RenewableUK’s Singh: onshore wind grid challenges must be fixed before Clean Power 2030 slips away

Onshore wind grid challenges are putting the UK’s Clean Power 2030 targets at serious risk, RenewableUK chief executive Tara Singh warned delegates at the Onshore Wind 2026 conference in Edinburgh. Her message was pointed: the policy ambition looks healthy on paper, but the infrastructure carrying it is not keeping pace.

Grid is ‘still a mess’

‘Grid is still a mess,’ Singh said, despite what she characterised as genuine positivity around auction rounds, deployment targets and planning reforms. The problems she identified are specific: connections need to be predictable, priced at what developers were promised, and offers need to arrive with accurate data so they do not have to be rejected on technical grounds before work can even begin.

Singh called for a more transparent and more accountable relationship between the industry, the National Energy System Operator (NESO), government and Ofgem. That is not an abstract governance wish. It reflects frustration that developers are making long-term investment decisions against a connection queue that has, until recently, been widely regarded as opaque and slow to reform.

There are early signs of movement. Osborne Clarke reports that NESO has begun issuing ‘Gate 2’ offers (formal connection proposals under the reformed grid queue process) to protected transmission and large embedded projects with 2026 and 2027 connection dates, with all offers for protected projects expected by mid-April 2026. That is a concrete milestone the industry will be watching closely. If Gate 2 offers are late, or arrive with the data errors Singh described, the reform narrative falls apart.

TNUoS uncertainty ahead of AR9 and what’s riding on the auction

Singh also pressed for ‘predictability’ in Transmission Network Use of System (TNUoS) charges ahead of the AR9 Contracts for Difference (CfD) auction. TNUoS exposure has been a recurring concern for Scottish generators in particular, given the locational charging methodology and the scale of capacity sitting north of the border. Unpredictable charges undermine the bankability of projects that are otherwise shovel-ready.

The stakes are clear from recent CfD history. Offshore wind secured a record 8.4GW of capacity in AR7, which the Department for Energy Security and Net Zero describes as the biggest single procurement of offshore wind in British and European history, according to Osborne Clarke’s analysis of the AR7 results. That number shows what the CfD mechanism can deliver when the conditions are right. The question is whether onshore wind gets the same runway.

AR8, meanwhile, will be structured across five pots, with an additional Delivery Year added for solar PV, onshore wind, remote island wind, floating offshore wind and offshore wind technologies, according to CMS Law’s review of the final allocation framework. The structural complexity of the auction mechanism is not the barrier Singh is focused on. Grid is.

Singh’s framing of onshore wind as ‘by far the cheapest scale renewable we have’ is the kind of claim that deserves scrutiny but largely holds up against levelised cost data. Her argument is that its cost advantage makes it the most effective vehicle for building broader public support for the energy transition, not just for hitting a capacity number. Whether that argument lands with an audience worried about turbine proximity and planning appeals is a separate question, but the economics are hard to dispute.

On Scotland’s role, Singh was direct: ‘If we want cheap energy in the whole of the UK then we need Scotland, and we need that grid built.’ The delivery engine framing is not just rhetorical. Scotland holds a large share of the consented and operational onshore wind capacity that the UK’s clean power ambition depends on, and the transmission constraints running south through the interconnectors represent a genuine physical bottleneck, not a policy nuance.

Failing to meet the Clean Power 2030 onshore wind targets, Singh said, would be ‘a missed opportunity from government’. With Gate 2 offers for protected projects due by mid-April 2026, the reformed connection process faces its first real test of whether grid reform moves at the speed the auction calendar demands.