By Dearbail Jordan, Business reporter, BBC News
The government has awarded nine offshore wind farm contracts after last year’s auction failed to attract any bidders at all. The contracts are part of a wider slate of green energy projects the government has announced that include tidal and solar power which, it said, will be enough to fuel the equivalent of 11 million UK homes.
Last September, no companies bid in the auction to build offshore wind farms. The industry said at the time that the guarantee price offered by the then Conservative government for electricity generated by the wind farms did not take into account higher costs such as construction materials which had risen because of inflation.
Keith Anderson, chief executive of Scottish Power, which won an offshore wind farm contract in the auction, told the BBC that the announcement was “really, really positive to get the government back on track to delivering a net zero generation environment and electricity sector for the whole of the UK”.
The new offshore wind farms will include what will be Europe’s largest and second-largest wind farms, Hornsea 3 and Hornsea 4, off the Yorkshire coast.
In total, 131 contracts have been awarded that will generate 9.6 gigawatts (GWs) of renewable energy.
“We inherited a broken energy policy, including last year’s disastrous auction round which gave us no successful offshore wind projects,” said Energy Secretary Ed Miliband.
“These results show that together, this government and the energy industry are securing investment into our country.”
The government is aiming to produce 60GW of energy through offshore wind farms by 2030.
The new offshore wind farm projects announced on Tuesday provide capacity of 4.9GW but Pranav Menon, a research associate at Aurora Energy Research, said the government has still some way to go to meet its goal.
“It still falls short of the pace required to meet its ambitious targets,” he said.
He said next year’s auction is “the last chance to procure capacity for delivery before 2030 – an additional 31GW of offshore wind capacity is needed to meet the target of 60GW”.
Meanwhile, Greenpeace warned that “the government clearly needs to take a hard look at how this system is working”.
Ami McCarthy, Greenpeace UK’s political campaigner, said: “5GW of offshore wind is of course welcome, but it is only about half of what is required each year to meet the government’s 2030 target.
“The last renewables contract auction was a catastrophic failure, and in fact the biggest disaster for clean energy in almost a decade – because of this, the new government has an uphill battle.”
