Fixing the UK’s grid connection backlog with Charles Deacon (Eclipse Power Solutions)

In the UK, the government talks about Clean Power twenty thirty. Its action plan to ensure that ninety five percent of all electricity generated comes from clean sources by, you guessed it, the year twenty thirty.

But if you want to connect a new solar farm to the grid, if you're already not in the queue, no chance.

That's the contradiction running through Britain's energy transition. The technology exists, The money is waiting. The ambition is there. What's missing is the permission to plug it all in.

Across the country, hundreds of projects, wind farms, batteries, data centers are stuck in the queue waiting for a connection. Developers are waiting on timelines. Increasingly, demand can't electrify, and the grid queue is so oversupplied that new applications have stopped altogether. This is the bottleneck behind the transition, The quiet bureaucratic crisis that decides whether Britain's clean energy revolution can actually happen because the ambition isn't the problem anymore.

Capacity is. The system's full, the rules are complicated, and the wires that move power across the country are based upon investments from decades ago. Our guest today, Charles, sees the bottleneck up close. He is the managing director at Eclipse Power Solutions.

Eclipse helps developers and large consumers navigate the queue and secure connections.

When the main network operators can't deliver, Eclipse builds alternative private networks through its sister organization, Eclipse Power Networks. Charles spends his days decoding ever changing connection rules, unblocking projects, and explaining why plugging something in has become one of the hardest parts of building clean energy. We talk about what's really slowing Britain down. Why connection reform is harder than it sounds, how new private networks are emerging as a workaround, and what it will take for Clean Power twenty thirty to move from a slogan to something we can actually switch on, even if that means clean reality in the twenty thirties. So welcome back to transmission. Today, the bottleneck that defines Britain's clean energy transition and what it might take to plug the future in.

Hello, Charles, and welcome to transmission. Hi, Ed.

It's great to be here. Nice to be this side of the screen for a change.

Very good. Very good. And as ever, let's get started. Could you introduce yourself and also could you introduce Eclipse Power?

Certainly. So my name's Charles. I am managing director of Eclipse Power Solutions, which is one of the business units that we have within Eclipse Power Group. Most people know Eclipse as an IDNO.

So we hold a distribution license to, own, adopt, and operate, distribution systems in England and Wales up to one three two k v and, thirty three in Scotland. That's been our core business, a large focus on what we call large power. So batteries, renewable generation data sensors, given that we don't have a gas or water license like a lot of other IDNOs. So it's sort of been our our position in the market if you A couple of years ago, we set up Eclipse Power Solutions, which is grid consultancy, helping people get connected to the grid and hopefully making things a bit smoother and easier.

And then finally, last January, I believe it was, we launched Eclipse Power Optimize, which is a company that can own, build, invest, and operate, private networks for behind the meter solutions. And that was a sort of response to our transmission license application back in twenty twenty two, which unfortunately didn't progress, but that is also something we're still actively considering.

Okay. Very good. And we will definitely come on to private wires because they are a hot topic in the space. Yeah.

But I'd actually I'd just like to ask another question on IDNOs. So, like, what exactly is that for the person on the street? You know, do they do they know what an IDNOs? Is?

Probably not. But the majority of connections now are going to IDNO. So they're becoming more well known.

So you think of your your typical regional DNO, you know, UK power networks, NGED.

Just DNO, very quickly. What is a DNO?

Distribution network operator. So they operate the local, electricity infrastructure that feeds your, you know, homes and businesses separate from the the sort of the motorway network, if you like, which is a national transmission system. This is a sort a roads and b roads. They traditionally were monopoly businesses, but sometime in the early two thousands, it was opened up to competition. So iDNOs hold exactly the same license from Ofgems at DNO, but they're not restricted to a geographic area, whereas, you know, regional DNOs are.

IDNOs can adopt what's called contestable works, which are essentially the new assets that you have to build between your site to your other field that you wanna build a housing estate or a solar farm on. The existing grid might be five kilometers away. You've got to build a new bit of cable between. You can either give that to the DNO or you can give it to an IDNO.

IDNO's, we like to think are more flexible and competitive. We're not beholden to a strict rigid set of engineering standards like the DNOs are, which makes sense because they've got tens of thousands of assets. We can take an engineering view on things and hopefully do things a bit cheaper. And we're also able to pay what's called an asset value on adoption.

So we can pay you money to connect to adopt the asset, whereas a DNO would adopt it for for a token, some of a pound.

Okay. Tell me more about that asset value that that final stage. How how how does that work?

So you would approach an IDNO for an asset value offer based on your your grid connection.

Essentially, the IDNO makes a regulated revenue off Duos, which is distribution use of system charge. That's essentially a tollbooth charge for using the grid. We will have an element of that in our electricity bills. That's regulated by Ofgem, so it's set at a certain level.

The ID and O would look at what they could earn on that connection. They'll give away essentially an element of that as a sweetener upfront. And the reason why our investor likes that, our investor is is is Octopus. They basically get a regulated rate of return on that asset for forty to a hundred years.

