Electricity Grid Upgrades

Debate between John Whittingdale and Bernard Jenkin

Tuesday 26th November 2024 Westminster Hall

[Sir Bernard Jenkin (Harwich and North Essex) (Con)]

I beg to move,

That this House has considered the delivery of electricity grid upgrades.

It is wonderful to serve under your chairmanship, Sir Christopher. I am grateful to have the opportunity of this debate.

I chair a cross-party group of MPs from Essex, Norfolk and Suffolk. We are working to promote the Clean Power 2030 objective, but we want to deliver it more cheaply and quickly, because it is becoming increasingly clear that undergrounding high voltage direct current cables is the way forward for the great national grid upgrade. Undergrounding will carry public consent and will avoid delays, and will therefore be cheaper as well as better for the countryside. Relying on new lines of pylons for the entire upgrade, as proposed, will delay decarbonising the national grid, because they arouse such hostility and will end up costing more because of the delays.

This debate is therefore not just local. Decarbonisation is one of the great national challenges that the United Kingdom faces. How it is achieved, how quickly and at what cost is an issue of national importance. The National Energy System Operator’s “Clean Power 2030” report is welcome, but it highlights the scale of the challenge. NESO is clear that public support is critical to achieving those ambitions, but its response to the Secretary of State in that document warns that losing public consent is a significant threat to delivering projects on time and within budget.

Fintan Slye, the executive director of NESO, made the importance of engaging community support clear on Radio 4 when the report was launched on 5 November:

“I am acutely conscious that building infrastructure, pylons, does impose on people and their locality.”

He also emphasised that

“it is really important…that we bring people and communities with us on this journey”,

and that the transition to net zero only works

“if we can bring society with us”.

He is clearly saying that infrastructure solutions must align with community priorities.

The challenge to install new capacity is enormous. The UK has around 14 GW of offshore wind capacity but, to meet future energy demands, that capacity will need to grow nearly threefold by 2030 and continue expanding so it can handle 125 GW of wind by 2050. That is a much faster rate of investment than we have seen so far, but projects for 2030 are already falling behind. Given the strength of public opposition to overhead pylons, it is highly unlikely that any pylon proposals will be delivered on time.

The “Clean Power 2030” report sets out how delays are already affecting key projects such as the one from Norwich to Tilbury, which is 184 km of pylons across Norfolk, Suffolk and Essex. NESO says that it will now be delayed by a year to 2031, and that delay is very costly. NESO estimates that the cost of delay is £4 billion a year—far higher than previous estimates—mainly because of the constraint payments that have to be paid to wind power generators.

Given the public opposition to the Norwich to Tilbury project, the funds being amassed for legal challenges, and the opportunity for judicial review at least twice during the process, it is likely to be delayed for far longer than just one year. That risk is likely to apply to the other 17 pylon schemes proposed in the great grid upgrade. Nevertheless, National Grid plans to use overhead pylons as the primary infrastructure for the massive reinforcement of the national grid. I put it to the Minister that the current concept is not deliverable.

The implication is clear. The way to secure public consent is by pursuing strategies that respect and protect local communities and what they value—their property, their livelihoods and the countryside.

[Sir John Whittingdale (Maldon) (Con)]

My hon. Friend has done a fantastic job in this area. He has been very persuasive in setting out the damage done to his constituency. Does he agree that the strength of the OffSET group—the offshore electricity grid taskforce—demonstrates that the issue is going to affect communities right across East Anglia, including Margaretting village in my constituency, and that therefore the opposition he talks about is likely to be very strong across the whole region?

[Sir Bernard Jenkin]

My right hon. Friend is completely right. It affects other colleagues, including some present here today representing, for example, Lincolnshire. We know that there are concerns in north Wales, and on the east coast of Scotland in the area represented by my hon. Friend the Member for West Aberdeenshire and Kincardine (Andrew Bowie), who is representing the Opposition Front Bench. This is a very widespread problem.

Undergrounding HVDC cables is not only technically viable, but the most sensible and sustainable solution for the future of our energy network—that is, if we cannot have it offshore. I acknowledge that quite a lot is going offshore, but it rubs salt in the wound that other areas, from Scotland to north-east England, have the luxury of offshore schemes, but we in East Anglia do not. Our countryside is not worth the investment.