A £70bn programme, mostly still at an early stage
VOn 11 September 2026 the National Audit Office reported that delivering Great Britain's electricity transmission upgrades for Clean Power 2030 "will be very challenging"12. Ofgem estimates that up to £70bn may be needed from 2025 to 2031, roughly four times the current rate of investment1.
VOf the 80 projects the National Energy System Operator identified as essential, 12 are built, 12 have been folded into newer schemes and 56 are in delivery. Fifty of those are forecast to arrive after the date the system operator judged optimal, and four after 20301.
VThe price of late capacity is already visible. Payments to switch generators up or down around grid bottlenecks rose from £0.6bn in 2018-19 to £1.9bn in 2025-26, and could reach £6.6bn to £7.8bn in 2030 if upgrades are not accelerated1.
Every project has an owner, and the outcome has none
VThe NAO found that while each Transmission Owner is accountable for its own projects, "no single person is accountable for delivery of the portfolio as a whole". Project information is provided voluntarily, and the system operator does not know the cost of delay for most projects, which makes prioritisation difficult1.
AThis is the portfolio problem that asset managers recognise. Each project can be run well and the programme can still miss its purpose, because the value sits in the sequence, the shared resources and the interfaces between schemes. Those belong to no single project, so they belong to nobody.
Outages are where construction meets maintenance
VUpgrades need parts of the network switched off. In 2025-26 the system operator delivered 8,100 planned outages and cancelled or rearranged another 15,300, when works overran, faults occurred or plans changed1.
AConstruction, maintenance and new connections all compete for the same outage windows. That is a whole-system constraint, and it can only be managed by someone who can see every project's cost of delay and trade one against another.
RThe Royal Academy of Engineering has called for a Chief Engineer, backed by the Prime Minister, to oversee the portfolio of grid projects3.
Give the portfolio an owner and a price for delay
AKIS PLUS LTD's view is that asset management practice treats the portfolio as the unit of decision. Three things would change the programme's odds: a named portfolio owner with the powers to reprioritise, a cost-of-delay figure for every project refreshed as forecasts move, and one published outage plan covering construction and maintenance together.
IWithout them, the NAO's warning is likely to hold: new generation will connect before the grid is ready, and consumers will carry the gap in constraint payments.
OUR PERSPECTIVEA programme can deliver every project it owns and still miss the outcome that nobody owns.
Three questions to ask this week
- Who is accountable for the outcome of our capital portfolio, as distinct from each project within it?
- Do we know the cost of delay for each project, and when was it last recalculated?
- How many of our planned outages were cancelled or moved last year, and what did that cost?