Okay. Okay. Makes makes a lot of sense. And I think it will help people just understand that there is there are some parts of the networks which are very much standard, but there are also different ways of of running network connections.

Now I think we're gonna dive into a lot of this over the basically the the last mile.

Yes.

Yeah. Yeah. The last mile is a great way of doing it as as is your other analogy around sort of motorways being the transmission network and the sort of b roads going into the distribution network. Now let's sort of take a step back from the sort of IDNO process, and let's talk about something which has been running for a few years now, which is connections reform. Yeah. We've had a bit of a roller coaster ride in the last year. What's the latest state of play, and how do developers stay ready to go?

It's, yeah, it's the million dollar question. I I I I sometimes say to people, I've had all the answers. I wouldn't be doing this job. I'd probably be on a, you know, sunning myself on a Caribbean island somewhere.

Essentially, connections reform, I think it was started being talked about back end of twenty twenty two. I think that was the first meeting I went to. Essentially, as most people know, this sort of unregulated market that we had just meant that the queue was huge and we had far more in the queue than we could ever feasibly need for our power needs in terms of generation. So something had to be done, you know, to reduce that queue because the network operators couldn't see the wood for the trees.

They didn't know what was a good investment, how to plan their networks. We moved from a first come, first served approach to a first ready first connected. The definition of readiness was having your land rights signed up. That is probably quite a low bar.

And at the time, it was like, oh, we can't be having planning as a condition. We can't be deciding to prioritize certain projects over others. Very quickly progressed to realize that that wasn't gonna have the desired effects on the queue. So that was then reply applied retrospectively to the existing queue.

It was then realized that wasn't gonna have a desired effect.

And then, Labor government came in in twenty twenty four and wrote the Clean Power twenty thirty action plan, which basically gave targets for different technology types at different voltages around the UK, the Great Britain, sorry, to meet Clean Power twenty thirty, which is a ninety five percent renewable grid. That effectively assign quotas per technology per per area. So then we move to a first ready, first needed, first connected and the way the queue is ordered is you you get your kind of ticket to join the queue once you've got your land rights, that's your gate to your readiness. And then depending on whether you have planning permission or not already, that gives you a priority in the queue. And then depending whether you fit within these regional technology quotas then decides whether you get to remain in the queue or whether you get given a gate one offer which is worthless.

Okay. And let's and let's not go into too much of the technical detail around the specifics of of the gate one, gate two. But just in terms of the latest state of play. So Yeah.

So what is the next thing that's gonna happen? Because from from where I sit, I don't spend all day looking at connections reform, but we have projects that sort of get protected in twenty twenty six and twenty twenty seven. And yet some of those projects don't yet know Whether they're gonna get a connection. From the outside looking in, seems almost ludicrous.

Yes. I I would agree. I think it's quite quite easy to sort of forget that people aren't in this detail all the time.

We we have seen some delays. There was issues with NISO's portal for the transmission projects that that caused a lot of delays and and concern in the industry with data issues. So that meant the the the evidence submission window was open for a couple more months.

The original, program of works to get offers out was quite ambitious and it relied on there being a potentially low level of failures, from the initial from the detailed checks. The DNOs for their distribution projects found they had quite a high level of failures initially, but they worked with customers to get that back down to zero. So Niso thought well, not zero, but, know, close enough. So Niso thought we don't wanna be kicking people out of queue unnecessarily.

Let's have a bit more times, do more checks to help customers get the right outcome. So it it will benefit customers, I believe, the long run. But you're exactly right. We have projects which are protected because they've got planning and they've got a near term connection date.

So they've been given protection, so they have an investment certainty. Yet the opposite is happening because they're then being told we can't have an offer until January I think if if you're a transmission connection or maybe March if you're a DNO connection. Yeah. And I think confidence at the moment is quite low in the entire process.

So while developers have got the protection, they don't trust it.

Yeah. Yeah. So so that that's a really interesting part, right? Because the whole point of collections reform is to move faster, get stuff onto the system, bring cost down for consumers.

And yet here we are kind of a long way in and it almost seems like, yes, we're doing work around the technical assessments to make sure these projects are sort of fit for purpose which is is absolutely right. And on things like the the portal, you know, you have to get these things right. You have to give people sort of fair opportunity to to be able to compete. I suppose one of the things that seems really sort of odd to me is that I would say network operators and big sort of technical engineering type tasks take a long time to fix.

And so when you tell me that you'll get the connection offer coming through in for say transmission in say January of twenty twenty six, but you're supposed to be building in twenty twenty six, like these things take so much time to get ready. So so how do you as someone who wants to put hundreds of millions into these projects, how how do you kind of keep that cash ready to go and and hold your contractors as well to say, hey, trust us, this is coming, but actually you don't know.

No. No. And that is that is very difficult and I think the whole purpose of protection was meant to be to give that confidence, but as I say, it's not quite there and especially if you have a, an offer that might be flexible non firm initially and then firmer later, you need to know what the firm picture looks like to see what your investment, you know, looks like overall. So there's a lot of live discussion at the moment as well about how we deal with those phased offers. We can't have everyone wait until the end of the year if they've got a connection next year.

