IMPACT Magazine recently featured Rolton Chair, Peter Rolton and our white paper “Powering the 2035 Industrial and Data-Driven Revolution” which calls for the energy and real estate worlds to coalesce to attract the investment for infrastructure the UK needs.
Peter Rolton was an adviser to the UK government when the EU Renewable Energy Directive came into force in 2009 with its target of 20% renewable energy by 2020. He commented: “It was always my view that we needed to engineer the solution with better technologies, a viable business case, and a strategy to reduce costs with scale. We need to remove the emphasis on net zero and move the focus (and rhetoric) to using renewables to deliver solutions which are good for business and deliver energy efficiency and cost savings for homeowners too.” An example of this would be decentralisation and microgrid approaches which Rolton are championing.
In the same issue of IMPACT Magazine, it is reported that according to the International Energy Agency in order to meet national climate targets, grid investment needs to double globally to over $600 billion per year. This comes after over a decade of stagnation at the global level. While global investment in renewables has nearly doubled since 2010, investment in grids has remained constant. The EU Commission estimates that Europe needs to invest $2-2.3 trillion in grids by 2050.
The Rolton report also called for the transformation of the approach to grid connection and the opportunity to deliver shovel ready sites for developers with grid connection resolved. The queue to access the national transmission network is currently overwhelmed with more than 700GW of projects waiting to connect. With that figure set to increase to 800GW by the end of 2025, the capacity required to meet the UK’s forecasted electricity demand from projects waiting to connect will quadruple by 2050. As a result of all this, the delivery of critical renewable projects is being stalled, jeopardising the UK’s climate targets. Reform also needs to change the process from first-come-first-served to ‘first-ready-first-served’ – projects will need to meet certain criteria around land and planning rights to obtain a connection offer, or will need to be of a strategic nature.
Our energy consultant David Telford commented: “The UK grid was designed for small numbers of large power stations. It now needs radical reform of the electricity supply industry to open up more opportunities for investment in decentralised energy distribution, distributed storage and local SMART grids with data networks, allowing peer to peer, local energy trading.”
We welcome the work the UK Government is doing to bring forward reform and with grid connections in the news again this week as a key limit to growth, it’s an area Rolton are keen to support.
Rolton celebrates official opening of West Northamptonshire’s £9.4m State-of-the-Art Mortuary
We were delighted to attend the official opening of the new £9.4m County Mortuary at Riverside Business Park, a project that marks a transformative milestone for bereavement services and public infrastructure in Northamptonshire.
Rolton heads to UKREiiF 2026: Powering the future of sustainable engineering.
Rolton is proud to announce its attendance at the 2026 UK Real Estate Investment and Infrastructure Forum (UKREiiF), held from 19–21 May at the Royal Armouries, Leeds.
We are pleased to announce that Rolton has been reappointed as an approved supply chain partner for Perfect Circle, marking the continuation of our successful partnership stemming a decade.