Government criticised as Britain’s latest subsidy auction to help support new renewable energy projects awarded no contracts for offshore wind projects
- ‘Biggest clean energy disaster in years’: UK auction secures no offshore windfarms
Sam Richards, founder and campaign director of Britain Remade, says the government was complacent and incompetent for failing to heed industry warnings that the cost of offshore wind turbines had jumped sharply:
“The failure to award a single contract for offshore wind in the latest round is the direct result of the Government’s complacency and incompetence in the rules they set for the latest auction. This catastrophic outcome will cost hard-pressed billpayers £1bn a year.
“Ever since the Contracts for Difference system was introduced in 2014 industry has driven down costs at every single auction round – to the point that, for a time, offshore wind farms were 9 times cheaper than new gas plants.
Only 3.7 gigawatts of fresh projects cleared in the government’s fifth auction round for new renewables, marking a huge drop from the almost 11 gigawatts that were given contracts in last year’s allocation round.
The main reason for the huge fall in new capacity was the lack of offshore wind, which is facing rising financing and supply chain costs.
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