Grid spending is shifting from cables to controls as AI and batteries strain the network

The Ministry of Climate, Energy and Environment said on 1 October that projects already waiting for connection in Honam, which covers Gwangju and the provinces of North and South Jeolla, will get priority under a revised framework due to take effect from January 2027, according to pv magazine. Parts of the Chungcheong region reopen too. Restrictions on the east coast are to be lifted in the first half of 2027.

Under the new flexible connection regime, projects can connect beyond a section's normal hosting limit, with output curtailed when generation exceeds what the network can carry. The ministry said this lifts the solar connection limit from 14 MW to 16 MW on a distribution line and from 50 MW to 60 MW at a substation. It estimates the change alone allows 2.6 GW of additional solar in Honam without new grid construction. Storage gets a direct role too. By 2030 the ministry aims to connect 3 GW of extra solar in saturated areas through batteries on distribution networks and another 1.6 GW through storage at substations. It did not specify the battery capacity involved.

It also said it has recovered 9 GW of connection rights from solar projects that reserved capacity but were not viable, and expects to recover more than 10 GW in Honam alone by 2030, including from delayed offshore wind.

Connection studies will change as well. Until now they assumed new renewables would run after existing fossil plants; they will now assume renewables are dispatched first. The ministry estimates that shift allows 20 GW of additional renewable capacity nationwide by 2030. National transmission-level hosting capacity is projected to rise from 119 GW to 171 GW, and distribution-level capacity from 84 GW to 110 GW.

Money is moving toward the wires

The spending debate has a European counterpart. The European Investment Bank and BNP Paribas launched a guarantee scheme for European power grids, reported by EU Today on 30 September as a 700 million euro programme, with Devdiscourse putting the associated investment at 2.8 billion euros. The two accounts differ on what is being counted: one describes the guarantee, the other the investment it is meant to support. The dossier does not reconcile them.

IRENA has said grid investment needs to reach 1 trillion US dollars a year by 2035, a figure carried by Canal Solar on 30 September. The same outlet reported the IEA's estimate that modernising networks could free up to 330 GW of connectivity. Those are the numbers the policy conversation is now anchored to. They explain why connection queues have become a political problem rather than an engineering footnote.

In Britain, the government announced a publicly owned Great British Grid, covered by Renewable Energy Magazine on 30 September and by Envirotec Magazine the same day. Industry backing for the plan, associated with Greater Manchester mayor Andy Burnham, was reported by Enlit World on 30 September. National Grid, Net Zero Industry Wales and Celtic Freeport separately announced a partnership to accelerate industrial electricity connections in South Wales, according to Business News Wales on 1 October. National Grid is also spending 32 million dollars on the 110-year-old Perry Street substation to handle load growth, per a 1 October report.

Distribution-level work is smaller but steady. NGED completed a 7 million pound upgrade to Torquay's network benefiting 40,000 homes, Torbay Weekly reported on 1 October. E.ON launched a 230 billion forint grid upgrade in Hungary, the Budapest Business Journal said on 1 October.

Batteries, insurers and the risk of sharing a plug

Storage is the fastest-moving piece of the grid build, and its insurance profile is changing with it. Olly Litterick, head of renewables at Tokio Marine GX, told ESS News that co-located solar-plus-storage sites now carry "hundreds of millions of dollars or even billions of dollars of exposure in a single location where multiple insureds share grid connection points."

TMGX covers loss of revenue from physical damage, so a failure at a shared export point can hit several insured projects at once. "When the grid goes down due to [a] material damage incident or there's a transformer failure or something of that description, you know, the numbers can be astronomical," Litterick said. He added that the company's roughly 8 GW battery book is "probably slightly outdated" because it is growing so quickly, and that most of it is still in construction. Thermal runaway remains the main driver of probable maximum loss estimates.

Smaller batteries are being pushed into homes and onto streets instead. MIT Technology Review reported on 1 October that PopWheels runs about 50 battery-swap cabinets and around 2,500 batteries in New York City, and has started supplying food cart operators, where about four batteries supply five kilowatt-hours, roughly a day's operation for many carts. Copper, meanwhile, is building induction stoves with integrated batteries. Sam Calisch, the company's cofounder and CEO, said at a New York Climate Week event on 24 September that if every stove in America shipped with a battery it would add up to tens of gigawatts.

The economics of the big installations are being watched closely for a different reason. A 1.9 billion dollar Department of Energy boost for advanced grid technology was reported by Canary Media on 24 September. Vistra's Moss Landing battery in California caught fire again, Canary Media reported on 18 September, the kind of event that shapes local opposition to large storage.

Supply chain rules arrive before the hardware

On 26 August 2026, President Trump signed an executive order declaring a national emergency to restrict high-risk foreign-produced equipment in the US electric grid, according to SemiEngineering. It covers generation, transmission and control equipment operating at 69 kilovolts or above, including large transformers, grid-tied inverters, circuit breakers, battery storage systems and SCADA software. Standard residential solar inverters and commercial distribution below 69 kV fall outside it.

No vendor has been named. The specifics do not exist until the Department of Energy publishes implementing rules, due 24 December 2026, which could take the form of a prohibited-entity list, a pre-qualified vendor whitelist, or both. Transactions after 26 August can be restricted, and the Energy Secretary can require equipment installed before that date to be monitored, disconnected, replaced or removed. The order follows the supply chain downward, so a US or European manufacturer sourcing chips, communications modules or internal software from a covered jurisdiction may still find its finished product restricted.

Data centres are on the other side of the same constraint. Google is moving its AI data centres from backup power toward grid-interactive operation, Data Center Knowledge reported on 25 September. In the Netherlands, grid congestion is pushing data centre development beyond Amsterdam, the same outlet reported on 21 September.

The common thread across all of it: capacity is being bought with software, storage and flexible connections rather than only with new lines. Whether that is enough to keep up with demand is the question the next round of filings will answer.