Power-line planning reform could cut time to build by nine years

A more ambitious reform of the planning process could cut the time to build power lines critical in achieving net zero to five years, according to the government’s independent adviser.
In a report for the government last year, Nick Winser, Britain’s electricity networks commissioner, put forward a set of recommendations to help speed up the construction of many hundreds of miles of high-voltage cables needed to connect new wind farms and meet increased power demand for electric vehicles and heat pumps.
His report found that the time between identifying the need for a new transmission line and construction could take up to 14 years, a timescale that needed to halve.
However, he said it was possible to make “incremental gains” to bring down the process to about five years, which could include holding the pre-application consultations with the local community “to a more sensible timescale” and shortening approval times for the secretary of state and increasing the planning inspectorate workforce.
The adoption of a “strategic spatial energy plan” that sets out what supply and demand is likely to emerge, and where, would help consultations become “a more open, respectful and transparent process, where communities will feel that they understand better the engineering, environmental and economic trade-offs that are being weighed as we come forward with proposals”.
The government has set out a stretching target to double onshore wind, triple solar power and quadruple offshore wind by 2030 with a view to delivering a net-zero electricity network by the same timeframe.
Labour’s target to decarbonise the system was “challenging but doable”, he said, because a lot of the projects to upgrade the transmission system had been set in motion by National Grid, so “we shouldn’t regard this as an actual starting point”.
He also said that an energy skills plan should be set out, similar in spirit to the strategy set out for the NHS, to combat shortages. “I’d be trying to do demand predictions for technicians and engineers and I’d be working back towards ‘what set of apprenticeships, higher education courses do we have and opportunities to retrain do we have?’”
A spokeswoman for the Department for Energy Security and Net Zero said: “Securing Britain’s clean-energy future will require improving infrastructure to get renewable electricity on the grid. Without this, we will never deliver clean power for the British people. We agree with Nick Winser that these processes need speeding up and are working on doing so.
“It will also require the skills to make it happen and through the office for clean energy jobs, we will work with trade unions, experts and industry to support British workers and provide the skills necessary for the clean-energy jobs of the future.”