Written evidence to be reported to the House
Energy Bill
12:00 pm
Nick Winser: On the offshore transmission regime, we do have concerns about the approach that is laid out in the Bill, which is to auction the provision of offshore transmission. That has not been done before. It seems to us that it is a complex, innovative and uncertain way of approaching this task, which is very significant, as the Committee will have discussed. Getting to the sort of level of renewable deployment that we need to get to by 2020 needs some quick and certain action. There has been talk of 33 GW of renewables offshore. Twelve years is a blink of an eye against such a challenge.
In National Grid’s view, we need to deploy simple, co-ordinated, well tried and tested, regulated transmission build. In short, we do not think that the proposed approach to auction transmission offshore is going to be quick, certain or in customers’ best interests. We do not think that it will help us to get to the carbon targets. We think that it will introduce delay. It would be better merely to extend the regulated transmission provision offshore for ourselves and for the Scottish transmission companies.