WHAT DOES THE PRIME MINISTER’S SPATIAL ENERGY PLAN MEAN?

Last week, amongst what could be kindly called other controversial announcements, the Prime Minister committed to bringing forward the ‘first ever’ spatial plan for energy infrastructure. We can understand what he means by looking at some of the other spatial plans for energy infrastructure the UK has put in place previously.

The first is this lovely map of Wales showing the ‘Strategy Search Areas’, or the areas identified by the Welsh Assembly as suitable for onshore wind development. I suppose you couldn’t call it a plan as it didn’t include the infrastructure actually necessary to get the power out.

This one, showing the full planned extent of the National Grid, does however. I suppose you can’t call it a fully spatial plan, however, as the lines don’t show where the pylons would actually go, only the points they’d go between.

This rather jaunty number reflects the state of play of the Government-run oil pipelines in 1944, which would be subsequently expanded to stretch nation-wide, and which Government only finally sold off in 2015. Yes, we did in fact have a nationalised energy network less than a decade ago.

While it’s lots of fun to post maps of infrastructure, I also want to try to outline three scenarios for what might be in the Government’s upcoming spatial plan, as it’s an important tool for delivering Net Zero.

This is because of the UK’s horrendously clunky planning system for major infrastructure projects, which the Prime Minister also referenced updating. While electricity transmission lines are classed as needed infrastructure – and so therefore in theory should be able to get through planning easily – it’s the abstract concept of transmission lines that have a clear need case, not any particular row of pylons. This means lots of scope for judicial reviews. This applies across energy infrastructure, although it is famously much, much worse for onshore wind in England.

The idea of a spatial plan is therefore to provide a rock-solid need case for energy infrastructure that can enable it to be waved through the planning process. These pylons go here, say the developer, because it says so on the plan. And you can invest in them, says the regulator, because it says so on the plan. Of course, it’s slightly more complicated than that, but this is the general idea.

In setting out a spatial plan, there are about three levels of ambition the Government can choose between.

1) Transmission Planning. The first has already been well trailed in various documents already, and is about transmission infrastructure and what’s called the Central Strategic Network Plan. This places all of the transmission network infrastructure needed to deliver Net Zero into a single geospatial framework and is specified down to a reasonable granular level. A variant of this may extend to siting large-scale generation, especially nuclear and offshore wind, as part of a more joined up approach to planning and CFD allocation.

This route is probably low regret, but the politics of building so much infrastructure will be challenging: quite apart from the people who live near it, investing ahead of need runs the risk of misallocating capital at the billpayers’ expense, but this is manageable depending on how the new projects are scheduled.

2) Distribution Planning. The second is more granular and extends planning across vectors and down below the major arteries of the system. In this model, distribution networks for electricity, gas and hydrogen – as well as potentially heat networks, already covered by an existing spatial planning initiative – are combined into a single plan based on assumptions about how technologies will be deployed.

This route is subject to significant technological risk; it is difficult to see how precise boundaries between heat networks and other vectors can be established at this point. Managing this risk would require scenario planning rather than a single plan, with thresholds of deployment beyond which a plan can be invoked.

Everything Planning. The most ambitious version – and here I am not using ambitious as a synonym for ‘a good idea’ – is to integrate energy planning with its dependencies, including water and telecoms. This would produce a single infrastructure plan for the entire UK against which considerable investment could be unlocked.

However, at this level of planning the risk of capital misallocation becomes extraordinarily high, and it’s difficult to see this being the route taken. Whatever the Government chooses, trade-offs lie ahead.