UK Electricity Grid Connection Queue

Before a wind farm, a battery or a power station can put a single unit onto the grid, it needs somewhere to put it. That is a connection contract, and getting one has become the hardest step in building anything on the British electricity system.

This page is the official NESO register of those contracts: what is queued, how big, what technology, and what date the network has given it.

What a connection contract actually is

Transmission Entry Capacity is the amount of power a project is contracted to be able to export onto the transmission network, measured in megawatts. Without it a project has no right to put electricity anywhere, however complete it is.

It is worth being precise about what it is not. TEC is not planning permission, which is a separate process run by a different body — that pipeline is on our renewable projects page. It is not finance, and it is not a commitment to build. It is a network right, and it can be held for years by a project that has done nothing else at all.

What is in the queue

The register below groups the contracts by technology, status and connection date, with the capacity held by each.

The queue is not a build forecast

Read the total queued capacity as a ceiling, never as a projection.

The queue contains projects that will not be financed, will not get planning permission, or were speculative from the start — an application costs a great deal less than a wind farm, and holding a place in line has had option value even for developers with no firm intention of building. The result is a total that has run far above anything Great Britain could actually use, which tells you plainly that much of it is not real.

What the queue does describe accurately is intent and location: where developers want to build, at what scale, and in what technology. That is genuinely useful, and it is a leading indicator of where the network will be under pressure next. It is simply not a delivery schedule.

Why the wait got so long

The queue lengthened for reasons that were sensible individually and unfortunate together.

It was ordered by application date. A project ready to start construction sat behind older applications that were not ready and might never be, because the rule was first come, first served and readiness did not enter into it. Meanwhile each connection depended on network reinforcement — new lines, new substations — that takes the better part of a decade to consent and build, so the network side could not simply absorb the demand.

Add a surge in applications as renewables became cheap, and the wait moved from months to years. Reform has been aimed squarely at the ordering problem: sorting the queue by whether a project is actually ready to proceed, so that the ones that can be built are not held up by the ones that cannot.

How to read a connection date

The date against a contract is when the network expects to be able to accept that connection. It is not when the project will be finished, and it is emphatically not a promise that it will be started.

Dates also move, usually outward, as reinforcement schemes are re-planned. A date years into the future on a project that has not begun construction is best read as an upper bound on optimism rather than a milestone. Where a date is missing from the register, the page shows it as unknown rather than guessing.

Why this queue matters to bill payers

A queue for a network connection sounds like an industry problem. It reaches households through two routes.

The first is price. Generation that cannot connect cannot compete, and a market with less generation competing to meet demand settles higher. Cheap wind stuck behind a connection date is cheap wind that is not pushing gas out of the price-setting position described on our gas system page.

The second is the cost of the mismatch itself. When generation connects in places the network cannot move power away from, the system operator pays to constrain it off — and that bill is on our grid balancing costs page. The queue is where you can see that problem forming several years before it appears as a cost.