Southampton… Boston… Orkney… south coast… east coast… north coast. Time and again the same problem comes up.
At the docks, on the Solent, rail freighthandlers speak of National Grid upgrade and connection problems holding back the expansion in electrified rail freight they crave.
Up to Lincolnshire, where National Grid staff themselves highlight problems linking their new interconnector cables piping in vital electricity from mainland Europe to the very grid they run.
Six hundred miles north on Orkney they need to scale up frontier tidal power energy turbines but they can’t because – you’ve got it – the grid can’t take that expansion in output.
So much in place in so many places to help deliver the government’s cherished green energy revolution and bring down our heating bills, but the aged, unimproved National Grid (NG) presents a massive bottleneck.
A hundred and fifty feet beneath south London’s Old Kent Road, in a spectacular tunnel right across London, we just happen (not) to run into the National Grid CEO John Pettigrew:
“The grid was built in the 60s with infrastructure predominantly in the middle of the country to bring electricity down south, but there’s not much infrastructure on the coast. The government has set renewable offshore wind energy as policy, so we have to build on an unprecedented scale to meet this.”
In fact, £30 billion over the next five years.
And that tunnel?
We were there to film just one of the huge upgrade projects for the grid, in this case cabling new renewable power from North Sea wind farms to where it’s needed – the capital. Where, obviously, you can’t just put up pylons
“It will enable us to reinforce the energy the capital needs to bring that North Sea energy into the city.”
Ed Miliband is targeting 60gw offshore wind by 2030 into the UK economy. Today it’s around 15. Even if you add in new wind and solar being built and those who won in the latest new bidding round, you still only get to about 27gw – a hell of a long way off that 60gw target by 2030.
Moreover, getting that power expansion delivered means a colossal grid upgrade. High stakes, ambitious targets wherever you look.
Which means building: transformers, turbines, massive onshore solar and wind expansion alongside offshore.
All of which will mean opposition. Let’s take just one aspect – pylons.
And one project – the new lines to get North Sea power to London and into that tunnel.
Of course that means pylons – across Norfolk, Suffolk and Essex. And the battle lines are forming. To bury or not to bury, that is the question. Nobody wants to look out on pylons.
In Essex, farmer John Stacey says his business will be cut in half by putting four pylons across his land. Months of disruption, he says, and reduced food production from the farm, compensation or not.
“Burying the cables would be quicker in terms of planning and far less disruptive long term. Not just for my business, but for people to enjoy this lovely countryside.”
A few miles away, Philip Langford says 150 feet tall pylons will pass close to his house. He accuses NG of not consulting, pointing out that Germany’s consultations with the public led to wide scale burying of cables instead of building pylons
“In the UK we decide, announce, defend – in Germany they engage, deliberate and decide.”
A robust , straight-talking south Londoner and self-made businessman, he decries the effect pylons will have near his home.
“It ‘s the blight on the countryside first and foremost this will have. But true, it will also affect the price of my property and there’s no compensation for me .”
NG – a plc – insists its consultation processes are thorough.
Roadside hoardings opposing the plan already speak to mounting opposition which may very well end up in the courts, possibly delaying a government and Mr Miliband keen on speedy delivery in a national energy crisis.
Neither option is cheap. Burying pylons isn’t just a trench as you might think. It involves cutting a swathe through countryside much wider than a motorway. Cables underground heat up and have to be spaced out. Even NG’s assessments show that burying isn’t necessarily cheaper either .
But the NG boss John Pettigrew insists that if you bury cables for this scheme, paradoxically, you’d need more pylons for delivery overall, not less.
“It’s all about shifting power from region to region. Here a buried connection would not get you enough power and we’d have to build overhead cabling – pylons – on top of that. So we make a careful assessment on each scheme for the secretary of state to decide.”
Leading the anti- pylon campaign in East Anglia is Rosie Pearson, a passionate advocate of wind power, but also of burying its cabling, not building pylons.
“If you look at what the Germans are doing, they have a much more forward-thinking approach. They use new cables called HVDC – high voltage direct current – which means you have a neat track through the countryside, then covered. No pylons, no visual impact, no destruction of tourism and less impact on farming.”
She claims that’s cheaper too, citing two NG bodies who reach that conclusion. NG dispute that and say this is taken out of context.
Pylons – far from the only coming obstacle in the planning process. You’ll find a similar campaign against the coastal infrastructure NG is planning in Suffolk to bring clean power ashore. This, like pylons, could well end up in judicial review in the courts. Delay: the very thing the government is set against.
Now, the track record of oil protesters is interesting here. Nimbies or not, they have forced major planning changes for drilling now affecting projects from Surrey to Shetland, with spectacular success right up to the Supreme Court.
But fossil fuels are sunset industries – renewables are the centrepiece of the government’s plan for national economic regeneration, backed by a landslide electoral mandate.