The UK National Energy System Operator (NESO) has put forward a proposal that would increase the transmission impact assessment (TIA) threshold from 1 MW to 5 MW.
The proposal has been put forward as an urgent change in the hope that the change, CMP446: Increasing the lower threshold in England and Wales for the assessment of TIA, can be implemented before the grid connection reforms promised for this year .
If approved, it could also help to facilitate the new connection process, proposing that projects below the lower end of the TIA thresholds would not have to go through the Gate 2 process.
National Grid Electricity Transmission (the transmission owner for England and Wales) initially proposed the change, Shraiya Thapa of law firm Freeths told our sister site Current± in one recent interview. Nasty read more about the ongoing grid connection reformsvisit Current±.
According to NESO, “implementing this change before the Gate 2 window opens will free approximately 400 distributed generation projects from the need to demonstrate Gate 2 compliance or alignment with Clean Power 2030 goals.”
The current TIA process has been criticized for being costly and delaying or effectively blocking local energy projects of more than 1 MW. Solar industry trade body Solar Energy UK has “warmly welcomed” the news that “a burdensome element of red tape has added many years to getting projects off the ground”.
The move has come sooner than expected, SEUK said, and will contribute to the “solar roof revolution” that Energy Minister Ed Miliband has promised. The change will only bring changes in England and Wales, but “a similar but less radical” change has already been made in Scotland.
Last summer, Scottish and Southern Electricity Networks (SSEN) increased the threshold for TIAs from just 50 kilowatts – around twelve times the size of a typical domestic installation – to a more substantial 200 kW. This significantly accelerated 35 projects in central and northern Scotland, with a capacity of 5.2 MW.
Chris Hewett, CEO of SEUK, said: “Reducing barriers to sustainable energy is always a welcome step, so we welcome NESO’s announcement today, which has come slightly earlier than we expected. Reducing red tape for large-scale roof projects, and potentially for small-scale ground-mount systems, will be a real economic boon.”
The announcement should significantly accelerate the deployment of photovoltaic solar energy, especially in warehouses. Two years ago, the UK Warehousing Association, working with Solar Energy UK, estimated that the sector could install 15 GW if grid problems were resolved.
