Great British Grid: A New Push to Fix Britain's Connections Queue

The UK government has announced Great British Grid (GBG), a new publicly owned body sitting within Great British Energy, tasked with speeding up the delivery of Britain's electricity network infrastructure. Where Great British Energy invests in generation, storage and supply chains, GBG will now do the same for the grid itself, working alongside existing network operators rather than replacing them.

The move goes to the heart of a problem that's been quietly throttling the UK's energy transition: connections. It doesn't matter how much wind, solar or storage capacity gets built if new projects can't actually connect to the grid, and Britain's connections queue has become one of the biggest barriers to both clean power and economic growth. The government is already working with NESO and Ofgem to overhaul that queue, having stripped out more than 300 GW of speculative capacity clogging the system.

Alongside GBG, the government is also expanding self-build connections, allowing developers and businesses to build their own links to the network rather than waiting on network companies to do it for them. The precedent is promising: similar reforms in Ireland cut connection times by up to 11 months. Competitive tendering for transmission projects is being widened too, opening delivery up to a broader range of organisations, GBG included, with the aim of driving better value and faster build-out.

Taken together, these changes make the link between grid, connections and energy explicit. Generation capacity and grid capacity have to grow in step, because clean power sitting idle behind a connections queue delivers neither lower bills nor energy security. By putting public investment directly into network infrastructure, not just generation, the government is betting that fixing the physical bottleneck is what finally lets the rest of the clean power pipeline move at pace.