UK approves Sea Link, a 2 GW undersea connection between Suffolk and Kent
Victoria Shinder1 min readThe UK government approved Sea Link on 30 October, a 2 GW electricity transmission connection between Suffolk and Kent that runs primarily offshore. National Grid is the developer. The Department for Energy Security and Net Zero says the link can carry enough power for the equivalent of 2 million homes and, by easing pressure on the network, will reduce the need to pay generators to switch off when the grid cannot carry their output.
A community benefits scheme, to be delivered by National Grid, will put more than £1 million into community funds in each of Kent and Suffolk. The department linked the decision to the Great British Grid, a publicly owned body within Great British Energy announced by the Prime Minister to speed up network upgrades, and to reforms that would let developers and businesses build their own grid connections where appropriate.
The same announcement covered two solar approvals: Great North Road Solar and Biodiversity Park near Newark, at 800 MW the joint largest solar farm in the country by capacity, and Frodsham Solar in Cheshire, which combines panels with battery storage. With these decisions the government has approved 39 nationally significant clean energy projects since July 2024.
What it means
Payments to switch generators off are the visible cost of a grid that cannot move power from where it is made to where it is used. A 2 GW link between two coastal counties adds a route around that kind of bottleneck. Approval is the planning step; the benefit to constraint costs arrives only when the cable is built and energised, and the announcement gives no date for that.