15-year contract demands damaging offshore wind industry

SIEMENS became the first offshore wind turbine manufacturer to confirm it plans to set up a base in the UK when it announced it was establishing a blade manufacturing base in Hull, creating 1,000 jobs.

In recent years four of the world’s other main turbine players have signalled their intent to establish factories at UK ports, however none have yet committed, with the length of leases required said to be a major drawback.

Industry insiders say that many of the turbine companies want leases of no more than five years, but the ports, which will have to make substantial investments in berths and other infrastructure, need a 15-year timetable to make it work for them.

One industry expert said: “The strike prices have been set, and the Government wants local content in the supply chain. But the turbine manufacturers looking at building factories in the UK are being put off by the length of leases they are being asked to sign.

“If it was a five-year lease that wouldn’t be a problem, but a 15-year lease is, and if the market does not develop in the way expected this would add insult to injury.

“While the Government has shown its commitment to renewable targets up to 2020, there is no visibility beyond then.”

Associated British Ports has agreed to invest £150m upgrading its port facilities as part of the Siemens deal, although details of the length of lease agreed between the two parties has not been released.

For more on offshore wind and the energy sector see: http://www.thejournal.co.uk/authors/Peter_McCusker/

Comments

Zero-Energy Poverty Will ‘Trump’ Net Zero

THE progressive pathologies of the 21st Century are collapsing around us so could the most economically damaging of the lot be next? Mass, low-skilled immigration is now acknowledged as a drain on a host nation’s economy, detrimental to social cohesion, and a fuel for criminality. Meta boss Mark Zuckerberg has binned arch-liberal Nick Clegg for a Trump supporter Joel Kaplan; prostrating at incoming President Trump’s feet, he acknowledged his culpability in censoring free speech. America’s leading banks are withdrawing from the Net Zero Banking Alliance which has curtailed investment in hydrocarbons in favour of unreliable renewables. And, now Trump’s incoming energy secretary Chris Wright, is set to axe the damaging Net Zero fallacy in favour of a global focus on Zero Energy Poverty. Wright, Founder and CEO of US gas fracking firm Liberty Energy, says Net Zero is a threat to the prosperity of mankind. Net Zero Lies Where Wright and Trump’s Net Zero scepticism is s...

Net Zero Is Rooted In Socialist ‘Science Fiction’

THE dismantling of the globalists’ Net Zero deceit continues apace as energy prices continue to rise, Arctic sea ice stubbornly refuses to melt and US President Trump’s energy advisors spear the technocrats supra-national ambitions. Hatched by a series of anti-fossil fuel, communist activists and whipped into a planet-saving, apocalyptic, frenzy by the unquestioning technocrats at the United Nations, Net Zero is primarily a capitalism hatchet job. Back in 2015 when Net Zero was being embraced by the elite, UN boss Christiana Figueres, key driver of the Paris climate deal, revealed their hand. "This is the first time in the history of mankind that we are setting ourselves the task of intentionally transforming the economic development model that has been reigning since the industrial revolution," she opined (1). Well, this state-mandated ‘socialist utopia’ maybe what the UN, the WEF, the Club of Rome, Blackrock and their political acolytes want - but it is far removed f...

Blaming CO2 Is The Analog Response To Climate Change

OVER 125 years ago Swedish scientist Svante Arrhenius fingered carbon dioxide role for its role in warming the planet. At the time it was seen as a good thing - after all it’s the cold that kills - but over the ensuing decades there’ve been a few revisions to how this additional CO2 is perceived. It is now the sinister suspect behind 200 years of global warming and is demonised in a way the witches were in the 16th and 17th centuries. Just as the witches were castigated for spoiling crops, and inducing bad weather, CO2’s fingerprint is now apparently detectable on almost any climatic event. Such is the man-made warming mania that for the last five years the green stenographers in the BBC and mainstream media have neglected their duty of impartiality to the British people by claiming climate science is settled (1). But, surely it is not unreasonable to question how, and why, this trace gas, at a mere 0.04%, or 400 parts per million (ppm) of the atmosphere - and es...

Peter McCusker Energy & Climate

Search This Blog