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Last week, the government began a consultation on ‘accelerating electricity network connections for strategic demand’, with plans to:
Staying power: much-needed housing must not be held up by a lack of grid capacity
- Stop speculative demand connection applications clogging the grid queue, after applications to the transmission network rose by 460% in the six months to June 2025;
- Get genuinely viable projects connected faster, especially strategically important schemes that support growth and jobs, including AI data centres;
- Impose tougher conditions on joining and staying in the queue, with consultations on stronger financial requirements such as deposits or milestone-linked fees; and
- Publish a list of strategically important projects that can be prioritised as capacity becomes available, alongside a more strategic process for connecting data centres.
Clamping down on speculative grid connection requests is a sensible move. If capacity is being tied up by projects that are not ready to proceed, that is bad for investment, delivery and growth.
That said, I would have welcomed explicit recognition of housing alongside the priority of securing jobs and growth.
Data centres matter and the government is right to recognise that. But this cannot become a simple case of prioritising one form of strategic infrastructure at the expense of another.
Housing also depends on timely access to power, as do other essential parts of social and economic infrastructure.
This is already a live issue. In parts of west London, we have seen grid constraints substantially delaying new homes, and similar pressures have been felt in Cambridgeshire and Oxfordshire. The grid is now a planning issue as much as an energy issue.
The answer is not to pit digital infrastructure against housing. It should be to set clear priorities, remove speculative demand from the queue and invest in the network so that viable projects with the greatest overall public value can move forward.
There is no overnight fix, but government does need a credible framework for deciding where scarce capacity goes first, and it must make sure homes are high on that list. The 1.5-million-homes target already appears off track, so care will be needed to ensure that much-needed housing is not held up by the lack of grid capacity.
Colin Brown, head of planning and development, Carter Jonas