National Grid Ventures President: North Sea grid doesn’t make sense without us
National Grid Ventures president Rebecca Sedler argues that Britain must reconnect with European energy markets, accelerate hybrid interconnectors and put consumers at the heart of North Sea planning.
By Rob Horgan, GridEx and international editor
National Grid Ventures President: North Sea grid doesn’t make sense without us
National Grid Ventures president Rebecca Sedler argues that Britain must reconnect with European energy markets, accelerate hybrid interconnectors and put consumers at the heart of North Sea planning.
By Rob Horgan, GridEx and international editor
Forty years ago, when National Grid and EDF’s transmission business (now RTE) set out to connect France and England via a 2GW interconnector, they were quite literally entering uncharted waters.
Paul Fletcher, now a technical director at Mott MacDonald, worked on the construction of the Interconnexion France-Angleterre (IFA) in the 1980s. Speaking from IFA’s site in Kent, as colleagues past and present meet to celebrate four decades of operation, Fletcher fondly recalls the challenges of turning the pioneering vision into a reality.
From building a bilingual message centre to send and translate messages from one side of the Channel to the other, to developing cutting-edge machinery so that the cables could be buried in a trench beneath the chalk seabed, IFA has always been at the forefront of innovation. Those pioneering feats are made even more impressive when you consider Fletcher and his colleagues had to use a local phone box to send daily progress reports back to National Grid’s London HQ.
When it began operating in 1986, IFA was the first modern electricity interconnector linking Great Britain with continental Europe and only the second subsea high-voltage direct-current cable link in the world. It remains Britain’s largest subsea connection by capacity and its lifetime net imports have totalled an estimated 409TWh to date.
The project, having reached the end of its original operational life, is fondly referred to by those who work on it today as ‘The Old Lady’. It now sits within National Grid Ventures’ portfolio, which includes five other interconnectors – the largest interconnector fleet in the world.
At the helm of that portfolio is National Grid Ventures’ president, Rebecca Sedler, who – along with her French counterparts – has taken the decision to breathe fresh life into the IFA interconnector, with a £400 million investment to extend its operation beyond 2050.
Sedler assumed the position in September, having previously acted as National Grid Ventures’ managing director of interconnectors for almost four years. Her appointment followed a structural transition within National Grid to a new operating model. In this role, she continues to oversee the company’s world-leading subsea electricity interconnector fleet and will be charged with drawing up future infrastructure development projects across the UK and Europe.
As it did during its original construction, IFA will again utilise cutting-edge solutions to upgrade essential technical equipment, buildings and facilities to ensure the interconnector is fit for modern-day requirements. As traditional, steady fossil-fuel plants close, the grid loses natural rotational inertia, and interconnectors can offer a high level of flexibility.
With markets operating on real-time data, it is also essential that interconnectors are able to respond to fluctuating electricity prices via automated import/export processes. In short, digital tools allow energy to be automatically routed through interconnectors from areas where it is cheap and abundant to areas where it is expensive and scarce. This drives down overall costs for consumers and prevents curtailment.
Upgrading IFA is therefore just the tip of the iceberg for National Grid Ventures. Speaking to GridEx ahead of the IFA celebration, Sedler outlines broader ambitions to expand Britain’s interconnector fleet, to be at the heart of a North Sea grid and to protect consumers from future price shocks.
The capacity of the IFA interconnector with France
Energy imported over the IFA since 1986
Investment to keep the IFA operating past 2050
The UK’s indispensable North Sea role
Building more grid offshore is inevitable, Sedler says. For Europe, the biggest opportunity to do that is in the North Sea.
However, following Brexit in 2020, the UK found itself excluded from the European Union’s North Seas Energy Cooperation (NSEC) planning forums. It meant European officials continued to draw up plans for offshore grids and renewable frameworks without direct UK participation.
Two years later, however, the exclusion was partially lifted as the UK agreed a Memorandum of Understanding (MoU) to re-engage with NSEC. Earlier this year, that MoU was turned into a concrete partnership as the UK joined nine other European nations (including Belgium, Denmark, France, Germany, Ireland, Iceland, Luxembourg, the Netherlands and Norway) to sign the Hamburg Declaration, committing to a massive joint plan to develop a 100GW North Sea offshore wind power grid together.
For Sedler, the UK’s involvement was never in doubt. She stresses that the region’s emerging offshore grid will only deliver affordable, secure power if Britain is firmly embedded in the European conversation.
“To think that that could be done in an area like the North Sea without the UK at the table is clearly suboptimal,” she says. “It just doesn’t make sense.”
