Capacity crunch on National Grid is delaying new homes in UK by years
Posted: Sun Mar 10, 2024 9:25 am
...Council leaders warn of ‘infrastructure crisis’ that will also affect green energy schemes and hinder growth
Quite a good - full -article. https://www.theguardian.com/society/202 ... k-by-years
One quote from the middle of it:
Quite a good - full -article. https://www.theguardian.com/society/202 ... k-by-years
One quote from the middle of it:
Susan Brown, the leader of Oxford city council, who is also a DCN vice-chair, said that 90 new homes in the Littlemore district had been meant to have heat pumps. “The National Grid basically said ‘we won’t have enough power to connect them’ so half the houses are going to have to have gas boilers instead – it’s so frustrating.” Brown, who is also chair of the Future Oxfordshire Partnership, said plans to expand the town of Bicester with 7,000 new homes and a commercial zone had ground to a halt. “All of that has been paused, awaiting grid reinforcement,” she said.
Under the current first-come, first-served system, developers can pay to jump up the queue, but the Bicester project has a further twist of red tape because there are two developers – one for the housing and another for the commercial buildings.
“Competition rules mean they’re not allowed to broker a solution together,” Brown said. “That’s particularly mad because it means they are dancing around, hoping the other one is going to take the full cost of providing grid reinforcement. There are so many daft things in our system.”
Brown said that leaders in other areas such as Milton Keynes, Swindon, Cambridge and Peterborough – with whom she works as part of the Fast Growth Cities group – were reporting similar problems. “It’s really beginning to constrain our ability to grow our local economy, which is significant for UK plc because the Oxford-Cambridge wider area is a significant net contributor to GDP, and not many bits of the country are.