Update on the New Infrastructure Onshore Delivery Programme

On 6 January 2023, National Grid Electricity Transmission plc (NGET) published a PIN (Reference: 2023/2 000-000455) (Original PIN), advertising a market engagement exercise for a project referred to as the New Infrastructure Onshore Delivery Programme (NIODP). This PIN is an update to interested organisations in respect of the: 1) project name; 2) anticipated contract notice publication date; and 3) Ariba registration process (which as an essential step for interested organisations to complete before they can respond to the PQQ and may take up to 2 weeks) Within the Original PIN, NGET indicated its intention to publish a contract notice on or around the 13th February 2023, which was subsequently (in a revised PIN published on 16 January 2023 (Reference: 2023/S 000-001244 (Revised PIN) updated to be on or around the 28th March 2023. In the intervening time since this engagement, NGET has been busy refining its strategy, including taking into account feedback from the market engagement process, as it gets closer to going to market for this procurement. NGET is now in the position of preparing and finalising procurement documents for the process, with the expected launch of the qualification process now being late May/early June 2023. (Please note in respect of the date at II.3 that this is a mandatory field for completing this notice and, given the lack of a specific launch date, should be disregarded when viewing this notice in favour of the date range stated here.) Given the scale of investment that is required to deliver the ASTI projects successfully, NGET has recently set up a new business unit named "Strategic Infrastructure" to focus on the delivery of these projects as well as the early stage development of other future strategically important projects. With this in mind, the name of the programme that this procurement opportunity relates to will be subject to change from its current title of NIODP with an updated title to be confirmed in due course. NGET will be running the qualification process (and subsequent tender process) through the Ariba platform, with which interested organisations may be familiar. If interested organisations have not used this platform previously, they will need to sign-up ahead of the launch of the PQQ to ensure they are able to receive all of the documents straight away following the launch. As this Ariba registration process may potentially take up to two weeks, interested organisations should complete the following steps by no later than 12 May 2023 to ensure they are able to access the Ariba event when it is launched:

1. If interested organisations have an existing Ariba account that they use with NGET: please indicate, by e-mailing the email address provided at section I.1, which account they would like to be used, providing the organisation ID and specific user ID. The organisation ID should be able to be found within their account profile and may start with WS (for example WS12345789).
2. If interested organisations have an existing Ariba account, but do not believe this has been used with NGET previously: please provide the ANID associated with the account, by e-mailing the email address provided at section I.1, so we can ensure the account is within NGET's system.
3. If you do not have an existing Ariba account: please provide the following details to the email address provided at section I.1, to enable us to create an account: a. Organisation name; b. corporate phone number and email; c. corporate address; d. contact name; and e. contact phone number and email. NGET thanks interested organisations for their interest in the opportunity to date while we have moved through the pre-market strategy phase. NGET looks forward to launching the process in the coming weeks.