I think it's an open secret that a lot of the close term protected projects are probably not deliverable with those dates now.

Supply chain is a big issue. People, everyone sort of rubs pizza to pay Paul, especially when it comes to commissioning engineers and, outages, system access as well. There is some reform reviews going on at the moment about allowing more outages to happen to connect projects. Yeah. But at the end of the day, the grid is there to feed you and I in our house. That's the priority. So we've got to make sure that the lights stay on while we do this work.

So yeah, it it is it is a difficult question I think to see how we could deliver those near term projects within that horizon.

Yeah. I think maybe there's some there's two really interesting parts in that and just just to just to make sure we've kind of covered them. So connections being both fixed and also flexible. You talked about phase connection offers.

What what do you mean by that?

So there are a number of initiatives brought in recently such as technical limits or active network management, which basically means the grid theoretically doesn't have enough capacity, it doesn't have big enough pipes for your electricity to flow. But given the intermittency of renewable generation, it doesn't make sense to size a network for this maximum Xbox that might happen a few hours of of the year. So customers are being given options to connect earlier but with a an actively managed connection. So basically, when it sees like their capacity is gonna be the limit's gonna be reached, a signal will be sent to the generator to turn down and that's called curtailment.

And that will be a, you know, a lost revenue or whatever on on the on the balance sheet, but that might be acceptable because you get to connect earlier. In the meantime, the DNO might never actually do the upgrade works. It might be an enduring flexible connection, but at transmission, they they have to do the works contractually. Contractually. So they might still do those works to make it firm, but that might not happen for another ten years. But you've got an opportunity to generate revenue for ten years when otherwise you might have been waiting.

And and for some assets like data centers, this is a really big issue. You know, you want that sort of five nines of reliability. You want the connection power to be there. For, say, batteries, it can be much more flexible.

And if you say to a battery owner, by the way, you're gonna lose ten half hours in a year, they kinda go, well, maybe that's not an issue. Or Yes. Can't around can't export in the middle of summer. You go, well, I didn't really want to anyway.

So so that's fine. Yeah. That's no problem. I suppose the other thing you also mentioned and it's really interesting and maybe we'll kind of come back on to it in the in the wider conversation is to do all of these upgrade works, you have to take parts of the network off in order to do that.

And I think there's really sort of interesting story that's going on within GB at the moment, but also globally. When you want to build out more good connections than ever before to connect things like wind, you also are having to do these large reinforcement works, means you have to take stuff off the system and so you get sort of this sort of double impact coming through on things like constraints.

Correct.

And so I think it's just a really interesting piece. I think if you can take a step back from it, maybe some of the constraints piece will ease as both the new connections come online and also the outages in terms of putting through those new connections also ease. Is that sort of a fair way of describing it?

Or Yeah.

I I think as there's more, you know, copper in the ground and and whatnot, there's more diverse routes to the power to flow, so that might help mitigate some of this.

The sort of standard that governs security of supply hasn't been reviewed in a while. I know it's probably not a very popular opinion to have after, say, Heathrow that we need to look at that, but I I I think we do. And there's a very high level of resilience given to certain group demands, which isn't always needed by single customers like a data center. Yeah.

And in terms of the the constraint payment piece, I mean, it's quite a big topic at the moment, isn't it? And and we see that constraint payments are higher than they ordinarily may have been because of outages on the system in that sort of England, Scotland interconnector. And I I think that's an interesting piece as well. It sort of exemplifies how we're very good at pulling on different bits of the energy system and not necessarily thinking about how that ripple affects the other corner of it.

You know, incentivizing more winds we built in Scotland sort of doesn't make much sense until we have that transmission capacity which we, you know, we should have started doing fifteen years ago but we haven't and we're still talking about needs cases and all that. And I think now those two bootstrap interconnectors coming on the offshore are now gonna go ahead. But, you know, we're not gonna see the benefits of those till the mid twenty thirties.

Yeah. And when you said bootstrap interconnectors, you essentially mean large cables that run down the side of the country.

Yeah. In the in the in the sea, basically. I saw this morning Scottish Power Transmission have just launched their consultation on the one between oh, I'm not gonna stop stations off the top my head, but down down the West Coast of Scotland, essentially.

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Enjoy the conversation.

Going back to the topic of connections of form, we might go from what from the outside maybe looks a little bit like a snail's pace to all of a sudden having this kind of tidal wave of projects coming through and coming online. Yeah. How are we gonna work around that?

So, yeah. I think I think resource planning is key. I think the networks need to be honest about how many people they need to deliver this. I think they also need to look more at automation where they can in terms of the the studies and offer process. A lot of that is still very manual. If I was to make a good investment, I would suggest we need to build some factories in this country to build transformers and cables because, you know, we we are we join the queue with the rest of Europe most of the time.

And then picking up on that factory point, also, it's the qualified engineers who can then deliver these projects as well. Right? Because there's only a finite resource of sort of appropriate commissioning engineers who can go on-site and can get these sites online. Yes. Exactly.

