Why Brits are going to start fighting about pylons

LONDON — The U.K. is on the cusp of a net zero revolution. Just not the one many might assume.

“When people think about the energy transition and the move to net zero — what it means for them, personally — they think about replacing their car, maybe their boiler, maybe putting solar panels on their roof, or whether they can afford insulation,” says Alice Delahunty, National Grid’s president of electricity transmission. “They don’t yet think … ‘will it mean a pylon through my village?’”

But as the government pursues net zero electricity generation by 2035 — a target it must hit to have any hope of achieving carbon neutrality by 2050 — it is planning a massive expansion of the system for transmitting electricity across the country.

Experts are hesitant to put an exact number on this expansion, but it is going to require more pylons. Lots more pylons.

National Grid estimates that, over the next seven years, five times as many transmission lines — via overhead pylons or (a more expensive option) underground cables — will need to be built than in the past three decades combined.

It is a complete overhaul of the system, growing capacity to ensure much more offshore wind, nuclear and solar power can be connected to the grid, replacing carbon-emitting gas power generation. It is also a response to the huge increases expected in the number of people charging electric cars or heating their home with a heat pump, both of which will increase demand for electricity.

Crucially, the new overhead lines making this possible will often be strung across picturesque countryside locations.

That’s likely to bring National Grid and the government — whether Conservative or Labour — into conflict with local communities and MPs who, past evidence shows, can fiercely oppose plans that would build pylons and other grid infrastructure into the British countryside.

Grid upgrades essential for net zero are about to run up against planning battles and well-organised not-in-my-back-yard (NIMBY) campaigns. Get ready for the politics of pylons.

“There’s a massive shift going on,” Energy Secretary Grant Shapps told POLITICO about managing today’s demands. “We do have to build a lot of that infrastructure … There’s a huge amount that needs to be done — and we’re having to work very carefully with MPs from across the House.”

Who wants a pylon in their backyard?

In places where plans are underway, political tensions are already rising.

In East Anglia, local campaigners and MPs are pushing back against plans for a high voltage transmission line which will run 112 miles from Norwich to Tilbury in Essex, stretching across the rural and often idyllic East Anglia region.

“In 31 years in politics, I have never known a single issue raise so much passion in my constituency,” said veteran Conservative MP Bernard Jenkin, speaking to POLITICO over the phone from Westminster.

Jenkin’s Harwich and North Essex constituency lies along the route of the proposed line. He and fellow campaigners — including the Environment Secretary Thérèse Coffey, whose Suffolk Coastal constituency is also affected — want the line to be moved offshore and have lobbied the Department for Energy Security and Net Zero (DESNZ) to change its plans.

“The local elections were materially affected by this issue,” said Jenkin. “Whether it’s Gainsborough country or Constable country or Benjamin Britten country, we’re talking about despoiling really serious parts of our national heritage.”

Jenkin is no climate-skeptic. His opposition comes from a wish to represent his constituents’ concerns. But if the next seven years sees the same kind of opposition from MPs wherever new pylons are required, the government of the day will have a serious problem.

National Grid responded to the lobbying by Jenkin and others with a new public consultation. That closed earlier in June and the company says it is now “carefully analyzing the feedback”.

Political minefield

We have been here before, of course. The early 2000s saw clashes over both on and off-shore wind proposals, which local campaigners warned would be an eyesore. In 2016, Cameron’s government banned onshore wind subsidies after the former prime minister said people were "fed up" with onshore wind farms being built, and "enough is enough."

Shapps is sanguine about what the East Anglia battle portends for the politics of the grid.

“I think most people accept that there’s going to have to be more infrastructure,” he said, pointing to moves that could mitigate the impact on local communities, including running transmission lines parallel to railways and roads where possible.

The government is also looking at whether local people could be compensated for electricity infrastructure being built close to their homes. Shapps cited a little-noticed piece of legislation, a backbench bill introduced by former Cabinet minister Liam Fox, which lays the groundwork for “compensation payable to landowners in certain cases where land is acquired for the purposes of electricity transmission.”

“As a country we will find a way to make this happen," Shapps said, "but we are sensitive to some of the concerns."

Adam Bell, a former government energy official and head of policy at the Stonehaven consultancy, said that "the sheer importance of [new pylons and grid infrastructure] for the country means they have to be built."

Even so, people are unlikely to love the idea of more pylons in their neighborhood. “People think of them as industrial equipment. They are big, steel frames,” Bell said. “The Conservatives haven’t spoken much about this yet. It’s very much in the ‘too hard, something for after the election’ box. It might be somebody else’s problem.”

Indeed, Labour is bracing for the issue to turn even more political. Accusing the Conservatives of “caving to NIMBY interests,” a spokesperson for Shadow Climate and Net Zero Secretary Ed Miliband said: “We stand ready to build the clean power system that Britain needs — that is the only way to cut bills, deliver energy security, and tackle the climate crisis.”

Such zeal might not go down well with everyone, though. Bell said he could imagine a political environment in the late-2020s where Labour’s pylon-building government is frequently lambasted by a net zero-skeptic right-leaning media. It could be “Keir Starmer’s steel wire warriors invading our countryside,” on the front page of the Daily Mail, he mused.

Future plans and future costs

For now, blueprints are already in place for how the net zero grid might look.

National Grid ESO — the legally separate part of National Grid responsible for strategic planning — last year published the "2030 holistic network design," its vision of how the government’s target of 50GW of offshore wind by 2030 might be delivered. It projects that £54 billion of investment will be required to make the plan a reality.

Ofgem, the energy regulator, has also introduced a new regulatory fast-track for 26 key infrastructure projects called the Accelerated Strategic Transmission Infrastructure. Of those, 17 have been assigned to National Grid (the private company) to deliver. Meanwhile, National Grid ESO will effectively be nationalized, with a view to it becoming the central, independent planner of the net zero grid.

It’s a painfully complex patchwork of responsibilities at a time when the government hopes to deliver strategic change to electricity supply.

There are other issues, too. including warnings that politicians have not been honest enough about cost. “One of the convenient illusions of those advocating net zero targets is that this investment is not going to cost current consumers (and voters),” wrote Oxford University energy specialist Dieter Helm, a former adviser to the European Commission. The costs of getting the new grid in place may have to land on consumers, whether that is through taxes or in higher energy bills, Helm predicts.

And then there are the NIMBYs.

Delahunty of National Grid is alive to the risks — and wants politicians to embrace the debate and make the case for pylons as part of the net zero mission.

“This is a national endeavor,” she said. “It’s about getting to clean, secure, affordable energy. We need to find a way to … recognize the huge responsibility we’re asking communities to take on by housing this infrastructure. They are housing it for an ultimate aim that we are all supportive of.

“Lots more people could lean into that space of education and understanding.”