Ofgem Fixed the Queue. The Bottleneck Just Moved.

For most of the last two years, the story of the UK grid connection queue was one of sheer volume. Applications for a connection grew from around 41GW to 125GW in under a year, and by early 2025 NESO was managing a pipeline of more than 700GW, a figure with no relationship to what the network could plausibly deliver. A large share of that pipeline was never going to be built. Projects held their place in the queue with no planning consent, no land rights, no financing, sometimes nothing more than a name and a grid reference, because there was no cost to speculating and no penalty for being wrong.

The reform that followed, built around NESO’s Gate 2 process and Ofgem’s TMO4+ decision, was aimed squarely at that problem, and by its own measure it has worked. The reformed pipeline now holds around 238GW of projects being taken forward through to 2035, down from the 700GW that had built up before it. Roughly 217GW of generation capacity was filtered into Gate 1 for lacking consents, land rights, or any demonstrable progress. For data centres, where Ofgem estimates as much as 73GW of the current pipeline may be speculative, a parallel set of proposals would require large projects to pay a commitment fee of between £237,500 and £712,500 per megawatt just to accept a connection offer, refunded on energisation and forfeited if the developer walks away.

This is, by any reasonable standard, a well designed piece of policy. It has done what queue reforms rarely manage: it has actually shrunk the queue. What it has not done, and was never going to do, is guarantee that the projects now holding a protected place in that queue can be built on the timeline they have claimed.

Readiness is not the same thing as capability

A Readiness Declaration asks a developer to demonstrate progress on planning, land, and financing. It does not ask whether the developer has a contractor who can actually deliver the substation, the cabling, and the civils on the timeline the declaration implies. Those are different questions, and the industry has spent the last eighteen months answering the first one while largely ignoring the second.

This matters because the UK’s capacity to physically deliver high-voltage connections, in skilled labour, in contestable-works contractors, in DNO and transmission-owner programme capacity, has not grown at anything like the rate the connection pipeline has shrunk. NESO has removed the projects that were never going to be built. It has not created new delivery capacity for the projects that remain. A developer who clears the readiness bar in 2026 is now competing for the same finite pool of ICPs, substation contractors, and cable capacity as everyone else who cleared it alongside them, at exactly the moment the reform has made that pool of protected, “real” projects far more concentrated than it used to be.

The result is a queue that looks solved from NESO’s side of the fence and still looks uncertain from the developer’s side of it. Being judged ready no longer means being connected on time. It means having earned the right to compete for delivery capacity that is itself becoming the actual constraint.

The developers who will feel this first

The projects most exposed here are the ones that treated the Gate 2 process as a compliance exercise: assemble the paperwork, submit the declaration, protect the queue position, and only then start thinking seriously about who is going to build the thing. That sequencing made sense under the old regime, where a connection offer was mostly a waiting game. It does not make sense now, when the projects competing for delivery slots are, by construction, the ones that already cleared the readiness bar.

The developers in a genuinely strong position are the ones who reversed that sequence: who treated delivery capability as part of the readiness case itself, engaging an ICP for contestable works and locking in procurement and programme commitments before the Gate 2 window rather than after. Their Readiness Declaration was not just a description of intent, it was backed by a delivery relationship that could actually be evidenced, which is precisely the kind of progress NESO’s assessment rewards, and precisely the kind of position that is hardest to manufacture retroactively once a connection offer has already landed.

Ofgem has done the industry a genuine service by clearing 462GW of dead weight out of the connections pipeline. But a shorter queue of well-documented projects is not the same thing as a queue of buildable ones, and the gap between those two things is where the next set of delays is going to come from. The developers who understand that the reform changed who gets to compete, not how hard the competition still is, are the ones who will actually get connected on the date they were promised.

Where TMS Grid fits

TMS Grid is an Independent Connection Provider and EPC contractor delivering high-voltage grid connections across the UK, from feasibility through to energisation. We work alongside developers early, including through the Gate 2 process, so that readiness on paper and delivery capability are the same thing rather than two separate problems.