SP Energy Networks launches AI tool cutting grid connection assessments to seconds

What happened

On 5 May 2026 SP Energy Networks and Keen AI, a UK company specialising in AI for critical infrastructure, launched IConn, a digital tool that lets developers identify viable connection routes to the electricity grid in under five seconds — work that previously consumed hours of manual engineering analysis.

IConn digitises SP Energy Networks' networks — its transmission network in the south of Scotland and its distribution network covering Cheshire, Merseyside and North Wales, into a unified view of existing, contracted and planned capacity. From that base it generates potential connection routes, cost estimates and power-flow simulations, and identifies technical constraints, for any proposed new connection.

The timing is not incidental. Demand for new transmission connections to SP Energy Networks' patch grew more than fivefold between November 2024 and June 2025.

The technology

The problem IConn attacks is one of information, not electrons. When a developer of a wind farm, solar park, battery site or data centre asks where and how it can connect, a network engineer has traditionally worked through network models by hand: tracing feasible routes, checking thermal and voltage constraints, estimating reinforcement costs. Each preliminary assessment absorbs hours of scarce engineering time, and the answers can vary with who does the work.

IConn encodes that process. By holding the network, including capacity already contracted to others and capacity planned but not yet built, as structured data, it can run route generation, costing and power-flow simulation as an automated query.

Amjad Karim, Keen AI's founder and chief executive, describes the result plainly: "We have taken a process that used to consume hours of engineering time and compressed it to seconds. That's the kind of step change the UK needs to respond to the need for more clean energy."

The claimed benefit for developers is as much consistency as speed: the same underlying data produces the same answer every time, giving projects clearer expectations about routes and costs from the outset. Alana Cairns, SP Energy Networks' transmission customer liaison manager, said the tool "reflects our engineering teams' depth of knowledge" in practical form.

SP Energy Networks is not alone in this direction. In March 2026, National Grid Electricity Distribution partnered with the connections platform Yottar on a comparable digital offering, though without a specified AI component.

Why it matters for UK & Ireland

Connection queues are among the most cited bottlenecks in British infrastructure. The figures around IConn's launch illustrate the pressure: a more-than-fivefold rise in transmission connection demand in eight months on one network, and, in the wake of interconnection reforms, over 14GW of battery storage capacity reported to be awaiting grid connection. Every hour of engineering time spent on a preliminary assessment for a project that never proceeds is an hour not spent progressing projects that will.

Tools like IConn do not add a single megawatt of network capacity. What they change is the front end of the process: developers can self-serve early feasibility answers, discard non-viable schemes before they enter the queue, and target applications at points on the network that can actually accommodate them. If speculative and misplaced applications fall, the queue that remains becomes more honest — which benefits generation, storage and the data-centre projects whose connection timelines have become a national competitiveness issue.

The geography covered matters too. Southern and central Scotland is where much of Britain's onshore wind and storage pipeline seeks to connect; Cheshire, Merseyside and North Wales sit on the distribution side of the same problem. Other network operators, including those in Ireland facing their own connection backlogs, have an obvious template to examine.

What to watch

Adoption and accuracy come first: how many developers use IConn, and how closely its five-second estimates track the formal offers that follow — a tool that misprices connections would do more harm than good. Next, spread: whether SP Energy Networks extends coverage, and whether other distribution and transmission operators procure similar tools, as National Grid Electricity Distribution's Yottar partnership suggests. One caution: coverage of this launch remains thin, a company announcement and trade press, so independent evidence of the tool's performance in use is not yet available.