Power Struggle: Delivering Great Britain’s Electricity Grid Infrastructure (Industry and Regulators Committee Report)

Earl Russell Excerpts

Tuesday 4th November 2025 Grand Committee

[Earl Russell (LD)]

My Lords, it is a pleasure to speak in this debate, and I thank the members of the committee for the quality of their report. This is indeed a very important and timely work, and I thank the noble Baroness, Lady Taylor, for her very good introduction. As the noble Baroness stated herself, this is a very fast-moving field, and the world has moved quite a lot since the publication of the report itself. I thought that the noble Lord, Lord Liddle, put it very well in combining the important granular nature of the report with the fundamental importance of Britain’s future, related to our grid development in these areas.

Against this report, we have to understand the background of decarbonising our electricity system by 95% by 2030—clean power. This is a key foundation of our energy and climate commitments. In the report, the committee found this to be a significant challenge, but achievable, and it talked about a once-in-a-generation upgrade to our grid to make this happen. The committee really looked at this huge challenge before us and what can be done to make sure that we deliver on these targets.

I have said this before, but in energy terms I think this is the biggest energy change since the industrial revolution—and it all needs to be delivered in the next five years. This is a vast, co-ordinated and complex dance between systems, regulators, government and big infrastructure projects. It is all immensely complicated stuff, and I am very grateful that this report has been done. As the noble Viscount, Lord Chandos, said, this is mobilising £60 billion into the network, 1,000 kilometres onshore and more than 4,500 kilometres offshore. It is a six-fold increase in wind development and a three-fold increase in solar. The grid is not just the backbone. I like to think of it as the central nervous system: if it is not working, the country does not work, and we do not go to work—we have no transport, and the country makes no money. So the grid is absolutely essential to what we do.

We have this massive scale, pace and challenge ahead of us. The committee was really concerned about that trajectory, whether the targets can be met, what the blockages are ahead and what more can be done between government, the regulators and investors to make sure that we can all work together. The one thing that is clear from this report today is that everybody wants us to be able to get towards these targets and recognises how fundamentally important they are to the energy transition.

I want to turn to planning. We have had the Planning and Infrastructure Bill and the Government have brought forward changes. The noble Baroness, Lady Coffey, talked a lot about the need to bring communities with us through that transition, and I welcome that. There is more to do on that front; there is more to do in planning change terms. The report recommended hypothecating funds to planning officers and making sure that the granular nature of the planning system worked, so there is more to do on that. I tabled some amendments to the planning Bill in relation to the low-voltage grid, which is equally important. Small blockages in the system all add up and will cause considerable problems over time—so I think that there is a need for further planning reforms.

The committee also looked at the grid connection queues and the problems there. I recognise the work that the Government have done already to move to the system needed for 2030. That is welcome—but there is more to do around it, and the noble Baroness, Lady Taylor, in particular, asked questions about post 2030. There are some questions for government about not getting too hung up on a hard target, because some of the real challenges that lie ahead for government and our grid transition actually sit in the 2030-35 timeframe. There is a need to get to clean power, and we welcome that —but there is a need to be not absolutely rigid and to look further afield to make sure that we are not taking decisions that fundamentally cause greater problems down the road, as we continue that transition post 2030 —because 2030 is the start, not the end. We need to get to 2050 and beyond. That is concern for me as well.

There were some concerns about the Government’s position on the role of Ofgem, the energy regulator, and the duties that it has to protect consumers and ensure affordability—and the need to balance that against ramping up investment in infrastructure. These tensions can have impacts, and there is a need for the Government to take political leadership in this field and move things forward.

Obviously, the committee came out in favour, on balance, of regional zonal pricing. Since the report was published in July, the Energy Secretary came out and took a decision not to support that as a way forward and to keep the national pricing strategy. Personally, I welcome that commitment. The trouble with zonal pricing was that, while it had upsides, it seemed to have equal downsides for every upside it presented. Fundamentally, the challenge was putting that much change into a system that was already under so much strain and needed so much investment. Ultimately, the worry with it was that it would fundamentally undermine investor confidence just at the period of transition.

I am not against that decision. The question for the Government now is: they ruled out zonal pricing in July, so how will they use price structures and mechanisms to help with the energy transition, outside zonal pricing? What comes next in terms of the reformed national pricing system? Are the Government still on track to report by the end of the year, as they said they want to do? Can the Minister say anything about what that will look like? We all need to move this stuff forward. Those are the kinds of questions I have around that. We need to provide investor certainty, to review network charges and to provide stronger locational signals. Is there still the opportunity to take up some bits of that work?

The committee also talked about the Government taking a clearer political strategy and guiding Ofgem in its work, making sure that there are clear political decisions and pathways and that they are not leaving too many of these issues to the regulator. That is an issue that I think is important, going forward.

The committee was concerned about the proliferation and number of new strategic plans. This is a complicated space. We have the strategic spatial energy plan and all sorts of other plans. Could the Minister say a word about the conflicts between them, when they are being delivered, how the Government will make sure they work together and co-ordinate across different bodies, and assure us that the proliferating plans will not get in the way of the key thing we want to do, which is delivering this change?

The committee also called for the Government to publish key matrices every six months, in terms of 80 critical transmission network projects identified by NESO. The Government in their response committed to publishing statistics on the clean power share, but not to give that real detail. Could I push the Minister and ask the Government to reconsider that? The committee argued quite strongly that that detail is fundamental and important. That level of scrutiny of this period of rapid change is really important. This is about Parliament and parliamentarians trying to work with and support the Government. It is about trying to co-operate and work together on these issues. So I call on the Government to consider that again. This transparency is really open and important in these matters.

Can I also ask the Minister about connections and connection queues? What work is NESO doing with AI and AI tools to help with that? I understand that there is some work around that. These really complicated problems could benefit more from AI and AI tools, and I understand that there is some use of them.

Finally, I will ask the Minister about the update to the energy code, which has not been mentioned to date but which was a key recommendation in the report. I know that work is going on with this and, again, it is a very complicated area. I am concerned that the date for updating the energy code is smack up against the 2030 deadline and I am worried about the Government’s ability to deliver this transition.

To conclude, I had a lot more I could have said. We really welcome this report. I think it is an important and fundamental look at where we are in this transition. A very complicated dance needs to happen between investment, government and the regulators and needs to happen at pace and at scale. The Government need to be a bit more open. There is a need to fill the policy vacuum left after zonal pricing has been ruled out. The Government need to bring forward ideas, be open and give clarity about the direction of travel—where they are going and what their thinking is—so that we as politicians and the general public know where we are going. I think this a timely and important report and I am very grateful to the members of the committee.