The government’s recent announcement of the Great British Grid is a welcome sign that grid infrastructure has finally garnered the attention of the government’s political agenda. As ICP contractors, we know better than most how badly the current system is failing and have been talking about how necessary an upgrade is for some time. Connection queues stretch for years, despite recent initiatives to speed things up. Costs are opaque and volatile. Projects that should be energising are stuck in limbo.
But there’s an uncomfortable question that the announcement does not answer: have we identified the solution before identifying the problem?
The grid connection problem isn’t capital
The government’s central premise is that Britain needs “additional public investment” to accelerate grid delivery. The implication is that private capital is insufficient, or that a publicly-owned competitor will drive down costs through competitive pressure.
This misunderstands the nature of the constraint. Ofgem already estimates that transmission owners will spend up to £70 billion between 2025 and 2031. National Grid has committed roughly £40 billion on its own. The CATO regime already allows new entrants to bid for transmission projects. Private capital has not been the bottleneck.
The real question, as one industry analyst put it, is: if private capital is already available for regulated transmission investment, what investment needs to be “unlocked?”
An Ofgem-regulated long-term revenue stream is precisely the sort of proposition that infrastructure investors understand. Introducing a government-capitalised entity that can bid with a lower cost of capital doesn’t magically increase efficiency, it simply changes the terms on which capital is provided. Competition only tells us something useful if competing bids are economically comparable. A publicly-funded GB Grid competing against privately-financed Transmission Owners is not a fair test of efficiency.
Competition on whose terms?
A further concern that the government has not addressed is if GB Grid is publicly capitalised and able to bid for transmission projects under the competitive tendering regime, what happens when it wins? The lines between ‘competing’ and ‘crowding out’ become incredibly blurred.
The government says GB Grid will ‘complement, rather than replace’ existing operators. But a state-backed entity with access to public capital on preferential terms does not need to replace anyone to dominate a tender process. It simply needs to win. And if it wins consistently; not because it is more efficient, but because its capital costs less, then we have not increased competition. We’ve introduced government ownership by stealth, wrapped in the language of competition.
This raises an important question: who ultimately benefits from these contracts? If GB Grid is awarded projects that private Transmission Owners and CATOs could have delivered, the public purse hasn’t saved money. It’s simply taken on risk that the private sector was already willing to carry (likely at a higher long-term cost, once public sector borrowing rules, procurement constraints and political interference are factored in).
There’s also the question of what happens to the existing supply chain. If GB Grid becomes the preferred bidder for major projects, the private sector’s incentive to invest in skills, equipment and capacity diminishes. Why train engineers and develop expertise if the state is going to compete for the same work on unequal terms? The long-term effect could be a shrinking private sector, reduced innovation and a de facto nationalised transmission network delivered under the guise of market competition.
If the government wants greater public ownership of electricity transmission, it should say so. That is a legitimate policy objective, to be evaluated on its own merits. But it is a different objective from increasing competition, and it should not be smuggled in under the language of market reform.
The real grid constraint is engineers, not money
Here is what the government’s announcement does not mention: We do not have enough engineers.
This isn’t a new problem, and it’s not one that can be solved by creating another transmission owner. Creating another transmission owner does not create another protection engineer, commissioning engineer, cable engineer or SAP. Moving an engineer isn’t the same as creating another engineer.
The connections reform process has already run into this wall. Every connection application, every scheme, every reinforcement must be modelled for thermal analysis, fault level, and dynamic stability. Only experienced engineers can do this work. When mitigations are required, they must be planned and modelled again. This is where the queue is actually getting stuck; not in a lack of willing investors, but in a chronic shortage of people capable of doing the technical work.
This bottleneck is getting worse, not better. A significant proportion of the power engineering workforce is approaching retirement. National Grid, NESO, ScottishPower, and SSEN are all recruiting heavily from the same limited pool. The supply chain is competing for the same design engineers, SAPs and commissioning specialists.
Even if the government delivered an initiative today to train the engineers of tomorrow, it would take years of learning, training and experience to bring their skills to the level needed to do this work.
Outages are a hidden constraint
Even if we could somehow conjure more engineers tomorrow, there is another physical constraint that no amount of capital can overcome: system access.
The existing interconnected network must remain secure while the new one is being built. A construction programme can’t simply demand simultaneous outages on strategically important circuits because it would be convenient for individual projects. Outage windows are a scarce engineering resource, planned years in advance. Adding more Transmission Owners means more boundaries; safety rules, control systems, protection coordination, maintenance protocols, information sharing, access arrangements — all competing for the same constrained outage windows.
Does introducing more Transmission Owners save enough money to pay for the interfaces it creates for the next 40 years? The government has not asked this question.
What should be measured?
The government’s announcement frames success in terms of billions invested, connections accelerated, competition increased. But investment is an input. An operational, maintainable, safely energised network is the output.
Great British Grid should ultimately be measured not by how much public money it deploys, but by additional network capability delivered safely, economically, and on time. On that measure, the announcement is silent.
We know how many billions Britain intends to invest in the grid. Do we know how many engineers we have, to be able to deploy them? Do we know what the investment will deliver? Until we can answer those questions, creating another institution to spend public money on transmission won’t remove the constraints that are preventing us from building the grid today.
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