Why electricity pylons in Essex are the front line in the battle to hit net zero
In the narrow lanes around Aldham in Essex the countryside is close to the English ideal.
On an unseasonably warm mid-October day the fields recede to a low horizon, broken only by hedgerows and the spire of the parish church, the tallest landmark this side of Suffolk.
If National Grid has its way it won’t stay that way for long.
Aldham is on the route of a new pylon line that will run more than 110 miles, from Norwich to Tilbury on the Thames Estuary, carrying electricity generated on wind farms in the North Sea via high voltage cables suspended from 50-metre tall towers.
National Grid, the listed company that owns and runs the UK’s electricity network, says it’s crucial to a massive grid upgrade without which the transition from fossil fuels to low carbon power cannot happen.
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For locals and campaigners it’s an unnecessary intrusion that will bring steel giants marching through some of the most scenic countryside in the east of England.
This is more than just a local planning dispute.
It’s a story about the most important national infrastructure project you have probably never heard of; about a glacial planning system that fails communities and builders; and the balance between local and national interests as the UK strives to hit its climate goals.
The great grid upgrade
On the road to net zero Britain is like a traveller who remembered their laptop and adapter but forgot to pack the plug cable.
For years we have been preparing for a low-carbon future by focusing on supply and demand, without thinking enough about the bit in between.
While supply has focused on phasing out fossil fuels, chiefly using offshore wind power, consumer and business demand has begun shifting to lower carbon options like electric vehicles and heat pumps.
This has transformed not just where we get our power, but how much we will need.
Demand for electricity will double in the coming decade as natural gas, petrol and diesel are phased out and a world reliant on digital data consumes vastly more power.
The expansion of offshore wind and, in time, nuclear, will meet demand, but those new power sources need to be connected to a grid originally built for the fossil fuel age.
The bones of the national grid were built in the 1960s and 70s, connecting power stations largely clustered around the coalfields of the north and midlands to cities and towns using ‘motorways’ of high-voltage pylons.
With most of our power coming from the coast in the future that has to change.
National Grid has identified 17 new or upgraded lines required, including undersea cables to link Scotland and the east of England and several onshore pylon routes, the largest of which is Norwich-Tilbury.
It will cost up to £19bn and most of it has to happen in seven years to meet the government’s target of decarbonising the grid by 2030.
Carl Trowell, President of strategic infrastructure at the National Grid
“There’s no energy transition without a massive upgrade to the transmission system. It’s an enabler for everything we want to do,” said the man in charge of delivering it, Carl Trowell, National Grid’s president of strategic infrastructure.
“Over the next seven to eight years we’ve got to build five times more infrastructure than has been built in the last 30, so it’s quite an upgrade.”
Fight the power
For Adam Scott, owner of Church House Farm in Aldham, the great grid upgrade means three 50-metre pylons planted on his land, and £6,000 each in compensation.
“You would happily pay £6,000 not to have them,” he said.
“There are many impacts. You’ve got to go round them with machines, you can’t irrigate land near them, if we want to grow trees to help climate change we wouldn’t be allowed to, so there’s a lot of separate impacts the pylons will have if they arrive in our village.”
Sky’s Business correspondent, Paul Kelso with farmer Adam Scott in East Anglia
Mr Scott and residents along the entire route have been galvanised by perhaps the most effective local campaign group in the country, the Community Planning Alliance, founded and run by Rosie Pearson.
Dubbed the “Queen of the Nimbys”, a term she loathes, Ms Pearson has been hugely successful in helping community groups maximise their influence to oppose infrastructure projects, primarily housing.
She believes the pylons are unnecessary and should go under the sea, referring to rough drawings of an alternative offshore plan she says would be cheaper.
“We don’t see why the pylons should be built across East Anglia when the wind farms are offshore and the power is needed down south. It’s offshore, keep it offshore,” she said.
National Grid utterly rejects this, saying campaigners have misrepresented their figures and insisting an offshore route would cost £4bn as opposed to £1bn for the pylons, with consumers ultimately paying the difference.
“The first thing to say is that Norwich to Tilbury is part of a wider system, some of which is offshore and some onshore. Going offshore is four to five times more expensive, and it comes with its own environmental issues,” said Mr Trowell.
“And you can’t put all your infrastructure offshore. It takes hours to repair a pylon but it can take months to years to try and fix a problem or a fault offshore. Ultimately we have to strike a balance, and that’s what we’ve done.”
Local campaign groups oppose National Grid’s Norwich to Tilbury proposals
If the pylons are built, Ms Pearson says communities should be compensated for hosting in the same way as if Norwich to TIlbury was a train line.
Currently the grid, and the government’s electricity commissioner have said only that they should receive “benefits” from hosting infrastructure, such as cheaper bills.
“That’s patronising,” she said. “Full compensation needs to be paid to any farmer that’s having his business disrupted, any homeowner who can’t sell, any business that can’t run in the same way, not sweeteners.”
Planning problems
Where she and the grid agree is that the planning system is not working.
It can take a decade for major projects to pass through a system ill-designed to cope with the net zero infrastructure boom.
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De-carbonising Britain’s electricity grid
Rosie Pearson may have helped around 600 local groups challenge various building projects, but she rejects the accusation that they stand in the way of progress.
“I think people look at it the wrong way.
“The system creates the objector, the planning system even calls us ‘objectors’. If the system involved communities right from the beginning, presented them with options or alternatives, with facts and pros and cons, then you’d end up with decisions being made much faster.
“I can certainly say with this pylons campaign, if we’d all been consulted at the beginning we’d probably be working towards a better solution for everybody.”
