The future's bright and interconnected

Both the UK government and the European Union recognise the importance of cross-border interconnection and support it. From the UK government’s perspective, interconnection is seen as beneficial due to its potential contribution to three challenges of energy policy: affordability, ensuring security of supply, and decarbonisation.

The flexibility afforded by interconnectors and their potential to facilitate the integration of intermittent and decentralised generation is also seen as beneficial.

For the EU, interconnectors are crucial for the completion of the internal energy market and several UK-EU interconnectors have been awarded the prestigious Project of Common Interest (PCI) status by the EU.

These benefits, along with the introduction of the cap-and-floor regime, help explain why, in addition to the four interconnectors currently in operation in the UK, which provide about 4GW of capacity, there is now a strong pipeline of new interconnector projects.

Click here to read the full article which was first published in Infrastructure Investor, Annual Review, March 2018.