By Paul Homewood
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The UK’s government must offer higher prices for offshore wind power generation or miss the capacity targets it has set itself, climate think tank Ember has warned.
The UK incentivizes new wind and solar capacity by guaranteeing minimum long-term prices for the energy produced from such installations via contracts for difference. Yet the prices that the government has been ready to offer recently have fallen short of developers’ funding needs, reducing interest in new projects.
It was because of this discrepancy between developers’ expectations and the government’s budget that the 2023 offshore wind auction yielded no contracts. According to Ember, this needs to change and it needs to change immediately if the UK wants to stay on course to install 50 GW of offshore wind generation capacity by 2030.
There are currently 14.7 GW of offshore wind in operation and another 13.3 GW in the pipeline. That leaves a gap of 22 GW that have to come from somewhere and for that to happen, incentives need to be ramped up.
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The renewable lobby group Ember have a very close relationship with Labour, who have based their whole energy strategy on Ember’s make believe projections.
I strongly suggest that Miliband will quickly find a way to increase subsidies for offshore wind.
