The TEC Register

The obscure Transmission Entry Capacity (TEC) Register gives us a window into the scale of energy projects coming our way. Spoiler alert, there’s a lot.

In recent articles and interviews, I’ve used phrases like ‘the scale of change is vast’, or ‘truly transformational’ and likened what is coming in the energy sphere to ‘another industrial revolution’. At a very high level, this is stating the obvious. There are four main things at play – the new government’s target to decarbonise the grid by 2030 (previously 2035), the need for energy security, a net zero target of 2050, and projections of our future energy needs.

Taken together, this all means we need to more than double the current level of energy generated nationally – likely closer to treble it – and in the near-term build as much energy infrastructure in the next five to six years as we have in the last thirty. Around how specifically we get there, there is alarmingly little clarity or joined up detail in the public domain.

Previously, the Network Options Assessment (NOA) would tell us what was coming in terms of transmission infrastructure, now it’s the Centralised Strategic Network Plan. We may be critical of the content but at least there is some visualisation and over-arching strategy, albeit a flawed one, for the future of energy transmission in the UK.

But what about generation? How do we see, at an early stage, what might be coming. This is where the TEC Register comes to the clunky and difficult to navigate fore.

Accessible here, you can download a csv file and crack it open in Excel. But to find out what has been given a ‘connection offer’ in your area isn’t as simple as you might hope. There are no geographical search criteria and no maps. Instead, the easiest way I’ve found is to figure out where your nearest big substation is (or is proposed to be, an important distinction) and search the spreadsheet for it. So, taking my home county of Suffolk as an example, put in Bramford, Friston, Hadleigh or Yaxley and your eyes will be opened.

This is why I referred to it as obscure. Despite it being online and everyone having the ability to access it, a new addition to it is not advertised. The parish councils are not informed, district, county or unitary authorities are not informed, the local MP is not informed, and the press is not informed. Yet this is the point at which vast schemes first enter the public domain and communities are not told a single word about it. It just appears here, on a csv file, waiting for someone to find it and begin to ask questions.

How vast are we talking? Take Yaxley in Suffolk. Search for it and you will find over 3,200MW (3.2GW) of large-scale solar farms. Let me put that in perspective. The circa 500MW Sunnica Solar Farm started off as a 2,500-acre proposal and eventually ended up as a proposal taking over 2,000 acres of agricultural land out of food production. So very roughly, we’re talking about schemes totalling between 13,000 and 16,000 acres and that’s just one substation in one small part of Suffolk. To put that figure another way, 3.2GW is the generating capacity of Sizewell C. Imagine a proposal for that hidden away in a csv file with no real announcement.

Photo by Markus Spiske on Unsplash

Here, it’s important that I insert a caveat. Not everything on the TEC Register will come to pass. There is more on here than will be progressed by developers, but it is the starting point – everything that is proposed starts here. If only 25 percent or 50 percent of what is listed here comes forward, the scale remains massive. Another important point to make is that while the horrible way in which it is presented is the fault of National Grid Electricity System Operator (ESO), the fact that a given project has a connection offer isn’t their fault – when approached for one, they legally have to provide it. The process around those offers is also worthy of much discussion - I’ll leave that for another day.

But who is deciding if Yaxley is the right place for a nuclear power station’s worth of solar to connect? Or where, more generally, NSIP scale solar should be clustered around the country? The answer, worryingly, is nobody. Where is the wider spatial planning for all the energy projects we need as a nation? The answer, equally worryingly, is nowhere. We will start to get this with regional strategic plans in around 2026 but we don’t yet know what form that will take and what role communities will have in shaping them.

So, what do I want to see? Some sort of overarching ownership of connection offers and a clear strategy behind them. Someone actually asking if, for example, Suffolk is the right place for all this solar. We need clear visualisations for the public too – even at a very high level – and that means online maps. These schemes are in their infancy, some developers will still be trying to piece the land they need together, but even if you could just hover over an area, or substation, and see what was being proposed there it would make life much easier. We need much earlier engagement with communities and councils from developers too. At the moment, they seem afraid of it, not wanting the public to get wind of their proposals and turn people against them.

When we do reach the stage of regional strategic planning for energy, it needs to be properly transparent. All proposed schemes for a given period need to be viewed in the round and the issues and options properly debated, and consulted on, in public - in much they same way as we currently do with local plans - before it is decided what does and, importantly, what does not proceed.

Hopefully by lifting the lid on the TEC Register and encouraging others to dig into it, we can start to bring about that change. This lack of clarity, in fact the outright opacity, is bad for everyone.