A Committee of MPs has been told northern Great Britain is being “penalised to the tune of tens of millions of pounds every year” by outdated rules governing how the electricity network is paid for, with Scotland worst-hit.
Referring to the Transmission Network Use of System (TNUoS) charging regime Scottish Renewables CEO Claire Mack told Westminster’s Scottish Affairs Committee earlier today that the “solution lies with the UK Government and with Ofgem, the energy regulator”.
She said they must act – as the UK Government committed to do in its energy white paper – without delay to reform “the commercial rules of the electricity system” or risk “excessive costs for consumers or a failure to reduce emissions in line with our net zero target.”
The trade group has published a new report on the issue today, which it has claimed could “deal a blow to ambitions to increase the amount of offshore wind in Scottish waters tenfold by 2030”.
Mack said the system is bad for consumers – with the cost of added risk alone worth a possible £14 per UK household by 2030, as well as bad for net-zero, by damaging the business case for green power projects outside southern England.
The system risks the UK losing its best renewable resources, many of which are in Scotland, she stated.
She also said the system is failing to do what it was designed to do in the early 1990s, with “wildly unpredictable” charges failing to reflect the cost of running the electricity network, which has remained stable for many years.
She said the costs are set to get “much worse”, increasing on average from £11 per kW in 2016 to a predicted £27 per kW in 2024 – an increase of 145%.
She pointed out that the TNUoS charge is not levied on European renewable energy projects, “meaning it is cheaper to build wind farms there and sell the power to the UK through a growing number of interconnector cables than build homegrown clean power plants”.