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Grid and bear it: British Isles celebrates and sweats over electricity grid upgrades
15/9/2026
News
Electricity consumption and renewable generation in Northern Ireland</em>, published 3 September 2026
Great Britain’s National Audit Office (NAO) has warned of the risk that the UK government’s grid upgrade will not be completed by 2030 as planned. A new report found the project timetable ‘very challenging’.
The NAO report points out that the grid upgrades need to meet tight deadlines in order to head off rising constraint costs. Constraint costs are paid by the government to energy generators to adjust their output to prevent overloading transmission lines; effectively, when grid limitations prevent their electricity from reaching consumers.
Constraint costs totalled £1.9bn in 2025–2026, and NAO predicts they could rise to up to £7.8bn by 2030. The NAO reports that the industry regulator Ofgem estimates that accelerating grid investments will save electricity customers £30 on their bills by 2030 by avoiding increased constraint costs, although making the £70bn of investments will cost £60 per customer.
The NAO worries that the work may not be done on time. It says that only 16 of 80 projects highlighted by the National Energy System Operator (NESO) as necessary in 2024 were accomplished. Most of the rest, it says, are at early stages of development and not expected to be completed in time to meet NESO’s targets for optimal effect at reducing constraint costs.
NAO Head Gareth Davies said: ‘Value for money now depends on delivery. Failure to implement these necessary grid updates will hamper economic growth as well as increase consumer bills.’
Meanwhile, news across the Irish Sea from the other nation making up the UK, Northern Ireland, is that in the first half of 2026 renewables generation exceeded non-renewables for the first time. Over the 12 months to the end of June, renewable sources generated 50% of gross final energy consumption (8,865GWh), up from 44% in the previous period. The mix of renewables was 74% wind, 18% bioenergy, 6% solar, 1% landfill gas and 1% hydroelectricity and tidal. Almost all of the non-renewable generation was gas, with 3% from oil.
To the south, Republic of Ireland Energy Minister Darragh O’Brien announced in early September that solar generation capacity has exceeded 3GW in the country. At one point in late August, utility-scale solar generation exceeded 1.3GW, which amounted to a third of the country’s entire generation.
Overall, the country has 8GW of renewable energy generation capacity. On 11 September, EirGrid real-time energy reporting suggested that the country’s daily energy mix was 43.6% renewables, 36% gas, 17% imports and 3% other. On that day, total energy production capacity peaked at about 4.5GW (four times that of Northern Ireland alone).
EirGrid CEO Cathal Marley said that the news comes ‘as we continue to progress the most ambitious programme of work ever undertaken on the transmission system in Ireland, to support our economy and society’.
Launched in June, €19bn of investment has been allocated by the government to complete 389 transmission projects by 2030, including building out offshore infrastructure to connect to future wind farms.
