Britain’s Energy Policy Has Run Ahead of Its Grid

There is now a widening gap between Britain’s climate ambitions and the physical reality of its electricity system. That gap is no longer theoretical. It is being felt on the ground. in planning committees, in rural communities, and across the electricity network itself.

The problem is not a lack of ambition. It is a lack of sequencing.

Successive governments, advised by the Climate Change Committee and implemented through DESNZ and Ofgem, have encouraged rapid expansion of renewable generation long before the physical infrastructure required to support it exists.

The result is a planning system saturated with solar and battery proposals that cannot, in practice, export power reliably to the grid.

Nowhere is this clearer than in South Yorkshire.Across areas such as Hooton Pagnell, Grimethorpe, and the wider Doncaster – Barnsley corridor, electricity networks are already operating at or near their technical limits. Northern Powergrid’s own operational data shows constrained substations, limited or zero headroom, and reliance on upstream transmission routes that are themselves overloaded.

In simple terms:

There is nowhere for additional power to go.Yet applications continue to be submitted and in some cases approved.On the assumption that future reinforcements will solve the problem. Those reinforcements, however, do not yet exist.

The national transmission upgrades often cited by developers, such as the Yorkshire GREEN programme, are not designed to unlock local generation. They are strategic, long-distance reinforcements intended to move large volumes of power across regions, primarily from offshore generation in the North Sea.

They do not create new local capacity for rural solar or battery schemes, nor do they guarantee any local export rights.Even more concerning is that many of the transmission upgrades now being relied upon remain subject to further regulatory approval.

Under Ofgem’s own framework, large elements of the so-called “Beyond 2030” network are still in the development or assessment phase. They may be redesigned, delayed, or cancelled altogether. Yet planning decisions today are being asked to assume those projects will arrive on time and at scale.This creates a profound disconnect between policy and engineering.Local distribution networks , the part of the system that actually connects homes, farms and solar farms, are being asked to absorb increasing volumes of generation without the physical capacity to do so.

To manage this, operators are relying on “non-firm” connections, curtailment regimes and flexibility services.

These are not solutions , they are workarounds. They allow schemes to connect on paper while accepting that power may be switched off whenever the network is stressed.From a planning perspective, this raises an obvious question. How can developments be approved on the basis of energy benefits that may never materialise? If a solar farm can only export intermittently, or only when the grid happens not to be constrained, then its contribution to energy security, carbon reduction or local resilience is speculative at best.

The infrastructure needed to make those benefits real is not in place and, in many cases, not even funded.

This is not a failure of individual developers. They are responding rationally to a policy environment that encourages early applications, offers weak signals on grid readiness, and pushes risk down the chain.

The failure lies in a system that has separated planning consent from infrastructure delivery.

The result is a form of policy-driven disorder: communities face industrial-scale development without guaranteed public benefit, while network operators struggle to manage congestion they were never resourced to resolve.

Until grid delivery is aligned with planning approval and until reinforcement is demonstrably in place before large-scale generation is consented. This tension will only intensify.

The energy transition does not fail because of opposition.

It fails when ambition outruns engineering and right now, in much of rural England, that is exactly what is happening.