How a substation earns a place on the acquire list
Every megawatt of permitted battery capacity in all nineteen zones has been allocated. There is no queue to join. The only way in is a position somebody gives back, so the question worth answering is not where to build. It is where somebody else’s position is most likely to fall over, so that yours can take its place. This page is how that is scored and where the score is weakest.
What the list is, and is not
Forty substations, ordered by how likely it is that connection capacity comes free there. It is a ranking of fragility in other people’s positions, not a recommendation of anywhere to put a battery. Nothing on it has been checked against a landowner, a planning authority or a network study.
Four questions, each worth a stated number of points
The four components and their weights are published on the acquire panel itself rather than here, because a score whose weights you cannot see is not evidence. Each is derived from the published register and nothing else: how much is contracted at the point, how much of it is late, how deep the demand is, and what stage the holders have reached.
Then a reality check
The four scores are added and then multiplied by a single factor, because a point where nothing has ever been built is worth less than one with a working battery on it. Full weight where storage is already energised at the point. Four fifths where a firm gate 2 position exists and is consented. Half where gate 2 exists but nothing is consented. A quarter where there is no gate 2 position to take at all.
How to read a row
A high score with overdue against it is the strongest signal in the tool: capacity that is contractually late, at a point the market wants. A high score with at risk is earlier and less certain, and is where to be looking twelve to eighteen months out. A high score with no gate 2 means heavy demand and nobody holding a firm right, which is a different opportunity and a longer wait.
What is wrong with it
The weights are a judgement and they are ours. The lead times behind the consent gap are inference published nowhere. A late connection date is evidence of lateness and not of abandonment, and a developer may be late on purpose while it waits for something else. Nothing here has watched a single position actually fail, because the record only began on 20 August 2026. Ask again in a year, when the change ledger can say which of these actually came free.