On 13 October, Starmer singled out just one project in his rallying speech to global investors.
It was ScottishPower’s EA2, costing £4billion, generating 1GW clean energy and delayed by regulation (4,000 documents ) and two years of judicial reviews.
A view presented by the Prime Minister suggests that the blockage is the fault of the regulators and bureaucracy and JRs. In his words it has led to “inertia”.
Looking beneath the surface, we see a MORE NUANCED SITUATION.
WE SAY THE BIGGEST BLOCK TO ENERGY INFRASTRUCTURE IS LOUSY DESIGN PLANS.
We have consistently called for the agreement to a spatial energy strategy and core design principles at the outset. With good design plans, you can accelerate the planning and regulation process, whilst maintaining community buy in, saving money, building over 50% less onshore infrastructure and creating a more flexible onshore-offshore grid and family of hubs at brownfield sites.
The fault lies with an outdated planning process which gave too much control to the commercial developers.
Giving transmission network design to commercial organisations leads to suboptimal designs and unfair, disproportionate impact on rural areas close to communities and local tourism economies.
Compare the dynamism within other North Sea countries.
Developers are queuing up to execute plans designed by Govt controlled TSOs.
SPR EA2 is a perfect example of the worst of one- off project planning, ignoring cumulative impact, ignoring whole energy system cost benefit analysis, with no logic to the choice of location.
This hub at Friston is now being considered as the potentially biggest hub in Europe.
During the DCO process, the planning and judicial process is scrutinised because it is intended to protect communities from commercial abuse.
We challenge that assumption. We think the process is flawed and that nothing is fully scrutinised.
The criteria used by Ofgem are too narrow. Holistic network design criteria are not being used.
Starmer wants to stamp his foot at the regulators. We say no foot stamping please. Let’s do this humbly and full of good cheer.