Question to the Department for Energy Security & Net Zero:

To ask the Secretary of State for Energy Security and Net Zero, if he will make an estimate of the cost of the (a) pylons, (b) cables and (c) batteries required for upgrading the power grid to net zero by 2030.

In the Clean Power 2030 Action Plan, the Department estimated that the plan would require around £40 billion of investment on average per year between 2025-2030, much of which will be private investment [1]. This included around £30 billion of investment in generation assets per year, together with around £10 billion of investment in electricity transmission network assets per year, estimated by the National Energy System Operator (NESO) [2]. These estimates are in 2024 prices, undiscounted, and rounded to the nearest 10 billion. A substantial proportion of the network costs estimated by NESO would be associated with pylons and cables. In their Clean Power 2030 advice to Government, NESO also estimated that of the £30 billion technology investment required per annum between 2025-30, low carbon flex capacity – which includes batteries and long duration storage – would require approximately ~£5bn per year in investment over the same period [3].

1. DESNZ, Clean Power 2030 Action Plan: A new era of clean electricity: https://www.gov.uk/government/publications/clean-power-2030-action-plan

2. DESNZ, Clean Power 2030 Action Plan: A new era of clean electricity – technical annex: https://assets.publishing.service.gov.uk/media/6776727f6a79200ddfa21b81/clean-power-2030-action-plan-technical-annex.pdf

3. NESO, Advice on achieving clean power by 2030, Annex 4: Costs and benefit analysis, p. 21: https://www.neso.energy/document/346806/download