And and a lot of them, you know, go as independent contractors and then not all of the networks allow those people to then come back and work for them.

So I think there's a whole workforce planning piece. I mean, I'm pleased to see the government sort of launched their green jobs strategy. I haven't looked at it, I don't know what the detail is, but but I think that's the sort of thing we need to certainly be looking at. Also, I think we've now moved to a much more we're moving to a much more sort of, you know, century plan system, which which I think is probably required given the the sort of the near term targets that we have and also much more open and transparent system.

It was very much about, you know, commercial confidentiality, confidentiality, you can't speak about other people's projects. We're now seeing a a big push towards more data being provided. You know, they still can't publish the whole queue because of a certain clause in the Electricity Act called section one zero five, but I've not met a single developer that would be against changing that. Okay.

And having transparency could allow developers to come together as consortia and make better use of the physical connection assets. It's not just electrical capacity, it's physical space. You know, four hundred kV bay could service up to a gigawatt. It makes no sense having a two hundred megawatt best sitting in that bay, maybe even two gigawatts.

So what we need to do is have developers to come together to share those bays. So there is some work going on bay sharing.

People always talk about bays. I'm not sure everyone actually knows what a bay is. It's Okay.

How how would you to to someone on the street, how would you describe a bay?

So it's basically a plug. Okay.

And is it the size of sort of a mouse, a bus?

A plug socket. It would be taller than you. Okay.

And yeah, probably pretty about as wide as this table, perhaps, depending if it's air insulated or gas insulated. But essentially, in in the substation, you have a big lump of copper called a bus bar and that takes the electricity from the the circuits, the cables that are around. And then to connect onto that bus bar, you put a circuit breaker on there and that's essentially a plug that you can plug your cable into.

Okay.

And the way a transmission at least, I mean, at distribution, there's a lot more socialization of connections happens and IDNO is a great example of that. We've got a number of projects where we have three customers, you know, three or four projects at the same substation. We approach a DNO and say, you don't wanna give up four batteries. You know, they're they're at a premium. Let us just socialize it into one under an IDNO. Great. At transmission, it's a bit different.

National Grid will not own anything in England or Wales at least, will not own anything downstream of their substation. So that cable, that transformer all has to be privately owned by the developer. So you're basically gonna have lots of developers trying to get lots of cable routes into one substation.

This is sort of why we've set up Eclipse Power Optimize because we think that's really inefficient. Why not have a grid co that can own those assets, fund those assets, and connect multiple customers? And ideally, you also collocate some demand on there as well and you keep that flow within the private network.

And this is this is kind of that trend private wires. Right? So we're seeing sort of many more of these coming through. How would you describe a private wire system to someone? And as a as a follow-up question on private wires, like how big can these be? Because is is it sort of like a private wire on someone's house, so it's a solar panel on the battery? Or is it a private wire like this is a whole estate or just sitting behind sort of one meter point and it's potentially kilometers of private wire?

Yeah. Both.

So you've kinda got your your traditional private wire if you like, which is a single customer and a generator. So, you know, a large industrial user, they might not like the fact that their energy bills are quite high, so they wanna put some solar on the roof or a ground mount solar next door or a bat with a battery or whatever. And that would just feed that one customer and there'd be a a power purchase agreement between the owner of the generation and the customer and maybe some export to the grid as well via their connection.

And crucially, all of that's sort of behind one meter. Behind one meter. So so there's kind of that whole business case happening almost without grids knowledge.

Yeah. Well, you have to let the grid know because there's there can be an impact on the grid if there's a fault. But but yeah, otherwise, it it's fine.

There there are become issues and challenges where you start to try and connect multiple customers behind the meter because you can't do what's called run-in parallel behind the meter, I. E. Export to two meter points at once because the DNO doesn't have visibility of what those power flows are doing, which makes sense.

So so how big can this actually be? What's sort of the biggest private wire that you've seen and worked on?

So we're working at the moment on FuturePoint Manchester, is one and a half gigawatts, one point four gigawatts up in the northwest of England, a JV with a with with Carlton Power. Okay. So there is a they're they're funding and building an an OCGT. There's gonna be some battery and there's also gonna be a a data center that's currently being marketed at the moment.

In that scenario, we're coming off National Grid's four hundred kV system. So this is where it becomes a bit more complicated. So traditionally, generators have been allowed to own what what National Grid call high voltage assets. So four hundred, two seven five k v, the super grid, the motorway voltages.

Generators can can own those assets because they're not counted as part of the main transmission system. Once you start looking at demand only connections or connections less so with hybrid connections, but demand demand connections that becomes that's considered part of the transmission system. And the current legal view under the Electricity Act nineteen eighty nine is that that's a license for activity, you need a transmission license. So National Grid will give you a connection at one three two KV.

