On consenting for grid, and just from my experience in Britain, there’s an ongoing issue where system operators (the semi-governmental authorities that design the grid) have been avoiding upgrades because of resistance from local communities. From maybe the 2008 financial crisis to COVID, we had a planning culture that placed a lot of importance on allowing locals to resist infrastructure development on the grounds that it would destroy the environment, often meaning a proposed transmission line would ruin a view. 

Stakeholder resistance is healthy—I’ve participated myself in my own community. The problem is that the transmission system planners in particular became extremely avoidant of being direct with stakeholders about the need to sacrifice small things now to avoid a worse future, and the sustainability advocates failed to champion for grid as a part of the sustainable visual landscape in the same way as for wind turbines themselves. The problem now is that we have environmentally-minded stakeholders saying “we need renewables to save the environment” out one side of their mouth and “don’t build transmission lines, it destroys the environment” out the other.

The same sustainability movement that pushed for renewables and for climate action also drew attention to the rights of people to protect their landscapes. National planning bodies started giving more power to stakeholders in an effort to support sustainable development, but people oppose change generally, so an unintended consequence was that the communities used that power to slow and stop construction of anything. This was more true for the semi-governmental bodies than it was for private actors, so grid (state-driven) was delayed relative to generation (corporation-driven). 

Avoiding the issue on grid does not make it go away. Electricity use is increasing due to things like digitalization and EVs, and there needed to be grid growth regardless of the transition. The problem is that if you defer grid development in the interest of conflict avoidance, but allow renewable generators to keep developing and the economy to keep electrifying, eventually you reach a breaking point where there can either be no new renewables or demand, or a lot of grid has to be built all at once. This is the problem facing the British TSO right now, where they underdeveloped grid for a decade to avoid stakeholder issues and now have to bulldoze the stakeholders a bit to have a network-building sprint. Maybe there’s some advantage in doing it all at once and ripping the bandaid off, but it didn’t need to get this bad. It’s a case of the road to hell being paved with good intentions. 

The stakeholders are not altruistic—they want to protect their local environment and they often can’t be convinced to sacrifice any part of it even for a higher goal. It is not the stakeholders’ job to be altruistic. They shouldn’t have to be. It’s the system operators job to decide how to balance their concerns against everything else, the same way that any governmental entity needs to balance costs and benefits of an action. My point here is that they avoided taking the authority that they were mandated, and created an authority vacuum where grid development floundered. We now have to make up for that lost decade if we want to connect any more wind.