Moving towards locally-decided, mid-sized energy projects

The Government has made ambitious targets for development - including Clean Power by 2030 -  but the planning process can’t move fast enough to meet these goals. 

The two planning regimes (TCPA and Planning Act 2008) have resulted in energy developers having to choose between two not-great options: either take the cheaper but riskier route through local consent, or stick all your eggs in one pricey DCO basket. Developers who opt for the local option tend to hedge their bets, submitting multiple 49.9 MW projects across the country, expecting them not all to make it through. Developers who opt for the national option are increasingly bringing forward bigger projects to help defray the costs of development, causing NSIPs to grow from around 300 MW (for the first 3 consented), to 500-600 MW (for the last tranche consented), and up to 840MW, the largest in the queue. 

As NSIPs require connections to the National Grid which are quite rare, the impact is that they tend be to clustered. The communities in the area are feeling the cumulative impacts and consultation fatigue, and political pressure is rising.

Moving towards local decision making

To break us out of this cycle, Labour’s answer is to push for more mid-sized projects which will be consented at the local level to spread the burden more evenly across the country. Several recent policy changes help support this shift:

The Clean Power Action Plan laid out spatial caps for solar and wind for 2030 and 2035. It included two sets of caps, one for ‘transmission connected’ (read NSIPs) and one for ‘distribution connected’ (read TCPAs). The surprise for most of us was that the NSIP caps were very low. Of the 50 GW of solar needed by 2030, only 11GW is available for NSIPs and 36GW is for TCPAs (leaving a little room for rooftop installations).  For solar NSIPs, 4 GW are already consented and another 4 GW are currently accepted, so there’s little space for the other ~13GW on the PINS website or others that haven’t yet gone public. On the other hand, there’s a great demand for solar at the local level.  (Note: For onshore wind, there was not nearly the same difference, with 15.9GW for 2030 for transmission and 13.2W for 2030 for distribution, due in part to the fact that there are few places to put a NSIP-scale onshore windfarm.)

The Infrastructure Bill, which dropped on Tuesday, includes several provisions around planning decisions at the local level. A national scheme of delegation will decide which applications go before committees or are handled by officers, and councillors would now need mandatory training before being able to weigh in. These moves should help reduce political pressure on local planning decisions. 

The Infrastructure Bill also includes a provision for projects that would be considered NSIPs by their size to choose the local route instead – an option that might be appealing for projects in certain areas which are more open to development. 

The Infrastructure Planning Order 2025 – just dropped today, this is the vehicle to change the threshold for NSIPs from 50MW to 100MW for both onshore wind and solar, doubling the size of projects that can be consented at the local level. 

Altogether, by increasing the NSIP threshold to 100 MW and allowing larger projects to opt-in to local review, while reducing political pressure on local decisions, and shutting the door on new DCOs – Government is attempting to shift energy projects back to the local authorities. To succeed and ensure that projects don’t get stuck in NIMBY-led local political opposition, developers will need to engage closely with local authorities, stakeholders and the community, ensure community benefits are proportionate, and demonstrate meaningful consultation to help keep political pressure low.