National Grid Lifts Capital Spending a Third as £70 Billion Plan Accelerates

National Grid said capital investment across its UK and US networks rose by about a third in the six months to September, as the British transmission and distribution company accelerates spending under a five-year programme it now expects to exceed £70 billion. The figures, published in half-year results on November 5, show the company’s electricity transmission business in England and Wales growing fastest, with investment there up more than 70% year-on-year.

£6.7 Billion in Six Months

National Grid said group capital investment reached roughly £6.7 billion in the first half of its 2026/27 financial year, up about 33% on the same period last year. Within that total, spending on UK electricity transmission — the high-voltage network that carries power across England and Wales — rose about 71% to roughly £2.9 billion, reflecting work tied to the regulator’s RIIO-T3 price control period, which began loading new transmission projects this year. The company said it now expects full-year capital investment of around £13.5 billion, which would be a new high for the group.

Net debt rose alongside the investment, reaching £48.6 billion at the end of September, about £4.4 billion more than at the end of March. National Grid also raised its guidance for underlying earnings-per-share growth this financial year to a range of 15–16%, up from the 13–15% it had guided in May, pointing to higher allowed revenue as RIIO-T3 funding flows through.

The £70 Billion Programme

The spending sits inside a five-year capital framework, covering the 2026/27 to 2030/31 financial years, that National Grid raised from an earlier £60 billion target when it reported full-year results in May. The company said in its half-year update that it has now secured supply chain capacity and delivery arrangements for about 80% of that five-year total, up from roughly three-quarters at the time of the May announcement — a detail the company has emphasized given how much of the UK’s grid buildout depends on scarce transformers, cables and skilled construction crews rather than capital alone.

National Grid’s chief executive, Zoë Yujnovich, has described the programme as the largest investment effort in the company’s history, driven by the scale-up needed to connect new offshore wind, nuclear and interconnector capacity to Britain’s grid and to meet rising demand from electrification and data centers in both the UK and the US Northeast, where National Grid also owns regulated utilities in New York and Massachusetts.

Part of a Wider Grid Investment Wave

National Grid’s acceleration mirrors a pattern now visible across transmission and distribution utilities on both sides of the Atlantic. In the US, Xcel Energy has lifted its own five-year capital plan 17% to $70 billion and CenterPoint Energy has raised its ten-year plan by $4 billion to $70.7 billion, both citing data-center and broader electricity demand growth. Equipment suppliers are responding in kind: GE Vernova’s planned $9 billion acquisition of transformer and bushing maker Trench Group is a direct bet that grid hardware, not just capital budgets, will be the binding constraint on how fast utilities like National Grid can actually spend their money.

On the UK side specifically, National Grid’s half-year update follows its late-October decision to commit £400 million to extend the life of the IFA interconnector with France to 2050, one of several individual projects now layered into the broader five-year plan rather than announced as stand-alone investments.

What to Watch

National Grid’s guidance assumes continued regulatory support through RIIO-T3 and no major supply chain disruption; the company’s own emphasis on the 80% figure suggests management still sees equipment and labor availability, not capital, as the main risk to delivering the programme on schedule. Energy regulator Ofgem’s RIIO-T3 determinations, which set how much revenue National Grid can recover for transmission spending through 2031, remain the key external variable the company does not fully control.

Sources

• National Grid plc, Half Year Results 2026/27 (regulatory news announcement), Nov. 5, 2026 — capital investment, net debt and guidance figures.
• AJ Bell, “National Grid interim profit jumps as investment accelerates,” Nov. 5, 2026 — investment breakdown and analyst commentary.
• National Grid plc, Full Year Results 2025/26 (regulatory news announcement), May 14, 2026 — original £70 billion five-year framework and CEO quote.

Illustrative image. Photo: Frans Berkelaar, CC BY 2.0, via Wikimedia Commons — source