UK grid ‘superhighway’ wins $2.5bn funding to send Scottish wind power south
Much Scottish wind power is currently curtailed due to lack of transmission capacity to send it further south
A 2GW UK grid “superhighway” that will send abundant Scottish wind power down to southern demand centres has won £2bn ($2.5bn) in funding from the country’s energy regulator.
Ofgem announced today that the money has been awarded to build the proposed Eastern Green Link 1 (EGL1) subsea and underground 196km cable between Scotland and the north of England.
The UK’s National Energy System Operator had flagged the link as being essential to achieving the Labour government’s goal of achieving a clean power grid by 2030.
“Today's announcement takes us another step closer to achieving Great Britain’s 2030 Clean Power ambitions,” said Beatrice Filkin, Ofgem director of major projects. “It means customers can reap the benefits of abundant homegrown wind faster, while also being increasingly shielded from volatile imported gas prices.”
EGL1 is being developed by subsidiaries of National Grid and ScottishPower, which is itself owned by Spanish renewables giant Iberdrola.
EGL1 is a high-voltage electricity “superhighway” able to transport 2GW of wind power from a site east of Edinburgh to a location just south of the English cities of Sunderland and Newcastle.
Most of the cable will be under the North Sea, with the remaining 20km of cables underground linking the cable to onshore substations and converter stations.
A disproportionate amount of the UK’s wind power fleet is in Scotland. This is partly because of Scotland’s excellent wind resource and abundance of available land. It is also partly due to former Conservative governments enacting and presiding over an almost decade-long de facto ban on developing onshore wind in England, which Labour has now lifted.
The Scottish government late last year reported that the country had 11GW of wind power capacity, 39% of that in the UK. That is despite Scotland having a population of around 5.6 million compared to around 60 million in England.
The other three interconnectors are a 1.4GW power link between England and Germany; a 750MW interconnector between Wales and Ireland; and a 700MW link between Scotland and Northern Ireland.