National Grid: Pylons

Debate between Alan Whitehead and Jamie Stone

Thursday 2nd May 2024 Westminster Hall

[Dr Alan Whitehead (Southampton, Test) (Lab)]

I will make sure to pronounce your name “Layth-am”, and not otherwise, Mrs Latham. And, given my experience in previous debates, I will make sure that I face you when speaking this afternoon.

I congratulate the hon. Member for Boston and Skegness (Matt Warman) on obtaining this Backbench Business debate. It has been very interesting, and has enabled us to set out the exquisite dilemma in terms of the relationship between the imperatives of grid strengthening and grid development, and managing our processes in such a way as to ensure that everything we are doing for the net zero imperative can be connected and organised so that we get the benefit of the renewable change for the future. That undoubtedly means—and this is a very basic reality check—that we cannot do without a huge extension and development of our grids, both onshore and offshore, in order to bring about that future benefit.

In addition, it is estimated that we will consume or demand something like 64% more electricity—possibly even more than that, as the Minister points out—across our country by 2035. That all has to be supplied, delivered and landed. Among other things, as the hon. Member for Ynys Môn (Virginia Crosbie) pointed out, we first have to make sure that the new power we are producing—onshore, offshore, new nuclear, offshore wind, floating wind, or whatever it may be—gets connected up so that it can deliver the additional electricity.

Secondly, we also have to make sure that the new power can get where it needs to go. As other hon. Members have mentioned, we have a huge crisis in our country at the moment, namely a failure to deliver power from where it is landed to where it is needed. We have a tremendous constraint problem in the delivery of power across the country, particularly north-south. Constraining power that is landed when it should be flowing down the cables to where it is needed will potentially be a huge waste of resource for the future.

I have said that this is a serious dilemma, when we consider the current proposals to make progress on this particular issue—as it happens, there is a new publication called, “Beyond 2030: A national blueprint for a decarbonised electricity system in Great Britain.” It was published about a month ago by the Energy System Operator, which of course is not the national grid; it is the system operator, which will become the National Energy System Operator very shortly. This publication is part of the strategic planning arrangement for the future.

We can see from that “blueprint” that most of what will be wanted past 2030 is offshore. The bootstraps that have been mentioned, in terms of dealing with constraint issues, are all offshore. I lay some blame at the Government’s door for the arrangements for landing offshore wind energy in the future. Unlike the point-to-point arrangements in the past for offshore wind, the future arrangements will deal with nodal collection out to sea and therefore the energy will be landed at many fewer points.

Many hon. Members have asked whether those arrangements should be largely at sea, and the answer is, “Yes, they will be largely at sea, and quite right, too.” That is what we need to ensure we keep our eye on, in planning for the future. To go back to the dilemma, however, that arrangement cannot be the case everywhere; we cannot simply manage a system of new cabling where it all goes out to sea, it is not landed and not transported across the country.

The problem that we all have to solve is where those things are not out at sea and have to be on land—a pretty limited number of the proposals in the “Beyond 2030” report are on land—and how we can do that in the best way to ensure, as hon. Members have already said this afternoon, we take the public with us and are united in recognising why we need those particular things to happen and why they are being done.

I am very interested in the observations today about how we can ameliorate what we put across land when we recognise that there is an imperative for us to do so, taking into account all the other things that are already being done offshore. First, that means—this is actually in the gift of Government right now—that we change the arrangements whereby undergrounding is always considered to be a much more costly operation, simply because the full effect is not taken into account, as the hon. Member for Bath (Wera Hobhouse) mentioned. That full effect is the overall strategic effect of undergrounding as opposed to building pylons in onshore arrangements.

If we had a different way of measuring that full effect through our permissioning systems, we would go a long way towards making undergrounding a much better proposition for onshore arrangements. Indeed, as the hon. Member for Ceredigion (Ben Lake) said, the interesting new developments in cable ploughing and other technology can substantially reduce the cost of undergrounding in the future.

There are several ways, including demand-side measures, to establish whether we actually need quite the length of cabling that we think we will need in the future, and there are ways in which we can make that imperative much more palatable to our population. What is not on the table is doing nothing about cable extensions because, as I have said, that would just take us back to the dilemma of the imperative—we have got to get on with cable extensions and very quickly if we are to deliver our green revolution.

[Jamie Stone]

I have heard SSEN ask on several occasions, “Well, what can we do for the community to make things more acceptable?” That type of proposed deal strikes me as unacceptable. I hope the hon. Gentleman agrees that just offering something to a community will not really sort the problem at all. “You take the pylons, and we’ll do this and do that”—I bet that we have all experienced that type of exchange.

[Dr Whitehead]

The hon. Gentleman is quite right. The idea of bunging people a few pounds to make something that is a problem less of a problem is not really a long-term strategy. Instead, we need to gain first understanding and secondly consent for what we continue to do overground, and indeed to try to integrate that with what we do at sea, to ensure we have maximised those arrangements. That will allow us to say that we have got our grid together so that it can face the demands that will be placed on it, and that we have done so in a way that allows our country to work well for the future. This afternoon, I hope the Minister will concentrate his thoughts on how we do that together.