Energy transmission: England’s NIMBYs are fast becoming NOBYs

Britain’s booming offshore wind industry urgently needs more grid capacity. Just like Australia, locals are resisting the rollout of wires and pylons.

Norfolk, England | Christine Murton runs a civil engineering business with her husband from her home near the village of Roydon, in the eastern English county of Norfolk. But something other than work has been preoccupying her lately.

For the past two decades, she has been rewilding almost two-thirds of her 10-acre (four hectare) garden into a woodland, building up a wildlife corridor to a neighbouring wetland known in these parts as a “fen”.

“It should be in nobody’s backyard”: East Anglia campaigner Geoff Lazell. Hans van Leeuwen

But in the past year, Britain’s National Grid has unveiled plans to erect several 50-metre-high pylons that will loom over her wood – and may even require some of it to be cut down. These form part of a new 180-kilometre high-voltage transmission line that will link power-hungry London to the burgeoning wind-energy industry off the East Anglian coast.

As swallows swoop to snack on the thronging insects around us, she calls her woodland “a life’s work”, waxing lyrical about barn owls, bats and bees. Then she looks up at the space that will be filled by pylon No.89. “We’re absolutely bloody devastated about this. I can’t even begin to tell you,” she says.

She and other simmering residents up and down the path of the line are girding for battle. And their campaign might be only the first of many such clashes, as Britain looks to upgrade its creaking electricity grid to support the green-energy transition.

The showdown echoes the one that is playing out in far less densely populated parts of rural south-eastern Australia, where local community and conservation concerns are pitted against the pressing demands of ditching fossil-fuelled power.

“Net zero has become a sacrificial altar now, they will throw onto it every lamb that needs to be sacrificed,” says Geoff Lazell, a retired businessman and neighbour of Murton’s, who has already succeeded in having the line’s proposed route moved away from a local steam-railway museum and gardens.

The campaigners are supported by district and regional councils in East Anglia, several of which are no longer Tory strongholds after recent electoral wins by the Green Party. All insist that they are not opposed to net zero agenda, and are not NIMBYs.

“We are always accused of being NIMBYs. But we’re not, we are NOBYs – these pylons should be in nobody’s backyard,” Lazell says.

Their argument is that a transmission grid can be built – and should have been built, if the offshore wind industry had been properly planned – off the coast, creating something both less obtrusive and more efficient.

National Grid is still carrying out early-stage consultations on the plan, with a more formal consultation set for next year and a development consent order application to the national planning inspectorate in 2025.

Its concern is that the present electricity transmission network in the region was developed in the 1960s to satisfy only regional demand. The regional grid’s 4.5 gigawatt capacity cannot meet the needs of the North Sea wind industry, which is at the centre of a government target to generate 50 GW of offshore wind power by 2030.

Christine Murton, at the edge of her woodland, shows the planned location of pylon No. 89. Hans van Leeuwen

“The offshore wind industry has grown far more quickly than anyone envisaged – in a way, it has been a victim of its own success,” says Barnaby Wharton, director of future electricity systems at industry group RenewableUK.

“We haven’t really invested in the network for 30 years. We’ve sweated our assets, and we’ve got to the point where we simply have to build more grid.”

Within a decade, National Grid will need infrastructure in East Anglia capable of supporting 20 GW, much of it destined for populations outside the region.

The opponents understand the challenge, but are convinced National Grid is opting for the cheapest, quickest and most piecemeal solution.

“There’s a suspicion that National Grid’s time scales are just as important as cost – that they feel they have just got to get something done,” says John Ward, deputy leader at nearby Babergh District Council.

“They won’t talk about anything other than this project. They won’t talk about anything else.”

A National Grid spokeswoman says the company is considering the feedback from its initial community consultations, but seems unconvinced about the offshore option.

“This would only carry a third of the capacity of an overhead line. We would need to build three subsea cables and associated onshore infrastructure to deliver the same capacity as the overhead line, at significant extra cost to consumers,” she says.

RenewableUK’s Wharton says the offshore option would be “phenomenally complicated” and would create a critical delay. This is because wind farm developers have 10-year leases over the seabed, and they need certainty over the transmission infrastructure within that period.

Offshore wind turbines at the Scroby Sands Wind Farm near Great Yarmouth. Bloomberg

“Nobody is worried that once you build an offshore wind farm you won’t be able to get energy into the grid. It’s a question of when you will be able to do it – that’s a major risk,” he says.

“The concerns are about delay and increase in costs, which pose a risk to individual projects but also to decarbonisation as a whole.”

Murton has another suggestion, one that has also been posited by campaigners in regional Australia: go underground. This is already incorporated into the plan further south at Dedham Vale – a particularly beautiful area in Essex, celebrated in the 19th-century paintings of John Constable.

Ward is sceptical that this is a much better option. He points to the temporary disruption of wide trenches, the longer-term restrictions on planting above the completed cable, and the permanent presence of paved access roads and converter stations en route.

Murton, though, echoes Australian campaigners in bringing up the Suedlink in Germany. This underground transmission-cable project is using a less disruptive boring technique called horizontal directional drilling – but it, too, is expensive.

The campaigners are pinning their hopes on a new comparative study of the options, promised by National Grid’s Electricity System Operator. They also hope grassroots opposition will motivate the region’s Conservative MPs to put pressure on the government to change tack.

But the remorseless logic of the energy transition seems to be against them. “We’re sympathetic to the changes that communities in East Anglia are facing. This is a difficult issue. But we have trade-offs to make,” Wharton says.

Ward suspects National Grid will quickly find itself at the pointy end of judicial reviews. This could trigger the very delays that so worry an already beleaguered offshore wind industry.

Although crunch time is still some way off, the frustration and despondency of people like Lazell and Murton rises readily to the surface.

“People say you get used to the pylons. But we shouldn’t have to get used to them – there is an alternative,” Lazell says. “It makes me so angry.”

As for Murton, she reckons the fight is only just beginning. “This is just a small part of what we’re going to see in this country over the next 30 years. Just the first test.”

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