By Josh Croft Director of M&E at Edmond Shipway
With the countdown to the 2050 net zero target in full swing, demand on the UK’s electrical infrastructure is being pushed to its limits. Businesses need urgent action.
IT’S a tricky balance – attempting to reduce end user carbon emissions to meet government targets, while user demand is ever increasing.
Working alongside many of the UKs leading developers and end user clients, we are increasingly finding the electrical infrastructure is not keeping up with the pressures being placed upon it. Much of this growth is due to businesses following their social and corporate responsibilities of removing gas from their premises and reducing CO2 emissions in the process.
In stark terms, the waiting time for upgraded incoming power supplies can be up to a decade and beyond, as National Grid battles to keep up with requests for power increases and new, high-power capacity connections from renewable energy installers. All this is putting the transmission system under pressure.
When the country’s last coal power station, at Ratcliffe-on-Soar in Nottinghamshire, recently ceased operations – ending the production of electricity from burning coal – we saw this as a major sea change in our reliance on fossil fuel amid the rush for ‘cleaner’ electricity.
There has been a rapid growth in renewable energy source generation – a record high of more than 50% of the UK’s power in the second quarter of 2023 – to help eliminate carbon emissions. The grid is becoming cleaner and will continue to do so for the foreseeable future.
We are moving in the right direction, but is it enough – and can our electricity infrastructure cope with the huge demand as we introduce greener heating solutions and extensive car charging deployment?
Much of the M&E sector and organisations throughout the built environment seem to support the move to an all-electric approach, away from fossil fuels and natural gas. One of our large financial sector clients aims to replace all its gas infrastructure by 2025, well ahead of the 2050 target – further demonstrating that the business community is treating this transition seriously.
But the grid is under ever-increasing pressure to keep up with these advances and urgently needs timely upgrading to cope with the future all-electric landscape.
Fuelling the rise in heat pumps
It’s essential to find low carbon alternatives to traditional gas-fired boilers in new and existing properties. The current favourite option is ground source or air source heat pumps – considered a more cost-effective and efficient energy source for heating and cooling purposes, with the ASHPs being the more common. They are also seen as a crucial part of the UK’s net zero strategy, with an ambitious target of 600,000 annual heat pump installations by 2028.
However, their efficiency drops to around 130-150% in the depths of winter from around 300-400% in summer months. It is a seasonal/annual assessment, or Seasonal Coefficient of Performance assessment where the heat pumps win overall, but the power draw can be at its highest at times in winter when the grid is under the most strain.
Car charging issues
It is estimated the country will need 300,000 public charge points by 2030 to keep pace with sales of electric vehicles, according to the National Infrastructure Committee.
We have recently worked on a mixed-use development with more than 1,300 homes, and various commercial buildings. The site will be all-electric and the developers wanted 2,500 car chargers for residents and the businesses.
Overall, the site needed 30 megawatts of electrical power – but discovered National Grid couldn’t support that until 2035. While the development might be built in six to seven years, the complete electricity supply would not be available for another 10 years.
Whilst not all developments require such large supplies, it’s a similar story with smaller supplies. What is becoming evident with these large electrical demands is that the timescales to deliver the supply is often led by the transmission network rather than the local distribution networks.
The alternative is limited and the natural fallback is to reconsider gas usage again, which no one wants to do, or reduce the amount of car charging output that vehicles can draw. It’s all adding to the overall problem.
Increasing the grid’s capacity
While everyone understands the importance of going all-electric, taking this approach is a complex and time-consuming undertaking, requiring high levels of investment, often involving complex upgrades and significant future planning timeframes.
We’re helping a well-known leisure client with a nationwide business to calculate its future energy needs, as it transfers from gas to electric. We’re making applications for the required power supplies now, to ensure it secures the capacity in the future, whether that’s in five or 10 years’ time.
It’s a common theme, with companies applying now to try and secure electricity, even if their development might never happen, leading to a backlog of applications which are typically dealt with on a first-come, first-served basis.
As National Grid itself says, more needs to be done, as electricity demand is anticipated to at least double by 2050. It acknowledges that our energy infrastructure needs significant upgrades to deliver clean green energy from where it is produced to where it is needed.
We support the mission to become the world’s first major clean economy – and will be watching in anticipation as we all make our best efforts to support a healthier, greener and prosperous future.