LITTLE HORSTED, England, April 24, 2026, 12:56 BST
- National Grid plc says its Little Horsted substation in East Sussex is now energised and operational.
- The site adds about 0.5 gigawatts of transmission capacity, enough for 480,000 homes.
- The work sits inside a wider £2.7 billion South East network investment plan running from 2026 to 2031.
National Grid plc has switched on its new Little Horsted substation in East Sussex, adding about 0.5 gigawatts of capacity to Britain’s electricity transmission network as demand for power connections rises across the South East. The company said the site, on the pylon route between Bolney and Ninfield, has enough capacity to serve 480,000 homes.
The timing matters. Britain’s power grid is being asked to carry more electricity from renewable generation, new housing, electric transport and local distribution networks, while regulators press network operators to deliver upgrades without letting costs run away.
Little Horsted will help UK Power Networks, the local distribution network operator, meet higher demand in the region. A distribution network operator, or DNO, is the company that takes high-voltage electricity from the transmission grid and moves it at lower voltage to homes and businesses. National Grid said the project forms part of £2.7 billion of planned investment across the South East between 2026 and 2031.
The project also lands just after RIIO-3, Ofgem’s five-year price-control regime, began on April 1. RIIO — short for Revenues = Incentives + Innovation + Outputs — sets how much monopoly network companies can recover from customers and what they must deliver between April 2026 and March 2031.
National Grid said it delivered a record year for electricity connections in 2025, plugging 2.4 GW of new generation into the transmission system and about 0.5 GW of demand, including distribution network capacity such as Little Horsted. The substation took two years to build and involved moving about 65,000 cubic metres of earth, later reused at sites in Polegate and Horsham.
The company also installed two 178-tonne supergrid transformers after a 27-mile move from Shoreham Port in Brighton in October 2024. A supergrid transformer steps electricity between voltage levels on the high-voltage network, allowing power to move safely between the transmission system and local grids.
Paul Alchin, National Grid’s project manager, said the site was “operational and connected” and that crews would leave over the next few months while carrying out tree planting, hedgerow work and land reinstatement. UK Power Networks project manager Paul Maslen said the substation would support “increased energy capacity,” while Tony Wilson, managing director of Balfour Beatty’s Power Transmission and Distribution business, said it backed “reliability and resilience” in the South East. National Grid
National Grid is one of Britain’s main listed utility groups, with electricity transmission and distribution operations in Great Britain and electricity and gas networks in the northeastern United States. Its UK electricity transmission arm owns high-voltage networks in England and Wales.
The competitive backdrop is mainly regulatory, not head-to-head. National Grid, SSE’s SSEN Transmission and ScottishPower Transmission are all racing to turn Ofgem-approved investment plans into physical grid capacity; ScottishPower has said its RIIO-T3 plan includes up to £12 billion of investment, while SSEN Transmission has pointed to 11 major transmission reinforcements under way or progressing.
National Grid shares were up 1.03% at 1,300.40 pence in London by 12:41 BST, with nearly 3 million shares traded, according to delayed LSEG data published by Investors Chronicle. The stock has gained about 20.9% over one year.
But delivery risk has not gone away. National Grid said one overhead line circuit linked to Little Horsted still needs a later upgrade, and UK Power Networks’ adjacent substation work is not expected to be mostly complete until spring 2027. Weather, land reinstatement and local works can still shift the timetable at the edges.
For now, the Little Horsted switch-on gives National Grid a tangible asset to point to as it argues that grid investment is moving from plans and price controls into the ground. The harder test is whether the next wave of projects arrives fast enough to cut bottlenecks without adding more pressure to bills.
