Ofgem would charge batteries £3,000 per MW to hold a queue place
Victoria Shinder2 min readOfgem published a minded-to decision on 17 September saying it intends to approve CMP470, a modification to Great Britain's Connection and Use of System Code that would introduce an Oversubscribed Technologies Commitment Fee. The regulator is taking views until 5pm on 1 October, and asked specifically for responses from developers, generators, transmission and distribution network companies and NESO. The consultation and its initial impact assessment are published at https://www.ofgem.gov.uk/consultation/connection-and-use-system-code-cusc-cmp470-introducing-oversubscribed-technologies-commitment-fee-otcf.
The mechanism is narrow by design. It bites only on technologies whose capacity sitting in the queue materially exceeds the government's own target for that technology — which today means batteries. According to the trade reporting of the consultation document, the fee begins at £3,000 per MW and climbs to a ceiling of £25,000 per MW while the queue stays oversubscribed. The modification was raised by the developer Field Energy in March and, if approved, would take effect around July 2027.
The arithmetic behind it is not subtle. Last year's connections reform already removed about 40% of grid-scale battery capacity from the queue, and roughly 83 GW is still prioritised on the reformed queue on top of 7 GW already operating. NESO's own estimate of what the 2030 clean power target requires is 24 GW, rising to about 29 GW by 2035. Even after a cull, the queue holds three times the storage the system operator says the decade needs.
What it means
This is a price on optionality, and that is the point. A connection application has always been close to free to hold and valuable to own, which is exactly the condition that produces a queue nobody believes. Attaching a per-megawatt security converts a free option into a carried cost, and a developer holding capacity it does not intend to build now has to pay for the privilege of blocking someone who does.
The consultation is arguing about the edges, not the principle. The variations Ofgem puts on the table — capping the fee at a project's existing maximum security exposure, releasing it once construction starts, withdrawing the exemption some co-located projects enjoy — all assume the fee happens. Anyone whose objection is to the instrument itself has eleven days to make it, and the minded-to language says which way the wind is blowing.
And it lands unevenly on small developers. £25,000 per MW on a 100 MW project is £2.5 million of posted security against a scheme that may not reach financial close for years. A utility balance sheet absorbs that; a specialist developer funds it, and the cost of funding it becomes part of the project. Queue discipline bought this way is real, and it is not free of side effects — it selects for the balance sheet as much as for the intention to build.
The reporting that surfaced the fee levels is at https://www.pv-magazine.com/2026/09/19/uk-regulator-plans-bess-fees-to-cut-grid-connection-queue/.