On 24th February our Director Kat joined the Community Council Convention Round-table at the Parliament, to speak about the findings of our Battery Storage Report, and to encourage members to respond to the consultation on changing the thresholds for energy consenting so more (or all) decisions on onshore energy are taken by Local Planning Authorities.
Here is what Kat said in her three minute slot at the round-table.
We started looking into battery storage because we saw a huge uptick in enquiries from communities seeking advice on BESS in inappropriate places, particularly Greenbelt, which is one of our key priority areas. Our research looked at the database of renewable energy which is held by UK Government, and the data set we were looking up ran up to the end of June 2025, we also looked in detail at the planning paper work and decision making for every ECU BESS that was consented and a sample of the largest local authority consents (all 49-49.9MW).
The findings of our report:
There is a huge amount of battery storage in the pipeline –
And that the amount coming through to ECU is getting bigger and bigger. We found ECU had never turned down a BESS application. I checked the consents issued between end June 2025 and when we published Nov 2025 and this held true at that time. Developers know this, and so more and larger BESS are going into the system.
we have already consented three times as much (Nov 2025 figures) than we need for net zero. And that there is enough in the pipeline for 5x. (these are the figures from NESOs Future energy scenarios 2024 – the 2025 figures we FoI-ed and they are a little bit lower for 2030 (3.4-5.3 GW) and between 7.8-8.7 GW by 2050.
Since everything gets consented in the present system – we are ending up with a huge oversupply of consented battery storage much in completely inappropriate locations.
NESO’s effective moritorium on Battery Storage
4 days after we published out report and called for a moratorium on battery storage NESO announced the results of their review into grid queue reform and declared that only 15% of requests to join the grid queue in North Scotland could be granted and 20% in south Scotland – the rest will need to wait until the grid queue reopens. A very swift answer to our calls for a moratorium on BESS! There are similar figures for onshore wind-only 20% North Scotland and 28% south Scotland.
I haven’t time to say anything about the detailed analysis of each application but we were extremely concerned that NPF4 is being ignored in ECU decision making. an FoI we did found that ECU are not even asking for Information on whether a site is in green belt – the same is for Brownfield sites (from another FoI). They routinely do not include conditions requested by the local authorities and, something we are particularly interested in, they are excluding conditions related to biodiversity enhancement even when developers offer it – thereby Scotland is missing out on millions of pounds for nature.
Important policy change could change things
There is a consultation at the moment on amending the threshold by which decisions go to ECU. At present it is 50MW. In England all decisions on Battery storage go to local authorities, that should be the same here – but we think that argument can be made for all onshore energy.
We would like to see the threshold should be very much higher – in fact we believe that all decisions on onshore energy should go to local authorities and that energy should be included in Local development plans.
If this is the case there is the advantage that they can then go onto Local development plans and there will be spatial planning and local accountability. And a plan led approach, as our planning system is supposed to be. NESO can be a consultee on the LDPs which will bring in the element of linking to energy network planning and it will make the whole system far mor efficient.
The theory with having a national body responsible for energy consenting is to get a national strategic approach – this is not happening in any form. Let’s take planning for onshore energy into local development plans and then we will get both the national planning element AND the local democracy that we so desperately need.
We are asking Community Councils and others who are involved in campaigning against inappropriate development to respond to this consultation.
More on the consultation to change 50MW threshold – deadline for consultation responses 27th March