Recently in Parliament, Richard asked the Energy Minister about the ability of the National Grid to connect to large solar farms. The exchange can be watched here.
Providing context for his question, Richard Fuller MP said:
As residents of Staploe, Keysoe, Pertenhall, Little Staughton and other Parishes know, there is a rush by financial firms to offer to build large scale solar plants. The East Park Energy proposal in North Bedfordshire would cover 1900 acres of land with solar panels up to ten feet in height; radically altering the landscape.
The National Grid has to be able to distribute such large solar plants efficiently across its entire network helping to avoid a clustering along the major transmission lines of the grid, one of which goes through East Bedfordshire.
In my opinion it's important that the grid does have increased distribution capacity. At the moment the capacity is only on the transmission part of the grid. The distribution part of the grid - which are the “branches” off the mainline transmission part of the grid - have in general not been sufficiently upgraded to take large solar plant capacity.
Because of this, transmission lines are receiving an undue amount of bids and there is a risk of clustering large solar plants inefficiently as a result.
As one of the main transmission lines runs through East Bedfordshire, this weakness in the distribution part of the grid means we are likely to get more of these speculative bids such as East Park Solar.
I highlighted this risk with my question to the Minister, and asked him to confirm that either the Grid has this distribution capability now, or at least that it will have by 2030. I was not convinced by the response.
