Although ambitious, this target date was recently put into focus with the announcement that the UK has managed to halve its carbon emissions between 1990 and 2022, which is positive progress towards the more pressing target of a 68% reduction by 2030. From both a foreign politics and domestic pride point of view this is encouraging news, especially when compared with other countries such as the US and France.

Pride and politics aside, with this increased focus and investment into our renewable energy provision has come a large amount of pressure on our outdated and restricted national grid capacity. The queue of renewable energy projects held waiting for access to the grid currently totals 400GW, which is much more than is required to power the entire system, and in order to bring the renewable energy generated into the national grid there needs to be enough free space to do so.

As of the 13 November last year Ofgem, the energy regulator, introduced a grid management system whereby any stalled or inactive schemes which were placed in the grid queue on a ‘first come, first served’ basis and have yet to come to fruition, are to be removed to create space for high-voltage transmission lines, and to allow quick access to the grid by generation and storage schemes.

Urgent reform has been required for a number of years – the new rules give National Grid the power to allocate project-specific milestones into new connection agreements and end projects if they do not reach these to avoid further clogging up the grid connection queue. Many in the industry are welcoming the change on the basis it will help maximise the amount of the nation’s renewable assets which are actively generating ahead of our next target on the way to 2050.

The Galbraith team has instigated a number of successful renewable energy development tenders for landowning clients as well as negotiated highly favourable terms for landowners who were approached directly by developers. If you own land that may have potential for the development of renewable energy infrastructure or have been approached by a developer with a proposed scheme, please contact our team who would be delighted to discuss the opportunity.