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By Eshe Nelson
Reporting from London and Cambridgeshire, England
In rural Cambridgeshire, a new British semiconductor company is poised to expand beyond its lab and open a production base. But the company’s ambitions came with unforeseen costs to bring enough electrical power to the new site. The future bill? A million pounds.
Paragraf manufactures chips based on graphene, an ultra-thin carbon. Its devices can be used to detect faults in electric vehicle batteries, to prevent fires, or to run on quantum computers. After obtaining it in 2023, Paragraf planned to develop its weekly output spanning from tens of thousands of devices to millions.
But the burden of expanding on-site power, the result of years of underinvestment in the U. K. ‘s electric power grid, is diverting money (and time) away from recruiting and purchasing equipment, said Simon Thomas, chief executive of Paragraf.
“Our biggest merit when you’re a company like ours is how temporarily you can scale,” he said. Delays “affect not only what you can do now, but also your long-term success,” he added. “It’s incredibly frustrating. “
Across the country, court cases over Britain’s lack of investment are coming to a head after more than a decade of low economic expansion and stagnant wages.
There’s an “overriding sense of things not working” in the economy, said Raoul Ruparel, the director for Boston Consulting Group’s Center for Growth and a former British government special adviser. That includes a lack of affordable housing, weak public services including transportation and long hospital wait times.
With the economy expected to essentially flatline this year, two ideas to reignite it have stood out: Accelerate electrical grid upgrades and make it easier for new construction to win planning approval. Analysts and lawmakers hope that these initiatives can unlock investment in infrastructure, cut carbon emissions and deliver much-needed productivity growth.
The challenge is enormous: in the last five years, the number of requests to connect to the electricity grid (many of them for solar power generation and storage) has increased tenfold, with waiting times of up to 15 years. It increases reasonable force from Scotland’s wind farms to England’s population centres and increases delays for those with gigantic power needs, such as laboratories and factories. Laws that give local governments ample power to make plans are blamed on Britain’s housing shortage and the blockage of the structure of pylons needed to send electricity from offshore wind farms. Residents’ objections to noisy buildings and adjustments to the landscape are a hindrance.
Planning and connections to the grid are the foundation on which everything else rests, sir. A functional grid that supplies reliable energy at low cost and a planning formula that allows the structure of all types of infrastructure are “fundamental to having a productive economy and a more efficient economy,” he added.
Planning and network connections, once specialized interests, have taken on a dominant importance. At the annual convention of the opposition Labour Party this fall, Keir Starmer, the party’s leader, vowed to “tear down” Britain’s formula of “restrictive” plans and get the grid up for power. “much faster” if he wins the race for prime minister in the general election. The upcoming general election, scheduled for 2024. La development of plans, and network reforms were two of the most important adjustments in the latest budget update to bring it to life. boosting growth, said Jeremy Hunt, Chancellor of the Exchequer.
At Paragraf, which grew out of the University of Cambridge six years ago, “we need to move faster than some of the infrastructure,” said Natasha Conway, the chipmaker’s director of studies.
The company, which has about 120 employees, manufactures sensors used to measure magnetic fields. Lured by the CHIPS Act, which provides subsidies to semiconductor manufacturers, he settled in the United States. In the end, Mr. Thomas decided to stay in Britain and set up a domestic production company.
“Graphene was isolated and invented here in the UK,” he said. “Are we just going through to let the whole price go somewhere else?
But getting electricity was not easy.
After months of searching for a site with the electrical power they wanted, Mr. Thomas moved to a warehouse 10 miles from the lab that would need an electrical upgrade. Instead of waiting for an upgrade organized through the city hall, the company paid a grid operator to install a connection to major networks. The solution will allow work to start up sooner, but will incur costs of £1 million ($1. 27 million), adding the value of upgrades to the first lab, the company said. Paragraf expects initial production to begin in the second half of 2024, about a year and a half after securing the site.
In November, the government announced measures to speed up approval of plans for primary projects and avoid NIMBY. These measures would, among other things, give communities monetary benefits for approving network infrastructure projects in their domain and disappoint early adopters. , first served queue for network connections to eliminate stalled projects.
The plans have been welcomed by the National Infrastructure Commission, which advises the government. Many of the reforms are plucked from the commission’s own recommendations, but the group wants the government to go further in compensating people when important projects like housing developments or electricity transmission facilities are built nearby.
The country needs to overcome a “desire to maintain a chocolate box image of Britain, which is nice for tourists coming in and looking at the quaint old villages,” said John Armitt, the chair of the commission. “There has got to be more to Britain in the future than that.”
The failure to execute primary projects – such as the government’s resolution in October to scrap a key component of a planned high-speed rail line, leading to delays and overspending – is weighing on investors’ “prospects on whether the UK is a hot spot”. “Coming soon,” Armitt said.
And Britain needs more investment: The commission estimates at least £70 billion per year in the 2030s, an increase from an average of about £55 billion per year over the last decade.
Notably, the UK government deterred investors by converting planning measures in 2015 and then tightening them further in 2018, so a single objection could thwart a planning application, thereby banning onshore wind in England. John Fairlie, representative in the wind industry at the time.
Fairlie is currently the executive leader of AWGroup, a renewable energy and land progress company that recently commissioned an onshore wind turbine in Bedfordshire, eastern England, that will generate enough electricity to power 2,500 homes. Due to planning constraints and grid connection delays, the task took seven years to complete.
In months, “politics has replaced, but it hasn’t replaced enough,” Fairlie said.
The turbine, which had been in the planning process as rules were tightening, was able to win approval in 2017. Since then, the main source of delays has been securing a grid connection. Advancements in wind energy technology allowed the company to install a more powerful turbine — which needed a bigger grid connection. “It just takes a long time to achieve that,” Mr. Fairlie said.
Over the next year, the turbine will be used to force an electric vehicle charging station, and the company plans more projects where it will build forced housing estates through local renewable power sources, thus preventing the grid from being congested by delays.
As Britain seeks to emerge from a long era of slow expansion and lost productivity, while still meeting its targets to reduce carbon emissions, businesses, economists and other experts say the government will have to urgently focus on such reforms.
“There’s a lot of recognition” of the problems, Mr Armitt. “We have big ambitions,” but we’re translating them into action, he added, which is especially important when it comes to net-zero targets.
What “is increasingly in line with a lot of people’s concern is that we set hard goals,” he said, “and as long as it’s about 10 years away, well, it’s very easy to throw the pot away. “far away. “
Eshe Nelson is a London-based journalist who covers news for The New York Times. Learn more about Eshe Nelson
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