NESO says it does not audit the delivery dates of Clean Power 2030 lines
Serguey Asael Shinder2 min readBritain's National Energy System Operator has confirmed that it does not independently check the delivery dates of the transmission projects that the government's Clean Power 2030 plan depends on. The statement is in a combined response, dated 21 September, to two information requests received on 21 August about the transmission projects required for CP30.
The answers are specific. All but one of the projects on the list the requester named are currently tagged by NESO as required for CP30. NESO receives progress updates from the transmission owners, but not for the purpose of tracking them against the 2030 timeline, and it says it has neither re-evaluated the whole plan in detail nor carried out any independent analysis or audit of delivery dates, which are provided to it by the owners. Project status information is given to NESO in confidence under the System Operator Transmission Owner Code and non-disclosure agreements, so it is withheld under the commercial-confidentiality exception. NESO points instead to the data workbook in its June "Beyond 2030" update and to the National Audit Office's report on upgrading the transmission network, published after the request was made.
Two other answers stand out. NESO says the roughly £80 billion figure cited by the requester does not appear in its CP2030 analysis, which put average onshore transmission investment at £4.7 billion a year between 2025 and 2030 - about £28.2 billion over six years - with offshore estimates given separately. And one question, covering correspondence with Ofgem, the energy department and the three transmission owners, was refused as manifestly unreasonable: an initial search returned about 80,000 items, more than 13,000 after narrowing, and reviewing them would have required staff across two directorates totalling some 400 people.
What it means
The 2030 target rests on a schedule of transmission projects, and the body that plans the system is telling the public that it takes those dates on trust from the companies building the lines. That is not a failure of NESO's role as currently defined; it is a description of it. But it means the only independent view of whether the dates are credible comes from outside the planning chain - in this case the NAO.
For anyone modelling connection dates, curtailment or the cost of constraints, the practical reading is to treat owner-supplied delivery dates as the optimistic bound and look for independent evidence - planning consents, NAO findings, Ofgem's price-control decisions - before building on them.