UK announces GB Grid, a public company to compete with transmission owners
Serguey Asael Shinder2 min readThe UK government has announced Great British Grid, a publicly owned company that will compete with the private operators of Great Britain's electricity transmission network, pv magazine reports. The government says the move will increase competition, lower costs and speed up connections.
Great Britain's onshore transmission network is owned by three regional monopolies: National Grid Electricity Transmission, SP Energy Networks and SSEN Transmission, which also decide on and carry out grid upgrades. Solar and storage developers connecting at transmission level have no choice of partner. Ofgem estimates transmission owners will need to spend up to about £70 billion on upgrades between 2025 and 2031, and connection queues remain long even after reforms removed more than 300 GW of capacity from them.
GB Grid's start-up costs will be covered by Great British Energy, the public clean-power investment vehicle, with a long-term budget left to future spending reviews. Alongside it, the government plans to reform self-build rules so that developers and businesses can build their own connections where appropriate, citing a similar policy in Ireland credited with cutting connection times by up to 11 months. It will also bring forward competitive tendering for transmission projects, which GB Grid could enter.
The competition route was already being built. Ofgem is consulting on a Competitively Appointed Transmission Owner regime, under which newly licensed operators would bid to develop, finance, build, own and operate specific projects; comments on the draft licence and guidance are due by 16 October 2026. The Energy Networks Association said operators are keen to work with the government on measures that lower costs.
Why it matters
The binding constraint for new generation and storage in Britain is the connection date, not the project economics. A public competitor and self-build rights both attack that date from different sides; whether they work depends on the detail of the tendering and on who pays when a self-built connection has to be integrated into the wider system.