Enable the ongoing transition to the energy system of the future
In this section, you’ll find information on another of our stakeholders’ priorities; enabling the ongoing transition to the energy system of the future. Read about the central role we plan to play in enabling the decarbonisation of electricity, transport and heating in the least cost way.
You want us to take a more proactive role in enabling the ongoing transition to the energy system of the
future.
The UK government recently introduced legislation into parliament to implement the Committee on Climate Change report’s recommendation of a target of net zero greenhouse gas emissions by 2050.
We welcome and agree with the main recommendation of the report. We haven’t yet reflected the potential costs and outputs of it in our draft plan.
What you can find in this chapter
1. What this stakeholder priority is about
2. Our activities and current performance
3. What stakeholders are telling us
4. Our proposals for the T2 period
5. How we will deliver
6. Our proposed costs for the T2 period and impact on consumer bill
7. How we will manage risk and uncertainty
8. Next steps
We'll spend £752m on this priority over the next five years, in our baseline draft plan. This represents 18p of the average annual household bill.
We know the future will likely turn out to be different from the common energy scenario we've used for our baseline. Because of this, we’ve proposed ways to adjust our funding automatically as the outputs we need to deliver change.
We estimate that if we delivered all the outputs that we currently think are uncertain and all the projects that are open to competition, we would spend an extra £1.7bn on this priority.
For this investment we will deliver the extra network capacity and flexibility needed for the transition to the energy system of the future.
We will:
carry out network reinforcement that delivers 20.8 gigawatts of additional capacity, reducing the cost of system operation
install system monitoring and make the changes to protection and control required to maintain security of supply
keep options open at the lowest cost until it becomes clear what is best for consumers
innovate using new technologies, operating approaches and helping support non-network solutions
help competition to develop in transmission networks, where this can lower costs for consumers.
The government will define the path to net zero greenhouse gas emissions by 2050. We stand ready to deliver our part.
Our draft plan sets out opportunities where we could deliver infrastructure ahead of it being needed to accelerate the transition to a clean energy system. These opportunities would require some government policy and regulatory changes to support them.
Our outputs for this priority will allow us to make progress towards the energy system of the future at the lowest total cost for bill payers.
We'll help reduce greenhouse emissions,benefiting future consumers and society more broadly. We'll make sure the electricity network can still deliver electricity where and when it’s needed to consumers even as the energy system changes greatly.
Your feedback matters
Your feedback on our draft business plan is important to us. We want to make sure we take account of a broad range of views as we develop our plans.
You can download our full draft business plan, or just this chapter here.