Connections, Capacity & Clean Power: Britain's Grid Reform - NESO

**Ed Porter** (0:00)
I'm your host, Ed Porter, and welcome back to Transmission.
Great Britain's energy system operator isn't just balancing the grid anymore. Not that that was ever an easy job. The role has expanded, planning gas security, designing markets, building data infrastructure, and mapping where every megawatt of new generation should go. All while the system itself grows year on year. My guest today is Kayte O'Neill, Chief Operating Officer at NESO, the public body now responsible for planning and operating Great Britain's energy system. Kayte covers a lot of ground, operability, connections, market design. If you want to dig into the data behind any of this, Ko, Modo Energy's AI analyst has it. Link in the description. Anyone moving capital into GB power needs to understand how the operator is thinking, because that thinking shapes every project that gets built.
Hello, Kayte. Welcome to Transmission.

**Kayte O'Neill** (1:06)
Good to see you. Thanks so much for having me on.

**Ed Porter** (1:08)
Our pleasure.
Let's dive straight into it. What is one thing that people consistently get wrong about operating NESO day to day?

**Kayte O'Neill** (1:17)
Yeah, I think actually the one thing that people typically get wrong is just the breadth and depth of our role. People have known us for such a long time as the electricity system operator, the electricity system planner. I think they know conceptually now we're a whole system organization, but it's maybe starting to see and feel some of that shift.
Even in the strategic planning space, yes, historically we've been focused on electricity. Now we're strategically planning across gas and across hydrogen. Our other roles are evolving in a very whole system way as well, providing that advice to government, providing whole system resilience assessments out into industry. You're just really seeing us make that quite significant step change. And I think people knew it was on the cards for NESO. It was something we talked about. But I think seeing actually the reality of that play out, the breadth and depth of where we are now spending our time, the things we are focused on, the whole system contribution we are making.

**Ed Porter** (2:24)
I still hear that. I still hear people say the National Electricity System Operator.
Obviously, you're the National Energy System Operator. And so your sort of your breadth is far bigger.

**Kayte O'Neill** (2:33)
Yeah. Yeah. Wildly, wildly different. And I think not just the breadth of what we cover, but the type of roles that we do. So of course, we're still operating the electricity system, still very involved in market design, still very involved in in network planning. But some of those other roles that I talk to, you know, providing the Clean Power 2030 advice to government, taking the learnings from the North Hyde substation fire last year and translating those into what are the learnings for resilience across the energy system and with the adjacent sectors. You know, those are huge step changes. Not everybody does see them, but it's certainly something that we're hoping is coming to life.

**Ed Porter** (3:18)
Okay, and North Hyde, that's close to Heathrow, right?

**Kayte O'Neill** (3:21)
Yeah, that's right. So that was the big substation fire that took out Heathrow briefly. But there were some really, really great learnings about how you think holistically about sort of critical assets, what's connected to them, how do you engage with those customers that are connected to those assets? Do we have that real deep understanding of the relationships across the industry and how we will use them in an incident?

**Ed Porter** (3:50)
Okay. And I'm excited to a few of those sort of electricity examples. I'm just sort of keen to give an example from the energy side, so the broader energy side. Is there like a molecules type example that you think about on a day to day or something you've delivered recently that you can give people a flavor of?

**Kayte O'Neill** (4:03)
Yeah. So probably the most pertinent one today is our focus on gas security of supply.
So we work really closely with National Gas, the gas system operator. But NESO actually has an explicit role in assessing the gas security of supply. Originally, that role was five to ten years out, and we've actually just agreed with government that we will expand that role. So we're now covering two to ten years out, working really closely with, as I say, National Gas who are focused on the coming year, so zero to one. And then we're looking at everything sort of two to ten out.

**Ed Porter** (4:41)
And this is a great topic, right? Because right now, global uncertainty in gas markets.
So how does NESO think about that uncertainty? And what more could we be doing to make our system more resilient?