So that means you need they need you need to wait for them to build a new grid supply point or a new super grid transformer, which is the size of a house and cost fifteen million pounds and can take years. And they might not necessarily build that until there's enough customers to make it worthwhile. So you're in a scenario now where demand customers are disadvantaged. And when the government is saying we need five hundred megawatt AI growth zones, it makes no engineering sense to feed five hundred megawatts at one three two kV. That's a lot of cable and a lot of land take.

So we don't think that was the right approach. So as I say, we did apply for a transmission license. Ofgem wouldn't grant one. So where do we go from here?

So we're hoping to be a license exempt network. And if if that happens, then that will be an industry first and that'll be huge. So we'd be then looking at four hundred k v stepping down to one three two fairly swiftly. We can have demand generation, you know, next to each other on the same site or whatever fed by that private network.

There's less power goes through that boundary meter, so you pay lower grid charges, lower, you know, commodity prices as well. And also it potentially provides a route to market for generators that might be unsuccessful in gate two, but they have a good site that's still got land agreements or or whatever. Yeah. So we think it's really exciting.

Then the other end of the scale, the first site that we've energized recently is sub one megawatt residential development in, I wanna say Norfolk. Okay. If I'm not a hundred percent sure. Or or or or Essex.

Sorry. Essex. Yeah. Near Epping. And that's in conjunction with with Octopus. It's what what they call zero bills development.

So there's wind sorry, solar, battery, and a smaller grid connection. And that's all just consumed on-site in the micro grid.

And the people that live there have no energy bills for five years guaranteed Yeah.

Which is really exciting.

I think we're gonna see a huge amount of that. Right? And it's in in some sense, it's a bit of a challenge to the grid. Like, the the people can put solar and batteries on their own site or people can go down the private wire route.

It's almost a challenge to the grid and say, hey, look. You need to get this to the point where it is a low enough cost that it competes with people doing it themselves on their own systems. If people can build their own version of this for less money than you're offering it Yeah. Given all the advantages you already have, it's a real challenge, I think.

It is. There is one regulatory hurdle though. Okay. Another one.

Again, under the Electricity Act nineteen eighty nine, to supply domestic customers an aggregated load of over one megawatt, you need a distribution license because you need to be an IDNO. So that means that everyone would then have a boundary meter to the grid. So we have to keep below that one megawatt threshold, but we think there's a case to lobby to to to lift that threshold.

Again, I think just perhaps as a side note to all of this conversation, just understanding how much of the energy industry sort of the engineering and technical performance is possible also has to meet so much of the regulatory sort of hurdle, and the combination of lots of the business cases that you see coming through are those that are well positioned both from a regulatory point of view, but also from a technical engineering point of view. Correct.

Fascinating kind of intermeshing of those Commercial engineering.

Yeah. And and also you've got nice anyone connected to those private networks has still got to have the right to appoint their own supplier and all that sort of stuff, which which is now possible under the metering codes, which is really good.

Nice. Okay. Very nice plug for that site and we'll definitely put in a link if people want to check it out.

So then just going back to connections reform. So you must work with a lot of clients looking at connections reform. What advice would you give to clients to deliver sites well through the next couple of years?

Yeah. So make sure you stay on top of your gate to readiness. So make sure your land agreements stay up to date. I think, you know, as and when the gate to offers come out, make sure that you scrutinize them properly.

Make sure you understand the costs that are in there, any potential outage or curtailment risk because it's quite often that people sign up to a a a non, again, this is the where people interchange, we use firm and non firm. An offer that is only connected by a single circuit. So if that failed, you're off basically or if there's ish other outages on the grid, the DNO might turn you off. That's not non firm in the kind of the traditional sense.

All generation connections are of that ilk. So there could be quite high outage or curtailment risks. If you don't fully understand that, you might be signing up for something where you're off forty percent of the year and you've got no right of course to the DNO because it's in your contract. Yeah.

So I understand that.

Well well, let's let's talk about that. Right? So sorry. I think I think we just say, by the way, you might have forty percent outage. I think a lot of people are, Christ, that's a real problem. So so what does the distribution of outages look like?

Is it common for someone to have a potential for forty percent outage, or is that more like the exception rather than uncommon, I would say.

But in this scenario, it was it was in South Wales connecting to one grid group. So one GSP group, GSP grid supply point is interface between the motorways and the the local roads. And there was a a one three two kV interconnector connecting to another grid group.

Interconnectors, your should always pick up and go, oh, because they can be run abnormally. So they might be switched out or over, so the power flow goes the other way and then that's an abnormal running arrangement. So your contract normally means you have to be tripped off under those arrangements. In this particular site, it would have been, yeah, forty percent of the year in the summer.

They often backfed the interconnector to support demand in another part of Wales when there was maintenance elsewhere and it just became unbankable. You know, I've also seen other customers where they've got connections from part of the grid and they think it looks fine, but then National Grid might decide to do some works, which causes the DNO to have to turn them off for a high percentage of the year. So, yeah, it's really worth understanding your position in the network and also how reliable that network has been historically. And also what's what's planned for future.

