BRITAIN HAS BET EVERYTHING ON WIND, mostly offshore wind, to decarbonise the national electricity grid by 2035 and reach Net Zero by 2050. The commitment is to increase the current 14 GW of offshore wind production to 50 GW by 2030, enough to power around half the UK’s predicted electricity consumption. It is Britain’s only current growing source of energy generation.
And yet the wind industry is in crisis. New developments are on hold and the government’s offshore auction in September failed to attract a single bid. Wind farm operators are effectively on strike unless the UK taxpayer ponies up more cash. The reason is that offshore wind is too expensive to be commercially viable, even with inflation-adjusted price guarantees which protect suppliers against intermittency and supply chain problems.
Mads Nipper, the CEO of Danish offshore wind pioneer Ørsted, told Bloomberg News recently it is now “inevitable” that consumers will have to pay more. “And if they don’t, neither we nor any of our colleagues are going to build more offshore,” he warned in an embarrassing back-track from previous industry claims that offshore wind was the cheapest form of energy.
The British government has long congratulated itself that between 1990 and 2019 carbon dioxide emissions fell by 44 per cent while GDP rose by 76 per cent. The UK, it boasted, was “decarbonising faster than any other G20 country”. However, this was achieved less by a switch to renewables than by replacing coal with natural gas as the main source of reliable baseload power.
Gas turbine generation increased from just 5 per cent of the electricity grid in 1990 to 40 per cent in 2021. Since the costs of North Sea gas extraction were significantly lower than Britain’s coal deposits and with
