No new offshore wind project contracts have been bought by developers at a key Government auction, dealing a blow to the U.K.’s renewable power strategy that critics said “may represent a landmark moment for renewables policy”. BBC News has more.
Results showed no bids for new offshore wind farms, but there were deals for solar, tidal and onshore wind projects.
Firms have argued the price set for electricity generated was too low to make offshore wind projects viable.
The government said a “global rise” in inflation impacting supply chains had “presented challenges for projects”.
It said while offshore and floating offshore wind projects did not feature on the agreed deals list, the outcome was “in line with similar results in countries including Germany and Spain”.
The Department for Energy Security and Net Zero said “significant numbers” of solar power, onshore wind, tidal energy schemes, and for the first time, geothermal projects, which use heat from the ground to generate power, had been awarded funding.
But the lack of offshore wind will be a blow to the pledge to deliver 50 gigawatts (GW) of offshore wind by 2030 compared with 14GW today.
Renewable energy groups have said that alternative renewable projects, such as solar, cannot do the heavy lifting in generating the power that offshore wind does.
The technology has been described as the “jewel in the UK’s renewable energy crown”, but firms have been hit by higher costs for building offshore farms, with materials such as steel and labour being more expensive.
Worth reading in full.
Campaign group Net Zero Watch (NZW) said the failure of the auction “may represent a landmark moment for renewables policy”.
NZW Director Andrew Montford said:
Government seems to have believed the spin about falling offshore wind costs, and set a low cap on bids for new contracts, thus calling the wind industry’s bluff by accident. Doubtless, the industry will now beg for new and higher subsidies, blaming inflation and supply chain problems. Government should not believe this spin. As global experience shows, wind power is extremely and intrinsically expensive.
NZW Energy Editor Dr. John Constable said:
The CfD auction results are symptomatic of a wider failure of wind power around the world. The industry is in a crisis from which it is unlikely to recover, because its costs are simply too high to be sustainable. The time has come for Government to admit that renewables have failed, and to start looking at realistic energy policies.
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They’re behind on all their renewable technology targets, not just offshore wind. Their plans simply are not going to happen. They need to change course now.
https://davidturver.substack.com/p/ar5-results-puncture-renewables-fantasy
Who in their right mind would cover a country and its coastline in thousands upon thousands of huge Industrial Turbines to get part time electricity requiring 100% backup from real energy sources (gas) when a few Nuclear plants tucked away in a corner somewhere would do the job 24 hours a day every single day? The answer is Eco Socialist UN lackey politicians who suck up the ar..holes of the UN and WEF and conspire to squeeze every last drop of prosperity from us all ————-Traitors.
History shows the people will prevail. Every globally controlling empire has fallen. The WEF are a passing fast.
Most of the onshore wind projects are in Scotland, meaning further unsightly damage to our world class natural heritage. The only reason that it’s profitable to build wind farms in Scotland is that, unlike England and Wales, they get constraint payments to stop producing power when there’s too much for the grid to handle. Given that demand in Scotland peaks at about 5GW in winter, is normally about 3GW and there isn’t a huge amount that can be sent to England without spending billions on new transmission lines an increasing amount of income for wind operators is going to come from subsidies.
Any so called ‘renewable or sustainable’ by definition, should not need subsidies!
Stood on its own two feet it would immediately fall flat on its arse!
We’ve been told “cheap clean renewable energy ” for 20 years plus now! So, when do my bills start falling?
Seems like the future of renewable energy, ev’s, wind power, solar and wave is…..
subsidies!
But don’t you know that the wind is FREE. ———It is so FREE that your electricity bill has nearly trebled since we started to use all the FREE wind. It is a bit like saying “here is a free apple” and then handing you a bill for 10 quid. The wind may be FREE but harnessing it is NOT. ————And you are right. No one would ever build a wind turbine without the 100% subsidy because they are totally uneconomical.
As I understand it the “price set by the government” (as we know, governments are great at setting prices) is a guaranteed minimum – and for the potential suppliers it’s not enough. So that tells me that the potential suppliers think that the actual market price is unlikely to exceed the guaranteed minimum.
Does anyone know how much hydraulic fracturing (fracking) will be needed for geothermal energy?
Erm… Germany does not have a vast amount of off-shore space to site wind farms. Spain has a lot of such space. I think there’s some other explanation about the common failure to get bids for off-shore farms – like: ‘not at that price’.
“not at that price”
Are we being scammed here?
Most certainly.
They closed the mines supposedly because they were uneconomical and needed subsidies.
And now for some reason they like uneconomical energy that needs subsidies.
Living in a modern state is like living with an abusive bipolar parent.
I think psychopathic is closer that bipolar to describe governments these days.
But coal is still by far the cheapest way to produce electricity. So it could not have been for economic reasons to stop using it. And if it was for economic reasons then why would you want to use something as uneconomic as wind? —–The reason is because it isn’t about economics, it is about ideology and politics. The UN politics of Sustainable Development. You could not get a dumber way to try and produce electricity than wind.
Get fracking!
Damn right. And get the bloody coal mines open.
I presume that the down-voters would rather we carry on buying shale gas from the USA?
Lunacy!
Lunacy! Unless you are invested in American shale gas. 🤑
Other people’s money flows to boondoggles in good times.
In bad times, the private money shakes its head and says, no thank you.
An eternal cycle.