And and like I I deal more in sort of the commercial world. So if I was to look, say, between the asset owner and an optimizer, they might agree a floor or a toll or some way of kind of ensuring returns to make sure those returns always come in and the revenues are delivered. I think one of the things that you're highlighting which is I think will people will find challenging is is almost the the riskiness of that and it's nonrecourse. So if you get turned off or you get told you're not allowed to run, it's not like you get that large compensation payment coming through from National Grid.

Right? Depends which terms you signed up to. So Exactly. Do do you ever see people sort of looking for insurance around those types of products or is this just a a risk that you have to do or assess through technical assessments?

Yeah. It's typically something I've seen people want to understand to bake into their financial models more than anything. So you've got your your normal sort of curtailment, which is where you get turned down because of the issues on the grid and then your straight up outage. The straight up outage is usually less visible actually and you have to dig around a little bit more.

But yeah, I've I've not seen people trying to take out insurances from it. The other option is, you know, not the option other option but the sort of the difference is a distribution connection. You don't actually have a right to use a connection. The DNI can turn you off if it's in your contract.

Transmission, when you've got transmission entry capacity tech, that's actually a right to export onto a transmission system. So that's why you can be eligible for constraint payments if you are turned off to manage network constraints.

And again, maybe that's something we need to look at because that's not not changed since about two thousand and one or something, but Excellent.

Okay. So moving on from the constraint side, I I just want to get your assessment of we want to move very quickly in CP thirty Clean Power twenty thirty. It feels a little bit like Clean Power twenty thirty has had a had a sort of a a check has come in over the last few months As it were to the speed that we're going to deliver it. And I don't think many people in the industry necessarily thought that Clean Power twenty thirty was really deliverable But saw it as almost like a worthy goal is perhaps with the way I'd phrase it.

Just in terms of the speed that we want to move at. So we've got something like twenty seven gigawatts of batteries that we want to do by Yeah. Somewhere between twenty two and twenty seven gigawatts by twenty thirty. Do you think that we can actually move at that speed in terms of the engineering ability that we have to connect projects?

I I think it is very challenging. I think for the reasons that I mentioned earlier, there there will be bottlenecks within that. I think the DNOs and the t and the TOs, transmission owners, and NISO, the system operator are looking at, you know, what date is realistic when these gate to offers come out, which is important. You know, having a gate to offer is a privileged position in the queue.

I don't think there'll be and it's bringing other warnings to developers. I don't think there'll be any leeway for faffing around, basically. The ENA have brought new milestones in which are challenging. I think two months to get planning is is always been maybe not fit for purpose.

There is some flexibility in that, but, you know, you'll be held to account and you'll be made to move. If not, you're gone because someone else wants that place in the queue. I think Clean Power thirty has always been a very laudable goal. I got into this industry for fear of, you know, seeing the climate change, seeing biodiversity loss, you know, that's what motivates me in my job and that that's why I do what I do.

And I think we've kicked the can down the road for far too long. We've known about global warming since the eighties. It's always been, oh, we'll deal with it in ten, fifteen years. Oh, you know, we'll keep using gas for another ten or fifteen years, you know, and that narrative is perpetuated.

I think having a a hard target to focus the mind has been so important and I would really really warn against backtracking on that. But if it means that we slip into twenty twenty two, twenty thirty three, twenty thirty four, that's fine. But at least it's not pushing out to twenty forty which causes more people to drag their feet. Yes.

Yeah. Yeah.

I I think I think actually when when all said and done and someone reflects on it in the twenty thirties, they might look back at CP twenty thirty if they so choose to.

And they all think that actually that the the sort of aggression of the goal was very useful for holding sort of industry's feet to the fire and just working out how fast we can move Yeah.

Noting that a lot of these things are very slow.

Yes. And I I think, yeah, it's it's a case of ensuring the supply chain is there to deliver. And I think there is the supply chain is there in the world. It's it's things that people are willing to use and approve.

And, again, plug for ID and Os, I suppose. We can be more flexible if, you know, if you wanna look at a transformer manufacturer in China that can get you a transformer in twelve months, and, yeah, we'll we'll take an engineering view on it. Whereas trying to get that through, say National Grid, you might be talking eighteen, twenty four months of design approval and then by the time you might as well join the queue at Siemens. Yeah.

Absolutely. Okay. So then I just wanna talk about one other element of the the grid and potentially moving faster. So a lot of what we've been talking about at the moment has been new connections.

But one thing that we see other grids looking at is this potential to sort of revise what's already on-site. So can we make more from or can we do more with our existing solar park? Can we do more with the connections we already have? What's your take on that and how easy is it to actually modify some of these connections?

That's really, really interesting point. I I think there's sort of two two sides to it. There's the first bit is looking at the existing fleet. A lot of it's probably underperforming.

I used to work at a solar developer. They did a an exercise where they looked at their existing portfolio, and I think they managed to eke out another fifty megawatts of generation out of it just by making performance improvements. There's also shed loads of unused capacity sitting in connection agreements. We see that as an IDNO, people get two MVA import, they never use more than one.

