As you will recall, we held our statutory consultation for the project earlier this year, between April and June. We have been busy since June reviewing the feedback we received in response to this consultation, and are working with our design team to revise the design in response to the comments.
You will remember from our consultation material that a key design matter still under consideration is the new 400kV substation that is required to connect the project into the national grid. As we outlined previously, this does not form part of the High Grove Solar project and is instead being progressed separately by National Grid.
We had anticipated an update from National Grid on the siting of this new substation late this summer, however at this stage, the location is still not confirmed. While there are many aspects of the High Grove design we can continue to progress, you’ll appreciate that there are some matters that cannot be settled until the location is fixed (principally the route of the connection cable) and that the final location could necessitate wider changes to our design.
As a result, we’re anticipating a revised submission date of no later than April 2026, pushed back from November this year. This will of course be dependent on the outcome of National Grid’s substation siting process, but we believe, based on our ongoing engagement with them, that this will allow us to appropriately consider the substation in our application.
We acknowledge that there may be some queries following this update. We want to emphasise that by changing our programme, we’re able to align more closely with National Grid which will result in more meaningful collaboration. It will afford us further time to consider the valuable feedback provided in response to our consultation.
We want to emphasise RWE’s commitment to working closely with local communities to design and deliver the best possible scheme. We will be in touch with you over the coming months, once we have further clarity from National Grid and a more detailed programme to submission, and we look forward to further engagement with the Parish Council in advance of submitting our application next year.
Once we have had the opportunity to respond to any follow up queries from this update, we’ll be publishing a website update and distributing a virtual newsletter to those that have registered an interest in the project from the wider community. Please do not hesitate to get in touch should you have any immediate questions and thank you again for your ongoing engagement with the project.
Best wishes,
Mikyla Davidson
RWE