For National Grid and other infrastructure developers the problem is a lack of clarity. Major planning decisions are guided by National Policy Statements, many of which are out of date and leave many decisions open to interpretation.
Sir John Armitt, chair of the National Infrastructure Committee and the government’s senior adviser, told Sky News they need urgent rewriting and regular updating.
“The process gets bogged down partly because there isn’t clarity of direction from the outset that enables an inspector to judge a project against the importance of the project to the nation, much more than to a locality,” he said.
“What we have to do over the next 20 years does require boldness, it requires clarity, it requires a sense of leadership and a sense that this is very important for our country in terms of the economy, our ability to grow jobs to spread that wealth around the country, our ability to compete.
“If we don’t make the changes to our infrastructure that’s necessary, we risk being left behind.”
Business
HSBC ‘being attacked all the time’ by online criminals – as boss ‘kept awake at night’ by cyber threat
The boss of one of the UK’s biggest banks says it is being attacked “all the time” by online criminals and he is kept up at night by cyber threats.
“It does keep me awake,” HSBC UK chief executive Ian Stuart told the Treasury Committee of MPs.
“Because we can be attacked and we are being attacked all the time.”
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Mr Stuart said banks were spending “enormous” sums of hundreds of millions of pounds on IT systems – the biggest expense in their businesses.
“Cybersecurity is now very much at the top of our agenda,” he added.
Ian Stuart, chief executive of HSBC UK, appearing before the Treasury Committee. Pic: PA
Concerns were also highlighted by Lloyds Bank chief executive Charlie Nunn, who said financial fraud will get worse if banks cannot intervene to prevent it and social media and telecoms companies are not incentivised to halt it.
Mr Nunn said the UK “has become the home of fraud”, adding that the number of victims is “pretty disturbing” and “individual cases are harrowing”.
Major high street businesses, including M&S and the Co-op, have been hit by cyber attacks in recent weeks and had their operations impacted.
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Who is behind M&S cyberattack?
Cybersecurity threats, however, were not behind the several-day outage at Barclays at the end of January, its UK chief executive Vim Maru said.
He added: “We’ve learned the lessons. We’re acting on the lessons, both work done internally, but also with help from third parties as well.
Account holders across the UK have suffered a spate of IT glitches from different banks around paydays this year.
Tens of millions of pounds on IT have been spent and customer glitches have fallen, Mr Maru said.
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Could ageing tech be behind banking outages?
He added that the problem at Barclays was a software issue, saying: “We put a fix in place that means that we won’t have a recurrence.”
The steel tycoon Sanjeev Gupta is mounting a last-ditch bid to salvage his British operations after seeing an emergency plea for government support rejected.
Sky News has learnt that Mr Gupta’s Liberty Speciality Steels UK (SSUK) arm is seeking to adjourn a winding-up petition scheduled to be heard in court on Wednesday.
The petition is reported to have been brought by Harsco Metals Group, a supplier of materials and labour to SSUK, and is said to be supported by other trade creditors.
Unless the adjournment is granted, Mr Gupta faces the prospect of seeing SSUK forced into compulsory liquidation.
That would raise questions over the future of roughly 1,450 more steel industry jobs, weeks after the government stepped in to rescue the larger British Steel amid a row with its Chinese owner over the future of its Scunthorpe steelworks.
If Mr Gupta’s operations do enter compulsory liquidation, the Official Receiver would appoint a special manager to run the operations while a buyer is sought.
A Whitehall insider said talks had taken place in recent days involving Mr Gupta’s executives and the Insolvency Service.
Steel industry sources said the government could conceivably be interested in reuniting the Rotherham plant of SSUK with British Steel’s Scunthorpe site because of the industrial synergies between them, although it was unclear whether any such discussions had been held.
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Mr Gupta is said to have explored whether he could persuade the government to step in and support SSUK using the legislation enacted last month to take control of British Steel’s operations.
Whitehall insiders said, however, that Mr Gupta’s overtures had been rebuffed.
He had previously sought government aid during the pandemic but that plea was also rejected by ministers.
The SSUK division operates across sites including at Rotherham in south Yorkshire and Bolton in Lancashire.
It makes highly engineered steel products for use in sectors such as aerospace, automotive and oil and gas.
A restructuring plan due to be launched last week was abandoned at the eleventh hour after failing to secure support from creditors of Greensill, the collapsed supply chain finance provider to which Mr Gupta was closely tied.
Under that plan, creditors, including HM Revenue and Customs, would have been forced to write off a significant chunk of the money they are owed.
The company said last week that it had invested nearly £200m in the last five years into the UK steel industry, but had faced “significant challenges due to soaring energy costs and an over-reliance on cheap imports, negatively impacting the performance of all UK steel companies”.
It adds: The court’s ability to sanction the plan depended on finalisation of an agreement with creditors.
“This has not proved possible in an acceptable timeframe, and so Liberty has decided to withdraw the plan ahead of the sanction hearing on May 15 and will now quickly consider alternative options.”
One source close to Liberty Steel acknowledged that it was running out of time to salvage the business.
They said, however, that an adjournment of Wednesday’s hearing to consider the winding-up petition could yet buy the company sufficient breathing space to stitch together an alternative rescue deal.
A Liberty Steel spokesperson said on Tuesday: “Discussions continue with creditors.
“Liberty understands the concern this will create for Speciality Steel UK colleagues and remains committed to doing all it can to maintain the Speciality Steel UK business.”
The Insolvency Service and the Department for Business and Trade have also been contacted for comment.
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