As part of West London Business and Park Royal Business Group’s ongoing advocacy on energy constraints that are impacting the entire subregion, we have produced a joint response to the SSE Willesden Grid Supply Point Strategic Development Plan (GSP SDPs) which was open for consultation across the summer and discussed at our recent Park Royal Business Group Breakfast Forum at the Ace Café with SSE attending as one of our key speakers.
WLB and PRBG have been responding to the energy constraints crisis affecting three of our boroughs (Hillingdon, Hounslow and Ealing) since 2021, when members first brought attention to the issue due to difficulties in securing new planning authority. Since then, we have been working closely with our partners at the West London Alliance to liaise with District Network Operators (DNOs) such as SSE and UKPN alongside Ofgem to secure new capacity. A lack of capacity and delays to system upgrades in Park Royal could have a chilling effect on the already difficult economic situation for many of these businesses, potentially forcing them to relocate from West London entirely.
Due to the geographical region this substation covers, we also sought the input of many of our PRBG and WLB members and strategic partners to incorporate information across various stakeholders in a joint response, with input from the Old Oak and Park Royal Development Corporation (OPDC), as well as major occupiers of the region such as APCOA and SEGRO.
This has helped paint a comprehensive picture of not just regional need, but identifying key queries across our businesses that arose from the document, such as the need to approve consented but not installed commercial rooftop solar in Park Royal:
The Executive Summary should also address by when SSEN will have the network infrastructure upgraded for the 9.1MW of solar PV that has planning consent in the Park Royal area to be connected on G99 (unlimited) connections. The SDP could also indicate whether SSEN is likely to prefer a private network (PN) to be built out in Park Royal, noting that the PN might still be reliant on SSEN upgrades or will have constraints on export capacity.
One of our main queries across this Strategic Development Plan was the usage of the outdated 2023 Distributed Future Energy Scenarios (DFES) analysis in their respective projections for future energy demand. This meant that the SDPs will not have accounted for more recent evidence from the Phase 1 subregional Local Area Energy Plans (LAEPs) conducted for West London in 2023, the first of its kind in the capital, and the ongoing work by local councils to develop their Phase 2 LAEP plans.
Whilst this was acknowledged in the Willesden consultation in the Appendices, the overall body of the document still utilised the 2023 DFES projections, which would change substantially if they had used the 2024 updated projections.
On our net zero and sustainability policies, we were pleased to see strong references being made to heat networks given the new commissioning of Hemiko in constructing a District Heat Network for the Park Royal area (OPEN) that is hoping to bring about 86GWh of heat at full build out. However, we would have appreciated more explicit referencing of OPEN given Willesden’s location.
Overall, we are exceedingly grateful for the increased communication and engagement we have been having with SSE and Ofgem over the past year and look forward to continued collaboration together to address the subregion’s energy needs. In particular, we will continue to push for additional energy supply prior to 2037 given the projections for increased demand by the 2030s that will stretch beyond what is currently available in West London.
