Junction

Britain reordered its grid connection queue. The commonly quoted comparison — 700 GW down to 381.5 GW — is not like for like, and the error runs through most coverage. The pre-reform figure of more than 700 GW covers generation and storage only. The 381.5 GW reformed pipeline is 283 GW of generation and storage plus 98.5 GW of transmission-connected demand. On a like-for-like basis the reduction is 700+ GW to 283 GW, with over 300 GW not proceeding.

Offers are running late, and the regulator has intervened twice in opposite directions — a distinction routinely conflated. In February 2026 Ofgem refused relief on protected projects’ connection dates, disclosing that 210 of 340 protected projects were affected and stating it was "frustrated and disappointed". In June 2026 it granted an alternative timetable, setting hard deadlines of 30 September 2026 for Phase 1 offers and 31 January 2027 for Phase 2. Progress against the first of those looks strained: the industry dashboard showed 94 of 633 Phase 1 offers issued in mid-August 2026.

The transmission side of this is a genuine open data success. The Transmission Entry Capacity register is published twice weekly as CSV with an unauthenticated API — 2,205 project rows, retrievable in a single call, no registration.

Distribution improved sharply in 2026, and the standard story about it is now out of date. Ofgem digitalised the Long-Term Development Statement by direction in April 2024, mandating a common information model built on the international grid exchange standard. In the May 2026 cycle, five of six distribution operator groups published standardised capacity heatmaps openly against that model. One group published nothing publicly discoverable.

But the standardisation is thinner than it looks, and the reason is in the specification itself. Ofgem defines the fields and then explicitly delegates the calculation to each operator: available capacity is computed "based on more detailed analysis and internal policies", and a utility "should provide details on how this RAG status is calculated as part of the accompanying documentation." GB has a common schema for grid capacity. It has no common methodology, and the specification does not require one. Two operators can be fully compliant and return numbers that cannot be compared.

The serialisation diverges too. Only two of five emit the specified nested structure; the others flatten it or return a bare array. One operator’s master resource identifiers are sequential integers rather than the globally unique identifiers the standard exists to provide, defeating the entire point of the field. Another uses a transposed field name. Constraint status comes back as "Red", "GREEN" and "green" from three different operators, against a specification that types it as an enumeration. One operator is inconsistent between its own two licence areas.

The joins are broken too. The transmission register carries no geocoding of any kind — the only location field is a free-text substation name. There is no shared identifier between transmission and distribution registers, so a project appearing in both cannot be reconciled except by fuzzy matching. And the reform status column is empty for 63% of transmission projects, because it only populates after agreements are countersigned.

Junction builds the national connection picture that neither government nor the market currently provides. It normalises all six distribution registers plus the transmission register into one schema, resolves entities across them, and maintains the join that does not exist.

It geocodes the transmission queue by building and maintaining the substation gazetteer that the register lacks, turning free-text substation names into mappable locations — the single missing ingredient that prevents anyone from seeing where queue pressure actually sits.

It normalises headroom to a single stated definition. The real barrier between operators is not file format but definitional inconsistency: each defines available capacity differently and publishes it as a picture rather than as data. Junction states its assumptions and applies them uniformly.

And it tracks queue integrity through the reform. With Gate 2 having reordered everything and offers running months late, monitoring which projects hold capacity against which are actually progressing is both newly possible and politically salient — including the protected projects where the regulator has already refused the system operator relief.