A long and growing list of foreign turbine manufacturers had committed themselves to building factories on British soil; project developers had every reason to believe the government would calm investors’ nerves with its Electricity Market Reform (EMR) package; and the industry had a powerful ally in energy secretary Chris Huhne.
Germany’s offshore wind programme, by comparison, appeared a shambles.
Despite Bremerhaven’s prescient decision a decade ago to embrace offshore wind, hardly any capacity had been built in German waters, and investors were tepid — and that was before TenneT’s admission that it was years behind schedule on critical transmission links.
What
