NGET portfolio for six construction projects: Early Construction Funding

What changed

Ofgem approved National Grid Electricity Transmission's Early Construction Funding (ECF) request for a portfolio of six ASTI projects, adjusting NGET's allowed revenue through Special Condition 3.41 of its electricity transmission licence. The decision was published on 3 February 2026, following a consultation that ran from 14 November to 21 December 2025 and drew three responses. Ofgem says it considered the responses and decided to adjust the allowances in Appendix 1 (ASTIAt) of SpC 3.41 to permit NGET's ECF spend in full. The mechanism is the ASTI re-opener, which lets Ofgem revisit transmission allowances mid-price-control for projects on the accelerated strategic build list.

The projects span the East Anglia, Lincolnshire and East Midlands reinforcement: five NGET applications under NOA codes GWNC, PTNO/PTC1, CGNC and EDN2; Brinsworth to High Marnham (EDEU); and Norwich to Tilbury (AENC/ATNC). ECF funds permitted early construction activity, site preparation, long-lead procurement, enabling works, before a project has full planning consent. Ofgem is explicit that the funding decision is ring-fenced from the planning process and should not bear on consent outcomes. The published outcome did not disclose the value of the adjustment; the consultation document figures and the decision PDFs hold the numbers.

What this means in practice

The party affected first is NGET, which gets allowed revenue to start spending on these projects before consent risk is resolved. The party that ultimately pays is the transmission-connected consumer, through TNUoS and the broader transmission revenue recovered across GB demand. ECF transfers timing risk from the licensee to the consumer: money is committed to construction activity on projects that do not yet have planning permission. If a project is refused or materially redesigned, the early spend is largely sunk. That is the structural feature of the mechanism, not an incidental risk. The consultation's framing question, whether the activities are "in the consumer's interest and support timely delivery," is the trade Ofgem is making: accept stranded-cost exposure on early works in exchange for compressing the build schedule.

This is the sister decision to the SHET ECF consultation, and the two together establish the working pattern for ASTI re-opener treatment. The revealed preference is clear. Three responses, all considered, and the result is an allowance adjustment that grants the request rather than a tightening or a partial award. Ofgem is choosing to fund early-works spend rather than slow the strategic build, and it is doing so through a re-opener that sits outside the normal RIIO-ET price control settlement. That is the point worth flagging: the ASTI mechanism removes these projects from the periodic cost-assessment discipline of the price control and routes them through a faster, lighter-touch approval. The incentive that creates for the licensee is to push spend through the re-opener, where scrutiny is thinner and the default is approval, rather than absorb it within the negotiated price control envelope.

For developers and connection customers downstream of this network, the practical effect is schedule certainty on the East Anglia and East Midlands reinforcement corridor, the spine that unlocks offshore wind landfall and onshore connection capacity across that region. A binary connection constraint, can a project energise or not, dominates a marginal change in transmission charges. On that test, accelerating these reinforcements is the higher-value move even though it raises the cost stack, because it relieves an availability constraint rather than shaving a price. The countervailing point is that the discipline being given up, project-by-project cost contestability before money is committed, is exactly the mechanism that would keep the cost of that availability honest.

What happens next

The decision is final and the allowance adjustment is live in NGET's licence via the SpC 3.41 ASTIAt term; there is no further consultation on these six projects' ECF. The substantive uncertainty now sits in the planning system, which Ofgem has deliberately kept separate. Norwich to Tilbury (AENC/ATNC) is the highest-profile of the group and carries the most contested consent process; its planning outcome is the binding constraint on whether the early spend converts into a delivered asset. Brinsworth to High Marnham (EDEU) and the four NOA-coded NGET projects follow their own consent timelines.

Expect further ECF decisions under the same ASTI re-opener as additional projects in NGET's and SHET's ASTI portfolios reach the early-works stage; the consultation-then-grant pattern set here and in the SHET decision is now the template. The numbers that matter, the size of the allowance adjustment and the per-project ECF breakdown, are in the four decision PDFs (the EDEU decision, the Norwich to Tilbury decision, and the combined four-project decision) and the consultation response pack. The next thing worth watching is whether any of these projects' planning consents slip or fail, because that is when the consumer-borne timing risk in ECF stops being theoretical and shows up as sunk cost in the transmission revenue line.