Grid connection

Ofgem proposes a fee on oversized battery projects clogging the grid connection queue, starting at £3,000 per MW

The Oversubscribed Technologies Commitment Fee targets utility-scale battery storage only, not domestic solar and battery systems, but it is Ofgem's clearest admission yet that the connection queue behind this site's own reporting on stalled solar planning is a real bottleneck it is now trying to price its way out of.

18 September 2026 · Source: Ofgem

Ofgem opened a two-week consultation on 17 September on a new charge it is calling the Oversubscribed Technologies Commitment Fee, aimed squarely at utility-scale battery storage developers rather than homeowners. The number behind it is stark: Britain's battery connections queue currently holds around 90 GW of proposed capacity against a projected need of roughly 29 GW by 2035, close to three times what the grid will actually require. Ofgem's proposal is to charge developers for holding a place in that queue once oversupply in a given area passes 50% of target capacity, starting at £3,000 per MW and rising to £25,000 per MW if the backlog does not clear, with the fee dropping away again once oversupply falls below 25%.

This lands the day after this site covered utility-scale solar's own planning pipeline drying up in 2026, and the two stories are the same underlying problem seen from opposite ends. Developers have been submitting speculative connection applications for both solar and battery projects on a scale the grid cannot physically absorb, which clogs the queue for everyone behind them, including the genuinely viable projects that would actually get built. Ofgem's fee is a blunt instrument aimed at that speculative layer: make holding an unrealistic place in the queue cost real money, and the projects that were never going to be built should drop out, freeing capacity for the ones that will.

None of this changes anything about how a domestic rooftop or plug-in install gets connected. Residential systems go through the ordinary DNO notification process, G98 for smaller installs and G99 above that threshold, and this fee applies only to large-scale battery storage developers sitting in the transmission-level connection queue, not to a household inverter or a plug-in solar kit. But the queue congestion this fee is designed to clear is the same congestion that has made larger commercial and community solar connections slower and less predictable across the country this year. If Ofgem's fee genuinely works, and NESO's own monitoring over the next few months should show whether it does, the practical effect for anyone applying for a larger non-domestic system locally would be a shorter, more realistic queue to sit in rather than a faster process today.

Read the original: Ofgem. Commentary is Sandwich Solar's own editorial view; the original reporting is credited to its publisher.

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