But contractually, that's give that's theirs. I think we need to look at more mechanisms to claw that back from people or buy it back from people, perhaps more rightly. And in terms of retrofitting existing connection, exactly, we need to do more of that. It's using existing assets, you know, the capacity factor of solar is fourteen percent.

Those assets are are are really underutilized.

It becomes challenging because we have allowable change guidance. So you can't just change your technology or add new technology and expect to keep your place in the queue, which is fair, I think. So what does so what does that mean?

So if you change your tech when you're in the queue, you're to the back of the queue, does that always happen? Yeah. What about if it's a minor change? So if I just go from say ten megawatts to eleven megawatts, do I go to the back of the queue?

Yep. So you can't increase. You can always decrease. Okay. You could maybe increase and get that extra megawatt as a phase two with its own queue position. But what you can't do is is basically, yeah, wholesale change the current queue position you've got. What you could do is do some technical assessment around it and go, right, my current contract gives me this much export, this much full level headroom.

This is the behavior on the grid. If you can do some studies to prove to the DNO that what you're gonna change to doesn't impact that Yeah. Then usually that can be okay because the overarching principles of the it is guidance is always fairness to other others in the queue, detrimental impact to other customers. Okay. And the big big popular topic at the moment is can I put a data center on my battery site or can I turn my battery site to a data center?

Did a lot of work on this. Answer is not really. There was a lot of work done over the last couple of years by the networks to change battery modeling assumptions, change battery security of supply standards to get more batteries on the grid, which gave people quicker connections. And now people are asking to turn them back to what's called final demand because that demand is not used back onto the grid. That's yeah. As I say, maybe you need to look at the security supply standards again, but Nissan did come out and say that's not an allowable change. That demand element will go to the back of the queue.

I mean, it is such a big change. Right? Batteries are although they're active nearly all of the time, the actual sort of load factor is very low on a battery site. Yeah.

Typically cycling, you know, one to two times a day. Your data centers want that five nines availability. Their usage might be something like sixty, seventy, eighty percent. But they are fundamentally very, very different assets.

That they are. And I don't think anyone really knows how they operate yet fully. I mean, UKPN have put some interesting data on the data centers on their network now and they're none of them use in their full capacity. Here, they're just modeled as a flat flat demand.

I understand in Germany, there actually are some more sort of load profiles and curves and things like that because if you're training for AI or whatever, it can be quite choppy. If it's just cloud, yeah, maybe it's a bit flatter. But yeah, it's an interesting point but I think we do need to find a way to make it work and again, it's if the technical parameters are the same, it should be allowed because at the moment, we're just gonna you know, these companies are gonna go and invest elsewhere if we don't find a way through on that. But yeah.

And I think people also need to be aware that strictly speaking, if you put demand, even if it's behind the meter, final demand on your connection, you become liable for the residual element of Tenuous, which is significant or going to get more significant.

Okay. Super interesting. And it maybe I'll just give you one final question on connections reform, which is that if you kind of have the the magic wand as it were and you get to fix an element of it, you get to change it to be your view. Like, what what what do you want it to look like?

Got two two points on this, think. So the first one is there's such a, easy thing we could do right now is to issue all the offers that weren't already not dependent on transmission works. Yeah. I don't think Niso realized truly how much stuff was actually still sitting in the queue that could have already disconnected yesterday.

I remember when I first started doing this job, could ring up the d n o, get the surgery, get a grid offer, no transmission assessment, you could get your fifty megawatts tomorrow if you're ready, you know. And there is still projects in the queue like that. They could be given their gate to offers now. There's gonna be no change to those.

That'd be a really, really quick win.

Because your earlier point, is that fair? Right? So you were saying you kind of all things in the grid queue provided is fair to everyone else in the queue. If you just bump someone up from position three hundred, right, because they could be added with very little work. Is that fair?

So not not bumping people up the queue. And again, these projects probably should have moved anyway. But the phase one, so out to twenty thirty, the sort of the the original queue position is basically maintained in a relative position. So that wouldn't be changing bumping anyone up the queue, it would be giving those investors certainty.

They've got a grid offer that will pass their tech DD I'm with you. To then connect. Additionally, I've been banging on for about two years that we need to have included embedded demand in this, which is demand connected to the local DNO networks, so the likes of a new hospital or housing estate. I get why it wasn't included because you don't wanna hold those up, but at the moment, there are increasing numbers of small demand connections that are now waiting behind transmission works.

If you make an application now and the DNO needs to then apply to NISO for the transmission assessment, you'll be assessed against the existing contracted background, which is the mess as we know, and you'll get a date of twenty thirty seven or or or whenever. The ENA is now finally looking at this but we need to see a concerted approach of a, how can customers apply to benefit from the new queue and b, how are the ex how is the existing queue going to be reassessed because initially it wasn't proposed to be. At end of the day, the grid is there to feed and better demand customers.

If they end up disadvantaged out of all of this, I think the whole thing is Exactly.

