By Taco Engelaar, SVP at Neara
As a new government sets out to drive forward Britain’s clean energy transition, businesses’ engagement in Net Zero is more important than ever. We’re seeing promising signs of growing commitment to sustainable action: for example, more than half of businesses plan to double their EV charging capacity by 2028. But this momentum has hit a major roadblock.
A lack of available capacity in the grid is creating a “gridlock” that is holding businesses’ clean energy projects at a standstill. Without sufficient infrastructure to support more renewable energy transmission, businesses that are looking to connect new clean energy projects – such as EV charging stations or energy storage batteries – are facing interminable approval processes or being denied new connections to the grid altogether.
A cautionary tale
We’re already seeing this issue hit a crisis point in the Netherlands. The lack of available capacity for new energy connections to transmission infrastructure is significantly hampering business development and inhibiting growth. Around 10,000 companies have had their electricity connection requests delayed. Many companies are facing the prospect of having to leave major cities, such as The Hague and Amsterdam, as a result, and a fall in business investment in the country is predicted. Meanwhile, concerns are rising over the growing implications of the gridlock for households.
It’s a lesson to which we must pay heed. We cannot afford for insufficient infrastructure to quell the vital momentum businesses are bringing to the clean energy transition. Nor can we rely on building time-intensive and costly new transmission alone to increase grid connections and speed up clean energy projects. We urgently need new ways to unlock greater capacity within our existing infrastructure, to more rapidly ease the gridlock and support businesses to drive forward sustainable action.
Harnessing the power of new technologies
Emerging technologies, such as AI, may hold the key.
In many cases, the challenge isn’t that there’s not enough capacity within the grid to run more renewable energy – we just can’t pinpoint where it exists and how to unlock it.
Traditional line rating methods, which rely largely on manual inspection of the infrastructure, can only provide a certain level of accuracy. Utilities have therefore always, quite rightly, exercised caution when determining limits for the number and size of connections that can be made to the grid at any one time. This is to avoid overloading power lines and keep the network – and community – safe.
However, AI is empowering us with a whole new level of visibility when it comes to monitoring and assessing the grid. When used alongside digital modelling technologies, for example, it can be used to create hyper accurate digital models of the electricity network, which show us everything – from individual power lines to pylons – in granular detail. Utilities can use these to map entire networks at scale and most importantly, to perform line rating analysis digitally.
Uncovering hidden capacity in the grid
Harnessing tools like AI to perform line rating in this way can allow us to assess available capacity in the grid to a much higher degree of accuracy. It’s enabling us to literally create additional capacity where more renewable energy can safely be run. For example, when used in a fast-growing region in Texas, AI and digital modelling technology found that 94.5% of the lines could safely be run at double the current capacity.
Armed with a roadmap for how to free up capacity, utilities can safely approve more connection requests and ease the backlog of projects waiting to get off the ground, without having to build as much new infrastructure to facilitate them. For businesses, this means being able to connect new clean energy projects and achieve their sustainability goals more quickly and easily, keeping engagement in Net Zero high.
Enthusiasm and commitment to sustainable action is only half the battle. Unless businesses are able to connect to the grid and get their clean energy projects moving, it’s impossible for us to meaningfully move the needle on the clean energy transition. We need to prioritise expanding the capacity of our existing infrastructure – building new transmission where necessary but also employing technologies, like AI, to unlock additional capacity within the assets we already have. We cannot let the gridlock slow down clean energy progress and block businesses’ path to Net Zero; we must fix it, and fast.
