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In the 20th century, the UK’s electricity grid was shaped by coal-fired power stations, clustered in the industrial heartlands. The once world-leading system was designed for a one-way energy flow from power plants to consumers – whose use of electricity was modest and predictable.

The shift to cleaner energy and growing electrification of all aspects of life means the grid of 70 years ago is no longer fit for purpose. With power generated from a wider and more disparate range of sources, significant investment and pioneering technology are required to deliver a grid that can match supply with ever-increasing demand.

“It’s way more complicated than energy in equals energy out,” says Robert Friel, member of the Institution of Engineering and Technology’s Sustainability and Net Zero Policy Centre. “We are trying to integrate tens of thousands of energy sources into a grid that was designed to take coal energy mostly from the Midlands and move it around the country. This is a complete transformation. We’ve got to build for the future.”

Increasing demand

For instance, most of the UK’s wind power is generated off Scotland and in the North Sea, where a single turn of a turbine at Dogger Bank wind farm generates enough electricity to power a home for two days. But transporting that electricity to London and the south-east, where demand is higher, requires an overhaul of national transmission and distribution networks to overcome bottlenecks after decades of little expansion.

By 2035, Ofgem forecasts that the UK’s renewable generation capacity will grow from 120GW in 2024 to 300GW, resulting from ambitious targets for wind and solar power, which should largely free the UK from volatile prices of imported fossil fuels.

But the new grid isn’t just about integrating more clean power; it is also about helping the system cope with huge increases in demand.

UK consumers will be using twice as much electricity by 2050, the Climate Change Committee predicts [pdf], as petrol cars and gas-powered heating systems are displaced by electric vehicles (EVs) and heat pumps. As well as transport and heating, households are using electricity more than ever for entertainment, communication and home working, with on average 13 electrical devices per household – although more efficient appliances help keep energy use lower. As reliance upon cloud-based services and artificial intelligence (AI) grows, datacentre usage is expected to more than double by 2030.

To help meet this soaring demand, record levels of investment in the UK’s transmission network were recently announced by Ofgem, the UK’s energy regulator, as part of its framework for ensuring the companies operating the UK’s energy networks have sufficient revenue to invest in and run them. Nicola Connelly, CEO of SP Energy Networks, which plans to invest almost £12bn to 2031 in delivering critical energy infrastructure, noted: “If the UK wants to deliver on its ambition to be a clean energy superpower and capitalise on its natural resources, then it needs the electricity grid to match demand. We are committed to delivering that at pace, combining unprecedented levels of investment with a focus on ensuring fair returns for consumers and investors.”

Changing consumer habits

There’s a cultural change afoot too, as customers move from being passive consumers of energy to generating their own and, in some cases, selling it back to the grid. Faced with the upfront costs of installing EV chargers and solar panels, many hope to reap the benefits.

Aggregators – companies that bring together smaller energy producers – will play an increasing role from a consumer perspective in selling and buying electricity at the best price.

Consumers are also getting smarter at using power when it’s cheaper, aided by growing levels of automation, which will affect demand, habits and usage down the line.

Technological innovation

To cope with increasing demand, technologies are being introduced to increase the capacity of existing infrastructure and reduce the amount of new power lines that are inevitably needed to transmit twice the electricity we use today.

Much of the new infrastructure planned will be offshore and under the sea – which wasn’t an engineering option back in the 1950s when the supergrid’s overhead transmission lines were conceived and built.

However, the infrastructure being built and upgraded needs to be smarter, flexible and more responsive to the flow of energy moving in different directions across the network, and increasingly automated. The continued use of AI will help improve management of supply and demand in real time.

“It’s possible that AI tools could see problems emerging in a system with thousands of generators in a way that a few control engineers just couldn’t,” says Friel.

Friel says there’s also scope to understand far more about household consumption and generation at a granular level and “how potentially thousands of domestic batteries and millions of electric cars will come together. Smart meters are part of [supplying this data] but we need more information to enable a digital system to emerge.”

As well as providing vital data, smart technology is helping give customers more flexibility, says Rozlyn Brennan, smart solutions director at ScottishPower. “Households are now often producers of energy as well as consumers, and smart technology is allowing people to choose when they use their energy, whether it’s smart EV charging, or saving money by using appliances out of peak times.”

Innovations are creeping in. SP Energy Networks, for example, has created a detailed “digital twin” of Britain’s electricity network. Using AI, it allows the modelling and testing of digital solutions to manage increased electricity demand on its real-life counterpart, helping to prevent outages and identify the most efficient way to operate the network.

Other emerging uses of AI include using it to enable individual PV panels on solar farms to dynamically adjust to different lighting conditions and accurately find the optimal operating point.

But to get the benefits of emerging technologies and modernise the grid, the UK needs to get going, says Friel – and this requires vision and commitment of the kind that inspired the first supergrid.

Its successor must be built to meet the needs of a cleaner, more digital and decentralised world. This isn’t just an engineering challenge but a social one, demanding collaboration between grid operators, policymakers and consumers to create a system that’s resilient, efficient and fit for the future. “We’ve come further than we might have imagined in the last 10 years, but we’ve still got a long way to go,” adds Friel. “Transforming the grid [will require] billions of pounds, but the danger is we don’t think big enough.”