Playing our part to look after the natural environment is very important to us. Across our network, we work closely with Natural England and local authorities to reduce the impact of our activities as best as we can and to protect natural habitats.
Protecting wildlife
We have an environmental team of experts working with us to make sure local habitats, plants and animals are identified and protected before, during and after our construction activities.
As we build and maintain our electricity assets, we seek to reduce our impact on habitats and species, prevent permanent habitat loss, and ensure that we can deliver long lasting positive enhancements.
We carry out extensive surveys across our projects to identify protected species and take special steps to ensure they are not disturbed by our activities.
Managing trees
We own and maintain one of the most reliable transmission networks in the world. To ensure this reliability, we have a duty to defend against trees falling onto power lines that can cause outages and disruption to our network.
However, we take our environmental commitments very seriously, and will work to minimise our impact on, and to protect and enhance our natural world as much as possible.
It can be dangerous for trees to be located too closely to our network – and as we have seen with previous weather events, this proximity can cause issues in the event of a storm, if not managed effectively.
We have a legal requirement to ensure that there are always safe distances between trees and our powerlines, and to maintain safe and secure electricity supplies during adverse weather conditions.
We use advanced technical solutions to prioritise our vegetation management approach, including satellite and aerial imagery ensuring we only remove trees and vegetation that pose a significant risk to our network.
Cutting down trees is always done after careful assessment, and we work closely with ecologists, to ensure we are following recommendations on protecting wildlife. We also engage specialist utility trained arborists, who work in compliance with the ecologists’ recommendations.
Protecting the natural world
Our 5 year Environmental Action Plan (2021-2026) sets out our ambitious commitments, reflecting our vision to build a sustainable electricity network that makes a positive contribution to the environment.
We’ve set targets to reduce our emissions, minimise waste and promote sustainability, care for our natural environment and be industry leaders in environmental good practice.
Focussing on our nature positive ambition, by 2026 we will:
- Deliver at least 10% net gain in environmental value, including biodiversity net gain (BNG) on our construction projects
- Increase the environmental value of non-operational land by 10% against a natural capital and biodiversity baseline
Read about our progress in delivering our commitments to protect the natural environment, as well as our other key focus areas by reading our Annual Environmental Report.
