After recycling a 40GW offshore wind target that was almost a year old for a political pep-up, Prime Minister Boris Johnson can’t afford any more sleight of hand with timescales if the UK is to hit a 2030 goal that attracted a blaze of publicity this week, leading industry figures told Recharge.

The target formed the centrepiece of Johnson’s speech to the annual conference of the governing Conservative Party on Tuesday, dominating the British news agenda and attracting admiring headlines even from normally wind-sceptic newspapers.

But while welcoming the ambition itself, the wind industry stressed the need to press ahead swiftly with policies and specific measures needed to help the UK quadruple its current 10GW operating offshore fleet in a decade, not to mention lay the ground for the 75GW many believe will be needed to meet its 2050 net-zero aspirations.

“The 40GW itself is not new, it was a [general election] manifesto commitment last year,” said Jonathan Cole, head of offshore wind for global renewables giant Iberdrola – one of the biggest developers active in the UK.

“We need these bold statements. But they need to be quite quickly followed up by the right regulatory framework and then they need to be put into practice,” Cole told a Recharge digital roundtable on the North Sea’s energy transition.

Cole said one important signal of intent came when the UK government indicated it planned to double the size of the 2021 next round of contract-for-difference (CfD) renewable energy auctions, which awarded 6GW of capacity in 2019, almost all of it to offshore wind.

“That is starting to tell me there’s going to be a regulatory process to procure massive quantities of renewable energy,” said Cole, adding that 8-10GW of that would need to go to offshore wind to keep the UK on track to meet Johnson’s 40GW goal.

The Iberdrola executive also welcomed Johnson’s pledge for £160m ($207m) for ports infrastructure as a positive signal.

“[This week’s announcement] was a great step in the right direction, but only the first step in a very long journey.”

Johnson’s address came after a year in which fears mounted that UK energy policy as a whole has begun to drift, with factors such as Covid, Brexit and uncertainty over the fate of Britain’s nuclear programme all clouding the ability to plan in the absence of a long-awaited Energy White Paper.

The offshore wind sector itself has not been immune from delays.

Grid concerns

While welcoming Johnson’s statement of intent, Bruce Valpy, managing director of consultancy BVG Associates, also noted that the 40GW goal “is not new news” and told Recharge the last year “has been a bit slow in UK, with delays to the [Crown Estate] Round 4 and Scotwind leasing processes [for new offshore wind seabed rights]”, although a good pipeline of projects is still progressing.

“The challenge will be whether the UK grid will be ready to take them,” Valpy told Recharge.

“We’ll need to see substantive progress in interconnectors, flexibility mechanisms, electric vehicles, vehicle-to-grid technology etc. for electricity prices to be stable enough to enable industry investment decisions for this volume.

“This needs the sort of clarity that we haven’t seen yet in these areas.”

Valpy’s focus on the grid reflects recent comments to Recharge by German utility giant RWE, whose chief operating officer for global offshore wind labelled the grid “the biggest and most important topic in UK offshore wind at the moment”.

SSE Renewables, which with Equinor is co-developing the Dogger Bank offshore wind farm off northeast England that will be the world’s largest at 3.6GW, also identified the grid as a key challenge still to be addressed by the UK, alongside consenting and electricity market reform.

Time to act

Reacting to Johnson’s speech, SSE Renewables managing director Jim Smith said: “Revolutions, even green ones, are not built on announcements alone.”

Smith added: “Now is the time to act to address key barriers and put the UK on course to delivering 40GW by 2030”, citing a nine-point action plan of urgently needed measures contained in a roadmap to 40GW of offshore wind by 2030 launched by SSE earlier this year.

The scale of the challenge was highlighted by analyst Aurora Energy Research, which claimed adding 30GW within a decade will be a mammoth undertaking, necessitating the installation of one 10-12MW turbine every weekday throughout the 2020s, about £48bn ($62.3bn) of investment and a further 20GW of tenders with the next few years.

One constituency both Johnson and the industry may struggle to bring onside is the UK trade unions, who have consistently slammed the amount of contracts leaving its shores for major offshore wind components such as foundations.

Rehashed rhetoric

Foreign outsourcing has been a particularly live issue in Scotland. Unite Scottish secretary Pat Rafferty claimed an announcement by Johnson that the UK will commit to 60% of turbines to be manufactured domestically is “rehashed rhetoric”.

Rafferty called for the CfD to be “totally reformed to legally ensure that domestic based firms are guaranteed work from the billions of pounds being poured into the on- and offshore wind sector.”

Rehashed or not, Johnson’s speech – which included an aspiration to power every home with offshore wind that was designed to appeal to the mainstream media's headline writers – did put the sector front and centre of Britain’s news agenda for a few days.

I never thought I’d see the day. It shows the tide is turning.

That included a front-page story in the Daily Mail, a UK newspaper not known for its love of renewable energy. “I never thought I’d see the day,” said Iberdrola’s Cole. “It shows the tide is turning and people are starting to believe in what we are doing.”

All eyes will now turn to a ten-point plan for a “green industrial revolution” the UK government has pledged to unveil later this year.

For many in UK offshore wind, planning for the future can’t come a moment too soon.

Wind

Revolution or rehash? Move fast or risk UK offshore wind goal, Johnson warned