Sedler’s central contention is that the UK’s geography, generation ambitions and existing interconnector fleet make it impossible to design an effective North Sea grid without British participation.
New ways of working
Creating a more coordinated approach will require new ways of working, Sedler says. Offshore wind farms, converter stations, subsea links, and the data layer which sits beneath them must be planned together rather than bolted onto national networks one project at a time.
The old approach – connecting generation first, then scrambling to reinforce the onshore network – cannot keep pace with the scale of development now envisaged.
“We can’t just pile onto the grid and expect everything to be connected and then do a load of grid upgrades and expect that to catch up,” Sedler says, adding that congested supply chains make coordination even more important.
She sees the beginnings of a more integrated model in projects such as LionLink and Nautilus. LionLink, National Grid’s proposed link with the Netherlands, is intended to connect to an offshore platform being developed as part of TenneT’s 2GW programme, which will also gather offshore wind.
Nautilus is planned around Belgium’s Princess Elisabeth Island, which will connect to nearby offshore wind farms and host interconnectors with neighbouring countries.
Such “hybrid” projects combine interconnection and offshore wind transmission. They can reduce the number of cables, converters and coastal landing points required compared with building each asset separately. Sedler describes LionLink as “the first seed of a coordinated grid”, while Nautilus could similarly make use of shared infrastructure and lessen the burden on onshore networks.
“It’s pretty obvious it’s the right thing to do to coordinate,” she says. The prize is not only lower capital expenditure; a strategic build-out can give manufacturers confidence to expand capacity and help developers understand where generation will connect.
The need is sharpened by another period of high energy prices. Europe may not be confronting the same shortage feared at the end of 2022, Sedler says, but households are facing an affordability crisis, while geopolitical shocks continue to expose the vulnerability of gas and electricity systems.
“The more we can extend our electricity network and share electrons and utilise our assets as much as possible to benefit consumers across Europe, the better,” she says. Recent crises, she adds, should be a reminder that volatility is not disappearing: “These issues aren’t going to go away. They are a continued feature of the gas and electricity systems across Europe going forward.”
That does not mean interconnectors are an alternative to domestic generation. Sedler is careful to reject a binary choice between cables and gas, nuclear or renewables. Cross-border links are instead “part of the overall portfolio of solutions”, providing flexibility around increasingly variable national systems.
“The more we can extend our electricity network and share electrons and utilise our assets as much as possible to benefit consumers across Europe, the better.”
Rebecca Sedler, president, National Grid Ventures
Rejoining Europe’s energy architecture
Infrastructure alone will not create an integrated grid, Sedler argues. She wants the UK to move closer to Europe’s carbon and electricity-market arrangements, starting with alignment between the UK and EU emissions trading systems. Without it, British electricity exports risk being caught by the EU’s carbon border adjustment mechanism.
That prospect, she argues, creates a perverse outcome where Britain could export cheap wind power to Europe only to see a carbon charge applied at the border. “It seems absolutely absurd,” she says. “Typically, our price would be super low because of wind dominating. But then we have a carbon tax put on it, and then that feeds back and disincentivises UK wind developers from building generation.”
Her next priority is a return to Europe’s integrated electricity market, enabling implicit trading across interconnectors. Today, capacity and electricity are traded through more cumbersome post-Brexit arrangements. The links still work – their daily capacity is fully sold and auctions are typically oversubscribed – but the process is less efficient.
“I would love us to rejoin the internal electricity markets of Europe, so we can just do seamless, implicit trading for all the interconnectors across all the borders,” Sedler says. The objective, as always for Sedler, comes back to it being “for the good of consumers”.
She also stresses the importance of reconnecting with Europe’s system-operator institutions. The UK’s participation in ENTSO-E, which has a formal role in European network planning, is one of the less visible but essential pieces of cooperation. “We have to rejoin,” she says. “That’s really important.” Sedler says that “conversations have been good and are ongoing”, but is cautious not to give anything more away. She does, however, warn that without coordination between Britain’s strategic spatial energy planning and its neighbours’ plans, assumptions about future interconnector flows could distort decisions on how much domestic generation is needed and where.
“The most important thing is that strategic and policy collaboration results in meaningful commitment and alignment,” Sedler says, bluntly. “However that’s achieved, I don’t really care.”
Her warning supports a wider point about the need not only for physical connections transporting power, but for organisational and data transparency between nations with increasingly connected grids. She says the physical cables are just one piece of the puzzle and that as much attention needs to be given to the supporting data and communications links: “Everyone thinks data just lives in a mythical cloud, and that it just appears. Of course, that isn’t the case. It needs to be built just as much as the cables do.”
Flexibility, security and the consumer case
For Sedler, the case for interconnection begins with flexibility.
