The Great British Grid – what is it and how it will work?
Great British Grid (GBG) is the first big energy policy of Andy Burnham’s government, and it offers an early look at his approach to infrastructure, with public capital moving back to the centre of essential services. Announced in his first conference speech as prime minister, the new body will give the state a direct hand in building Britain’s electricity networks for the first time since National Grid was privatised under Margaret Thatcher’s government in 1990. Under Keir Starmer, who stepped down in June, Great British Energy (GBE) put its money into generation, storage and supply chains. GBG, set up within GBE, goes a step further, extending the public stake from generation to the grid and investing alongside private capital.
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For all the talk of public control, GBG will not take over existing networks. Ofgem remains the regulator, NESO keeps its role in operating and planning the system, and network operators carry on as before. Crucially for network owners, ministers say they do not expect GBG to affect project commitments under current or pending Ofgem licences.
In practice, GBG arrives with two reforms that are aimed primarily at speed. First, the government will accelerate competitive tendering for transmission projects, including GBG among the bidders. Second, it will expand self-build connections, allowing developers and businesses to build their own grid connections instead of waiting for network companies. According to the government, similar reforms in Ireland have cut connection times by up to 11 months.
Why now, and when
Grid access has become the main brake on new solar, wind and storage in Britain. By NESO’s latest count, the connection queue has swollen to more than 700 GW of projects, far beyond what the system needs, and the government is now working with NESO and Ofgem to strip out more than 300 GW of speculative capacity. The physical grid still has to catch up, and NESO estimates that around £89 billion will need to be invested during the 2030s to carry the power those projects produce.
Burnham chose to frame the problem in business terms, telling the Labour conference: “You would not believe how many businesses complain to me.” His answer, GBG, would be a publicly owned challenger, increasing competition, driving down costs and speeding up connections.
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The timetable is yet to be announced. GBG’s start-up costs will come from GBE’s existing budget, and because grid projects take years to develop, its long-term funding has been left to a future spending review. A figure of around £4 billion has been mooted, but no date has been set for GBG to begin investing. In the meantime, the existing connections reform grinds on, with Ofgem agreeing that NESO must issue the remaining Gate 2 Phase 1 connection offers by 31 October.
How it has been received
Industry has broadly welcomed GBG, with most comment centred on delivery and little on the politics of public ownership, which may reflect a prime minister still in his honeymoon period. Energy UK chief executive Dhara Vyas welcomed the focus on the grid and noted that most of the roughly £90 billion needed for transmission will still come from private companies. Solar Energy UK backed the self-build reform, and its chief executive, Chris Hewett, said the real test is whether connection delays and above-inflation costs are resolved.
Some have gone further and questioned whether money is the real constraint. Minesh Shah of The Renewables Infrastructure Group pointed to a shortage of skilled workers, while Montel analyst Fintan Devenney warned that £4 billion would swallow much of GBE’s renewables funding without being enough to move grid development or power prices. Lucy Shaw at the Centre on Global Energy Policy cautioned against an awkward duopoly with a cash-strapped state body.
It is not yet clear whether GBG will invest beyond the high-voltage transmission network in the distribution networks where most solar capacity is connected, and for solar developers this is the question that counts. Manufacturers appear to share this concern, among them Make UK, which welcomed the plan but warned against a drawn-out process or funding uncertainty.
The Conservatives, who are moving ever further to the new right on matters of energy and green policy under Kemi Badenoch, were dismissive. Andrew Bowie, the party’s shadow energy secretary, reached for a pun: “Great British Grid will become Great British Gridlock if Labour continue to pile on green levies and taxes.”
Burnham and the politics behind it
Andy Burnham’s first conference speech as leader, given in Liverpool less than three months after he took office, made the grid plan part of a much broader argument. He told delegates that Britain had been on the wrong path since the 1980s, citing deindustrialisation, deregulation, privatisation, austerity and Brexit, and pledged to bring energy, water and housing under stronger public control. He also promised to repeal what he called Margaret Thatcher’s “ideological ban” on public ownership of water companies.
New Labour under Tony Blair kept the core of Thatcher’s economic settlement intact, while Starmer’s government confined public ownership to new generation investment through GBE. In a marked change of direction, Burnham has made public control a defining theme of his premiership, and parts of the Labour left hailed it as the most left-wing speech by a prime minister in half a century.
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The plan will also be of interest across the Channel. Grid access is a bottleneck across much of the continent,and the European Commission’s 2023 Grid Action Plan estimates that EU grids need around €584 billion of investment by 2030. Many European transmission operators, including TenneT, Energinet and Statnett, are already state-owned, meaning that public grid investor would bring Britain closer to a model familiar from Oslo to Arnhem.
Back in Britain, GBG makes the state a competitor and co-investor in building the grid. What solar and storage developers get out of it will be settled largely at the next spending review. (TF)
