120 GW of the queue is contracted at connection nodes with no published location
The connections reform attached large parts of the register to strategic connection nodes named for regions rather than substations. 122 of them, across 35 regions, carry 120,085 MW of contracted storage. Whether anything has been built at any of them is a question the register cannot answer. What it does say is that nothing published gives them a location, and that between them they hold no Gate 2 capacity at all.
| Region | Nodes | Contracted storage | Gate 2 |
|---|---|---|---|
| West Anglia | 9 | 14,719 MW | none |
| Trent Valley South | 6 | 13,569 MW | none |
| North Anglia | 7 | 12,041 MW | none |
| South Anglia | 6 | 9,443 MW | none |
| Derbyshire | 12 | 8,959 MW | none |
212 more points that no gazetteer can place
The same is true of a second group. 212 connection points in the register are named after places that no published gazetteer can place. The largest are Coddington, Lincolnshire Coastal Node, New North East, Butlers Wood, Weston Marsh and Jubilee Farm. Between them they hold 59,238 MW. 43 of them carry 400 kV in their name, and until 10 September 2026 this page said they all belonged to the transmission build programme. Read one at a time against the transmission owners' own project pages, they do not. 6 are substations a transmission owner is building or has consented, 5,146 MW: Butlers Wood, Weston Marsh, New East Coast, Chesterfield, Redshaw and Branxton. 7 more had stood for years, 2,195 MW, and the gazetteer had failed to match the name, a plural, a missing apostrophe, a capital S; read by hand, they are on the map now and no longer in this count: Bulls Lodge, Coalburn, Exeter Main, Peterhead, Connah's Quay, Humber Refinery and Walpole. 1 remains, 43 MW, Chickerell, because the register names a line between two substations and not which end. 10 are named for the applicant's own project rather than for any substation, 5,706 MW, Natpower Harburn, Wyseby Hill and Auchentiber Farm among them, and each is a substation the developer proposes to build to connect itself. The remaining 26, 16,790 MW, Coddington, Lincolnshire Coastal Node and New North East the largest, have no project page under that name that we have found. The register itself says something about them: 4 of those points, 5,244 MW, Coddington, New North East, Kelloe Mains and Dragon Green, each carry two or more unrelated applicants, and unrelated developers do not share a private substation, so those read as substations somebody other than the applicants is building. The rest carry one applicant each. The rest of the 212 are named at 275 kV or below, or carry no voltage at all, and are distribution points no published gazetteer lists.
Put together, 179 GW of the queue is contracted at connection points that no published source can place. It is the clearest single statement of delivery risk available anywhere in the published register.
Both tables are on the tool's Points tab: the nodes drawn as the regions they are named for, and every unplaced point listed by size.
How the tool draws something that has no location
NESO publishes no coordinate for a strategic connection node, so inventing one would be dishonest. Each node family is drawn instead as a dashed circle over the region its name refers to, at a centre set by hand with a radius reflecting the extent of that region. It is labelled as inference about the name rather than a claim about a site, and the layer can be switched off. Capacity sits on the region, never on a point.