommending that homeowners should be given generous compensation for agreeing to have power lines built close to their homes, is examining ways to solve the electricity capacity problem. He said: “We can’t let the distribution network become a barrier to the transition away from fossil fuels, which is why the commission is looking at what further investment or policy changes are needed to ensure the whole network is ready for 2050 and beyond.”
A government spokesperson said: “We’re driving forward the biggest reforms to our electricity grid since the 1950s – halving the time it takes to build networks, speeding up grid connections, supporting thousands of jobs and reducing bills in the long-term for families.
“Meanwhile we are on track to build one million homes this parliament and have laid out an ambitious long-term plan for housing that includes speeding up the planning system, cutting bureaucracy, and reducing delays to ensure we deliver the homes that communities want and need.”