Britain is an island system that imports much of its gas and is attempting to build large volumes of offshore wind alongside new nuclear. Cables allow it to export surplus electricity and import when supplies are tight, adjusting flows within seconds.
Taking IFA as a prime example, during its 40 years of operation electricity has historically flowed mainly to Great Britain. However, more recent years have seen an increase in flows going the other way. In 2022, electricity was exported from Great Britain for prolonged periods as France grappled with unplanned outages across its nuclear fleet.
There is also regular exporting on the intraday market, reflecting the different demand patterns between Great Britain and France. On the day GridEx visited the IFA site, for example, Great Britain was exporting power to France in the morning, with flows due to go the other way later in the day.
Improvements in data flows and system forecasting have allowed interconnectors to become more agile assets and Sedler stresses the importance of continuing to develop the digital infrastructure behind interconnectors, which is particularly important as the energy transition ramps up and more renewable forms of generation come online.
The ability to access cheaper French nuclear generation when the price of wholesale power is high in Britain helps to lower prices for British consumers, Sedler explains. National Grid analysis has found that in total its interconnectors have delivered £2 billion in net benefits to British consumers since 2023, compared with the higher cost of traditional gas generation.
“The purpose [of interconnectors] is to provide flexibility around that variability of the system in an economic way, and I think they do that really, really well,” she says.
Each large link can supply roughly a million customers, offering a scale of flexibility that household batteries, heat pumps, smart devices and electric vehicles cannot yet match. Sedler welcomes the eventual growth of consumer-side flexibility, but says it will take time to develop into a significant proposition.
Meanwhile, she says that fears that widespread offshore wind will make national prices converge and reduce the usefulness of interconnectors overlook differences in solar output, hydro availability, demand and weather across Europe.
Even if links ultimately operate more like conventional transmission assets because prices become more closely aligned, Sedler argues that consumers could still benefit from lower bills, resilience and redundancy.
Regulation that rewards innovation
The consumer case is also embedded in the UK’s cap-and-floor regime for interconnectors. The floor underwrites a minimum level of revenue, helping investors finance major infrastructure. The cap limits excess earnings and returns value to consumers when revenues rise above it.
Nemo Link, connecting Britain and Belgium, illustrates the model, Sedler says. It did not cost consumers money to build; instead, earnings above its cap have resulted in payments back to them. “It’s great regulation,” she says, “and great for investors like National Grid.”
The structure also encourages operators to manage capacity actively. Sedler’s trading teams can decide whether to sell capacity a day ahead or hedge a portion further into the future. If the difference between British and French power prices widens during a crisis, locking in some of that spread may secure value for customers even if the market narrows later. “We are so motivated when we see spreads go to a level that is exceeding our cap to lock that in, hedge that,” Sedler says. “We are thinking about hedging for customers.”
That incentive distinguishes interconnectors from ordinary transmission assets, which are generally rewarded for availability rather than commercial optimisation. “You should be encouraged to develop frameworks for regulatory deals that encourage you to optimise those for consumers,” Sedler says.
She sees similar logic in cap-and-floor proposals for long-duration storage, where operators can buy, sell and reshape positions while sharing exceptional value with billpayers.
One area where Sedler wants to see more proactive policy and regulatory support is multi-purpose interconnectors, which would allow cable developers and wind developers to submit joint proposals for hybrid projects serving both domestic generation and cross-border trade.
The obstacle is regulatory. A hybrid project may have to bring together the Contracts for Difference regime supporting wind farms, the offshore transmission owner framework and cap-and-floor regulation for interconnectors. “It’s a bit complex,” Sedler acknowledges, “but it feels like the right thing to do for a number of reasons.”
Ultimately, all Sedler’s arguments are about aligning plans – be it across generation and grid, or across borders. Plans also need to look beyond the short term, as preparing only five years ahead will not deliver the network Europe needs. “For me, network planning needs to be done really strategically, not just looking at the next five years, but 10 or 20 years ahead,” she says.
The immediate policy list is clear: align carbon markets, restore efficient electricity trading, deepen participation in European system planning and create a route for hybrid projects.
Behind those steps lies a broader demand for governments to turn declarations into delivery. “We cannot just announce policy, but we must follow through with it and work together in a coordinated way,” Sedler says.
Forty years ago, IFA’s pioneers found ways to bridge differences in language, engineering and geography, even while reporting progress from a local phone box. Today, the challenge is to bring that same problem-solving spirit to developing a North Sea grid and ensuring interconnectors are fit for the needs of a highly digitalised grid.
This article first appeared in Utility Week's sister website, GridEx Global gridexglobal.com
