The energy landscape is undergoing a revolution, with changing generation and demand patterns driving the need for substantial network investment in order to reach the UK government's Net Zero Target by 2050.
We have worked with industry during the development of our Early Competition Plan. We submitted our plan to Ofgem in April 2021 and our low-regret implementation activities in December,2021. Currently awaiting Ofgem’s decision, which is anticipated in early April ,2022 whilst planning implementation work
What is an 'Early Competition Plan'?
Early competition refers to competition that occurs prior to the detailed design, surveying and consenting phases of solution development. This means organisations could compete for the design, build and ownership of onshore transmission solutions. Early competition will help encourage new ways of working and aims to seek the best solutions at a fair cost for consumers.
Find out more about our zero-carbon ambition.
We have worked with partners from in and outside the energy industry to identify how competition could be introduced to cocreate our proposals. Our Early Competition Plan describes an end-to-end process of how early competition may work, proposing how models for early competition could be implemented and outlines the roles and responsibilities of all parties in the end-to-end process. More details about the project, and how we have worked with our stakeholders to form our proposals can be found on our key documents page.
What happens next?
Ofgem have reviewed our Early Competition Plan submitted in April 2021 and have announced their decision to progress early competition. They have asked the ESO to lead the implementation of the early competition tender process.
Last year the ESO took forward ‘low regrets’ activity to help towards the implementation of early competition. This includes developing internal ESO processes to undertake project identification and share appropriate network models. We have published a summary of this activity on our website. We have also shared a paper setting out how applicable the transmission model may be at distribution level. Finally, we have included a high-level implementation timeframes diagram.
Additional information developed through this process will be shared with stakeholders through appropriate forums, should Ofgem decide to progress early competition. This includes a draft project identification CBA and potential code change requirements. Our published key documents from Phase 5a are found on our key documents page.
