National Grid Innovation Day

1st October 2026

I was delighted to represent IAND at the National Grid Innovation Day at Magazine London on 1st October. Bringing together customers, suppliers, government and regulators to provide the ideas and spark the conversations to truly transform how infrastructure is delivered in the UK.

We heard about the importance of the infrastructure to UK growth from AI Minister Kanishka Narayan MP and Dame Clare Barclay DBE, Chair, Industrial Strategy Advisory Council, about customer expectations from James Tyler, Managing Director, Equinix UK and were treated to a candid Fireside chat on the benefits and challenges of new enterprise ways of working on the Great Grid Partnership.

Over lunch were some fantastic Dragon's Den style pitches from current innovative technologies (including an insectoid!). This was followed by National Grid 'reverse pitching' new problems to collaborate on solving, which demonstrated the desire for continuous innovation and ambition.

Key takeaways

The Grid is seen as a big opportunity/pain point to driving UK growth. This came from the AI Minister and the Chair of Industrial Strategy Advisory Council. The UK is aiming for at least “table stakes” compute and the fastest AI adoption.

Power is now at the heart of investment decisions. Equinix UK is making global decisions on where to build data centres. Decisions were made on proximity to fibre connectivity, but the demands from AI adoption have shifted the focus on proximity and connection to power.

Ofgem is encouraging innovation and is now more likely to penalise for not trying to accelerate timelines than trying and failing. They are also actively looking at removing blockers for faster connections.

National Grid's priority is to get more out of the existing network and then build new infrastructure. The event showcased AI companies who have found more capacity as well as new standardised approaches to modular tower building and engaging with communities using visualisation tools.

The Great Grid Partnership is central to delivering the largest investment programme in history. Knowing the supply chain would not have the capacity or capability to deliver in the traditional way, the Enterprise model has been adopted to take a programmatic approach (design once, build once, repeat) with a focus on standardisation and "production engineering". The investment upfront has enabled both the supply chain to invest and for resourcing agility that just wasn't possible when working project by project.

The day was such an important reminder of the importance of collaboration, which we at IAND are hearing from our clients in water and transport too. How ideas and learnings are shared across infrastructure owners will be critical in delivering the largest investment programmes in history.

Thanks to National Grid for an inspiring day!