Onshore transmission project delivery

Beauly Mossford is a reinforcement of the transmission system to the North West of Inverness being undertaken by Scottish Hydro Electric Transmission plc (SHE Transmission). It was completed at the end of 2015 and delivered approximately 252MW to accommodate future renewable generation in the area.

The reinforcement included:

• the construction of a new substation at Corriemoillie
• the replacement of the existing 132kV overhead line and tower infrastructure with a double circuit 132kV overhead line
• an element of underground cable.

We approved £53.2m of additional Allowed Expenditure for the Beauly Mossford project in April 2014.

This Scottish Hydro Electric Transmission plc (SHE Transmission) project is a large reinforcement of the transmission system in the far north of Scotland. It provides additional transmission capacity to export power from the expected increase in onshore renewable generation in the Caithness area, as well as new generation located on the Shetland and Orkney islands.

The project involves a subsea HVDC cable link between Caithness and Moray and a number of associated onshore works. The entire project is to be built by 2018/19.

In 2014 we approved £959 million (in 09/10 prices) of additional Allowed Expenditure for the project. 

This project reinforces the transmission system around the Kintyre peninsula, in the South West of Scotland. The increase in transmission capacity, delivered in Q1 2015/16, will accommodate future renewable generation projects.

The project comprised:

• a new substation in Crossaig Forest
• replacing the existing overhead line between Carradale and Crossaig with a higher capacity double circuit overhead line
• installing two subsea cable circuits from the new substation around the north coast of Arran to Hunterston.

This was a joint project between SHE Transmission and Scottish Power Transmission Limited (“SPT”), with approximately 90 per cent of the cable falling within SHE Transmission’s current transmission area.

We approved £174 million (in 09/10 prices) of additional Allowed Expenditure for the project in 2013. 

Hinkley - Seabank is a new transmission project to allow for the safe connection of the planned Hinkley Point C nuclear power station. The project will also provide additional capability and relieve transmission constraints in the South West of England. In January 2016 the Secretary of State for Energy and Climate Change approved National Grid’s plans for the project.

These plans can be found on National Grid’s website.  In January 2018 we approved the needs case for the Hinkley Seabank project. In May 2020 we published our project assessment decision for the Hinkley-Seabank electricity transmission project.

North West Coast Connections (NWCC) was a proposed new transmission project to connect a potential 3.4GW nuclear power station at the Moorside site in Cumbria. In 2015 National Grid published its favoured route corridor following public consultation and it consulted again in 2016.

In June 2017 National Grid announced that it was pausing work on the project and the project has now been cancelled.

Scottish Hydro Electric Transmission (SHE-T) submitted the Final Needs Case for the Shetland project in early 2020. We approved the Final Needs Case for the project in July 2020. For details of our assessment see Shetland transmission project: Decision on Final Needs Case and Delivery Model.

We completed the Project Assessment in November 2021 and determined the costs that SHE-T can recover for delivering the project.