And and well, two two things on this. So the first thing is the grid is absolutely desperate for demand both in terms of producing negative prices on the system, but also being able to average out FIT ROCFDCM costs. Sorry. There's a whole bunch of acronyms I've just dropped in, which I didn't mean to. But all of the costs which go to essentially fixed costs for running the system Yeah. Essentially all of those being aggregated over more demand will help to lower bills.

So that's That's really good point.

That's one sort of part. But the second the second part I wanna say, ENA. You you kinda snuck that in.

Sorry. Who are the ENA? Electricity Networks Association. They're a trade body for all of the all of the electricity network companies, basically.

Okay. Okay. Very good. I think we've covered a whole range of things around networks. I think it's been sort of fascinating oversight.

I do have two final questions. But before I go to those two, I just wanted to ask, you you mentioned UKPN who are a DNO and also a DSO. So they're a network operator and a system operator.

Yeah.

You're an independent network operator. Yes. So IDNO. Do you see eye to eye with with the with the network operators? Or is there or is there sort of is there is there sort of warfare between the two?

I think we we challenge each other. I mean, lot of my work over the last couple of years has been working with the DNOs to get better policies in place to allow IDNOs to play at the higher voltages because IDNOs at gonna use another acronym. EHV, extra high voltage, so you're thirty three thousand volts and above was pretty new. So now we've got some more policies in place which helps. I think it took a bit of time for someone to realize we are to another license entity, not just another customer. But, I mean, we're in competition with each other, but we we we work together on things and, Eclipse is actually a member of the ENA as well as the INA, which is the Independent Networks Association. So, yeah.

We've we've we've we've done all we've done all the acronyms. This might be a record episode for for acronyms.

And I hope people have have sort of stayed with us on glossary if you want.

Yeah. We can definitely get we can definitely get a glossary in there. Okay. My two final questions. So firstly, is there anything you'd like to plug?

I think it's the it's the the socialization of grid connections point, particularly at transmission. I think we need to see a lot more of that. I think we need to see more competition at transmission. I don't necessarily advocate in splitting up of the monopoly businesses. I don't even necessarily advocate them being in private hands. But think for single customer last mile connections competition has proven to be a success at distribution and we need to see that transmission as well.

Okay. I really like that. And then what is a contrarian view that you hold?

I think at the moment, as as a number of them, to pick one.

But I think the industry at the moment is facing a potentially existential crisis based on certain political parties, you know, the withdrawing support for net zero on the grounds of it's too expensive. And I think the industry is doing a really bad job of controlling that narrative. At the moment, we're seeing the government going more renewables will bring down the cost of energy. I mean, it it will bring down the wholesale price and we're seeing that.

However, they've also shelve market reforms. We're still having gas lead the price. But additionally, that's kind of disingenuous when the levies on bills, you know, there's a new nuclear levy coming in, what's first of November, think it was. And network charges, the tenuous demand element in particular going up ninety four percent for some HV, HV users because we're paying for fifteen years worth of missed investment in, you know, five years.

All of those are going up and they're gonna keep an upward pressure on bills in the in the short and medium term. And I think the government needs to be honest with people about that and we need to look radically at moving some of these levies either into general taxation if we're deeming that now, you know, clean power grid is a public good or moving some of them onto the gas bill. Cause you know, I was looking I I unfortunately burn gas on my heating. I was looking at getting a heat pump and things like that and at the moment, you know, while the cost of gas is cheap I know heat pump's more efficient, while the cost of gas is cheaper per unit than electricity, that incentive is is less prevalent for people that that may be just looking at the economics of this stuff.

So Yeah. I I totally agree and then that that sort of gas to energy sorry, that gas to electricity split, it's it's around four times more expensive for electricity. Yeah. And so even if your heat pump is four times more efficient to generate heat, then it still kinda comes out around the same.

I've been doing the same calculations. Yeah. And I and I and I think honestly, it really only works if you have say solar panels on your roof and you can kind of do a little bit of the private wire type system that we talked about earlier. But but really that that structural design of how much gas costs, how much electricity costs has to be fixed if we're gonna try and encourage more demands come onto the system, which allows us to socialize those costs more widely.

So Totally agree. I I think I hope government is hearing that message, And it's really interesting to see it from the network charge element as well as as well as the sort of the the levy side, which I see on a more regular basis.

Yeah. Exactly. And I I think it's business users as well. I mean, business users at the moment are crying out for cheaper energy, but, again, their energy is gonna keep going up.

And and if we if we're serious about kickstarting the economy, high energy cost is a drag on on all of it. So, yeah, think it I think it needs some some bravery put to it. You know, we we Clean Power thirty, Connections Reform, the strategic spatial energy plan that's gonna be the successor to Clean Power thirty that will look at spatially where do we put energy also in terms of the grid for the next, you know, however many years is really radical and really important and really something to be celebrated actually, what we've done and how far we've come and what is a relatively short period of time.

We need that sort of thinking to be applied to the supply side as well.

Agree. Charles, thanks for coming on transmission. You've been a wonderful guest.

We could have gone on Very welcome. We could have gone on for hours.

So let's wrap it up there.

Thank you. Thanks so much.