A month ago the UK energy regulator stressed the importance of adding more links between the electricity systems of Britain and the surrounding countries.[1] This will help ensure power is available when the wind isn’t blowing. When it is, excess electricity can be sold to our neighbours.

Aquind’s schematic illustration of its proposal

Ofgem wrote

Currently Britain has seven operational electricity interconnectors, connecting it to Ireland, France, Belgium, the Netherlands, and Norway, providing almost 7% of the UK’s electricity last year.

The UK Government wants to more than double existing interconnector capacity by 2030 to support its target of quadrupling offshore wind capacity by the same date.

Give the importance almost everybody places on the development of interconnectors it was strange to see the government turn down an application for a 2 GW connection with France a week or so ago.[2] This article looks at why the interconnection was blocked and suggests that the government’s decision is vulnerable to court action in the form of what is called ‘judicial review’. Judicial review allows judges to tell government or its agencies that they have not acted in accordance with their responsibilities or that their decision is patently flawed. The rejection of this interconnector looks vulnerable to being overturned.

The proposed interconnector

A new electricity interconnector (Aquind) between Normandy in northern France and the UK’s southern coastline would have created a 2 gigawatt two-way link. Potentially able to supply over 5% of Britain’s electricity needs if fully utilised, the link was strongly recommended by the government’s planning advisers. Although the planners saw some limited problems with the proposal, these were heavily outweighed by the advantages. Very few, if any, large scale projects like this that are accepted by the planning body are then rejected by government.

So why was this application different?

The proposed 2 GW pipeline would have required cabling through the city of Portsmouth, disrupting traffic and other activities during the construction period. It might also have had detrimental impact on some local landscapes.

But the landscape effects were minor. The required interconnector requires construction of an inland convertor station next to the connection point to the electricity network. This would affect people’s view at a Grade II* listed cottage. The Planning Inspectorate, who carried out the detailed assessment of the project, regarded this adverse impact as ‘less than substantial’.

In addition, a small building of a height of 4 metres at the point at which the electricity cable and fibre optic links carrying internet data would have had some effect on a historic site. The applicants intended to mitigate the impact by surrounding it with trees. The planners also did not regard this as a serious problem.

The plan for the interconnector was, however, deeply unpopular in Portsmouth and the immediately surrounding area. Local politicians seem to have been united in trying to block the new link. The concerns were principally over the congestion caused during the construction period.

Route from Portsmouth up to the proposed substation. (With apologies for lack of clarity of the map).

Central government faced a dilemma. Its own planning inspectorate had summarised its recommendation to proceed as follows:

overall, the need case for the Proposed Development strongly outweighs the identified disbenefits[3]

and

The ExA (the planning inspectorate) therefore considers that the final balance indicates strongly in favour of granting development consent.

So how could government block the plan and so avoid political problems in the Portsmouth area? It used a reason that its own rejection letter acknowledges is extremely unusual. It said that its adverse decision was based on the failure of the applicants to fully assess a possible alternative site for the connection of the 2 GW cabling to the national electricity network (‘the Grid’).

Although the vast bulk of applications for permission to construct a building or to carry our other construction works do not require the applicant to show that its plans are better than all other possible plans, the government made an almost unprecedented exception for this proposal. In fact it admits that applicants need to prove their proposal is better than all others ‘in exceptional circumstances only’.

In this case, although the applicants had fully assessed a wide range of different Grid substations to connect to, they had missed out one particular location. This substation, called Mannington, is about 60 km to the west of the original choice of connection point.

Why hadn’t they evaluated this particular site? The reason appears to be that when the interconnector was first being planned the Mannington substation was proposed as the point at which electricity from a large offshore wind farm (‘Navitus Bay’) was fed into the Grid. The interconnector applicants would have assumed that the substation was not available for a further very high powered interconnector.

But then the wind farm proposal was rejected by the planning inspectors, and in this particular case the recommendation was followed by the government in September 2015. The substation therefore became an additional possible site for linking the proposed interconnector to the Grid. It seems as though the applicants knew this but failed to include a careful evaluation of the route in their application documents.

The government’s letter of a week ago to the company wanting to build the interconnector gives the failure to assess the advantages and disadvantages of using the substation at Mannington as the principal reason for blocking the application. It is not there is anything particularly wrong with the existing plan for the interconnector, they indicate, it is that using Mannington just might be better.

Except that we already know that it would not be. Why? Because some of the principal reasons for turning down the offshore wind farm proposal in 2015 were to do with the use of the Mannington substation.[4] The substation sits within the south east Dorset Green Belt, an area supposed to be protected from any forms of new building, such as would be required for the structures and buildings to bring more electricity into the substation. So the planning inspectorate called the proposal to connect the offshore wind farm to Mannington ‘inappropriate development’. Exactly the same argument would apply to bringing the electricity from the interconnector.

And to get to the substation would require crossing the New Forest National Park. To give permission for this (and the habitat destruction that would, at least temporarily, result) would require what the planning inspectors called ‘exceptional circumstances’. They say that these exceptional circumstances do not apply.

There is no reference in the recent rejection letter from the government to these earlier refusals. But, to summarise, the government has blocked a 2 gigawatt interconnector on the basis that the applicants hadn’t assessed a potential alternative connection to the Grid. But the government itself had rejected an earlier application to use that site for a similar purpose in 2015.

This looks to me like an obvious case for judicial review on the basis of the manifest irrationality of this month’s decision. But by the time this is all sorted out we will have lost yet more valuable time in the race to get Britain better connected to the energy networks of continental Europe to help decarbonisation.

[1] https://www.ofgem.gov.uk/publications/ofgem-gives-green-light-investment-new-interconnectors

[2] https://infrastructure.planninginspectorate.gov.uk/wp-content/ipc/uploads/projects/EN020022/EN020022-004431-EN020022%20-%20Secretary%20of%20State%20Decision%20Letter.pdf

[3] https://infrastructure.planninginspectorate.gov.uk/wp-content/ipc/uploads/projects/EN020022/EN020022-004425-EN020022%20-%20Final%20Recommendation%20Report.pdf

[4] https://infrastructure.planninginspectorate.gov.uk/wp-content/ipc/uploads/projects/EN010024/EN010024-000043-Examining%20Authority%20Recommendation%20Report%20-%20%20Main%20Report.pdf