From Queue to Kilowatts: Why Geospatial Constraints Now Determine Efficient Power Delivery

Introduction

If you have ever sat in an investment committee where a “bankable” renewables project is quietly downgraded because its grid connection slips into the next decade, you have already met the transition risk of the 2020s: location.

The technology stack is not the bottleneck. The bottleneck is whether the right projects can connect in the right places, at the right time.

No publication date, audience seniority beyond the sectors named, or preferred geography was specified, so I treat these as no specific constraint. This piece uses Great Britain as a concrete reference point and draws on international evidence where it clarifies mechanisms.
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Evidence-based analysis

The queue is not a pipeline; it is an allocation mechanism with weak information.  reports that the previous “first come, first served” approach left shovel‑ready projects waiting for up to 10 years and allowed the connections queue to grow to over 700GW, around four times what is needed by 2030 (NESO, 2025).

That is not a normal “pipeline” with realistic delivery probabilities; it is a congested option book in which speculative projects can crowd out investable capacity, reduce transparency, and raise financing costs through avoidable uncertainty.

The direction of reform is equally explicit: prioritise projects that are “ready and needed”, not those that are simply earliest in the queue. NESO frames the reform as a backlog‑clearing measure designed to unlock deliverable clean energy investment (NESO, 2025). Read in plain economic terms, this is a shift from time‑based rationing to deliverability‑ and system‑need‑based rationing.

Congestion turns spatial errors into money. When generation is built where power cannot move, the system pays to manage constraints through curtailment, redispatch and balancing services. ’s 2025 open letter on network charging signals is unusually clear that charging reform should improve alignment with spatial energy and network planning, and that locational signals can help reduce congestion and constraint costs (Ofgem, 2025).

The mechanism is straightforward. If a generator’s “headline” output is 1TWh, but network constraints force repeated curtailment, then delivered MWh is lower, revenues are lower (depending on contract structure), and the system’s decarbonisation value is lower. At scale, congestion affects consumer bills and can weaken public support if the system appears wasteful. NESO’s balancing‑cost analysis explicitly links constraint outcomes to network delivery decisions and explains that proactive network delivery is expected to reduce constraint costs over asset lifetimes (NESO, 2024).

Spatial planning is becoming the operating system. NESO’s Strategic Spatial Energy Planning describes its purpose as setting out types, locations, capacities and timings for electricity and hydrogen generation and storage, optimised across cost, network needs and wider spatial interests (NESO, 2025).

This is a move away from relying on decentralised siting decisions alone and towards a national, cost‑optimised spatial pathway. It does not remove the market. It changes what “the market” is asked to optimise by anchoring it more tightly to system feasibility and system cost.

Regulators are building complementary tools. Ofgem’s connections end‑to‑end review highlights a concrete barrier that will be familiar to anyone who has tried to shortlist sites: good quality, standardised network capacity data is not consistently available in a timely, decision‑useful form, preventing customers identifying optimal locations (Ofgem, 2025).

That is not administrative hygiene; it is a market‑design lever. Poor data leads to poor siting. Poor siting increases delay, capex risk and system coordination costs, and then forces the system to pay to work around those errors.

This is not a UK-only story.  concludes that grids are becoming the weak link of clean energy transitions. It estimates that global grid investment needs to nearly double by 2030 to over USD 600bn per year after a long period of stagnation (IEA, 2023).

It also highlights the sheer scale of projects waiting in grid connection queues internationally, at least 3,000GW of renewable power projects, with around 1,500GW in advanced stages (IEA, 2023). The implication is broad: “capacity targets” and “project pipelines” are increasingly separated by a grid‑and‑permitting reality that is local, not national.

Decision-relevant implications

For developers and investors: start underwriting the map, not just the asset. Treat connection and congestion exposure as financial variables that can dominate expected returns. If you still value grid access primarily as a binary (connected / not connected), your diligence is behind reality in a market where prioritisation rules, local constraints and charging signals are changing.

You need distributions: probability of connection by date, probability of curtailment under plausible network build, and sensitivity to charging and queue reforms.

A practical habit change is to require three answers in every board or credit paper:

• What are the credible connection‑date scenarios, and what assumptions drive them?
• What is the expected delivered output after constraints, not the nameplate output?
• What changes (network build, policy, consents) would most improve outcomes, and are you positioned to benefit?

For system operators and regulators: transparency is a real intervention. Everyone now agrees the queue needs reform. The harder question is governance: who publishes what data, at what spatial granularity, and with what accountability for quality and timeliness? Ofgem’s end‑to‑end review is explicit that lack of standardised, usable capacity data prevents better location choices (Ofgem, 2025).

Improving data is not neutral: it shifts investment, speeds decision cycles, and can reduce system costs by reducing avoidable mis-location. In a system trying to deliver both clean power and affordability, transparency becomes an efficiency instrument.

For large electricity users: location will show up in your energy strategy whether you like it or not. Data centres, electrolysers, EV fleets and electrified industrial loads are no longer passive “demand forecasts”. They are network events. Government messaging about accelerating connections for strategic demand and clean power reflects that reality (DESNZ, 2025).

What “good” looks like in practice

Good decision making does not require perfect foresight; it requires explicit assumptions and clear triggers. In spatial terms, that means you can:
(i) explain why you are in this location rather than the next viable one,
(ii) quantify the consequences of being wrong (delay, curtailment, higher capex),
and (iii) monitor leading indicators (network delivery milestones, queue reforms, consenting progress) early enough to adapt.

Sources:

National Energy System Operator (2025) Connections Reform Results. https://www.neso.energy/industry-information/connections-reform/connections-reform-results

Ofgem (2025) Connections End-to-End Review – Updated Proposals and Next Steps. https://www.ofgem.gov.uk/sites/default/files/2025-12/connections-end-to-end-review-next-steps-final.pdf

Ofgem (2025) Open Letter: Reforming network charging signals. https://www.ofgem.gov.uk/sites/default/files/2025-07/open-letter-reforming-network-charging-signals.pdf

National Energy System Operator (2025) Strategic Spatial Energy Planning (SSEP). https://www.neso.energy/what-we-do/strategic-planning/strategic-spatial-energy-planning-ssep

International Energy Agency (2023) Electricity Grids and Secure Energy Transitions. https://www.iea.org/reports/electricity-grids-and-secure-energy-transitions

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