Wind isn’t working. Or so it seems. New developments are on hold both in the UK and in the US (where one of the world’s biggest companies, Ørsted, has just abandoned two big projects); the UK’s offshore auction earlier this year attracted not a single bid. The problem here, says Barry Norris of Argonaut, is that wind is just “ too expensive to be commercially viable, even with inflation-adjusted price guarantees which protect suppliers against intermittency and supply chain problems”.
This is partly about the rapidly rising cost of initial production: “cheap” wind was to some extent a
