Senior UK renewable's boss says offshore wind costs can be halved.

MAJOR efforts are underway to reduce costs in the offshore wind sector with the UK Government saying it aims to see a 50% cut in subsidy levels from 2020 onwards.

DONG Energy is the largest player in the European offshore wind sector and Benj Sykes, its operations director for renewables in the UK, believes it can almost halve costs.

He said: “The industry is under increasing pressure from the Government to show it can bring costs down which may explain why a number of schemes have fallen by the wayside in recent months.

“Building a supply chain will help bring costs down. We believe we are capable of bring costs down by 30 to 40% to £100 per MW/h. In fact DONG wants to go further and is looking at 100 Euros per MW/h (or £80 per MW/h).”

Offshore wind subsidies are currently £155 per MW/h, which is three times the wholesale price of electricity, with the costs being passed on through household and business electricity bills.

Sykes added: “We are currently trialling 8MW turbines and these will drive down the costs. The industry needs to earn the right to exist on a large scale.

“There are still uncertainties, but we are pretty confident. If we show as an industry we can get our costs down then the opportunity is there for the taking, but we have to earn the right to grow as an industry.

“We can create a big industry here in the UK for foundation and turbine manufacturers and the supply chain.”

ENDS

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

Comments

Energy Security On The Brink - As Green Lobby Takes Cover

NEW Climate Change Committee boss Emma Pinchbeck wants policy costs taken out of UK energy bills in a cynical bid to hide from the public the soaring costs of supporting renewables. This is just the latest legerdemain from the climate ‘crisis’ crowd who mindlessly orate that energy will become greener and cheaper under their watch. Nothing could be further from the truth. Our energy bills are now the highest in Europe (1) and our energy security more fragile than at any time since the beginning of the fossil fuel era. This is purely a result of their slavish adherence to the Net Zero lunacy. Last week the media widely reported how the UK was paying gas-fired power plants some £2m an hour to fire-up and support the peak evening UK demand period (2). This followed Pinchbeck trumpeting on Radio 4 how wind had the largest share of UK electricity generation ever recorded in 2024, even more than gas. The preference given to the so-called renewables in the hierarchy of energy supply is the so...

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...

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