Nine offshore wind farm projects awarded in UK auction

The Labour government is aiming to produce 60GW of energy through offshore wind farms by 2030.

The offshore wind farm projects announced on Tuesday provide capacity of 4.9GW.

Pranav Menon, a research associate at Aurora Energy Research, said the government still has some way to go to meet its goal.

“It still falls short of the pace required to meet its ambitious targets,” he said.

Mr Menon next year’s auction would be “the last chance” to procure enough capacity for delivery before 2030, with an additional 31GW needed to meet the target 60GW target for offshore wind.

Campaign group Greenpeace warned that “the government clearly needs to take a hard look at how this system is working”.

Ami McCarthy, Greenpeace UK’s political campaigner, said: “5GW of offshore wind is of course welcome, but it is only about half of what is required each year to meet the government’s 2030 target.

“The last renewables contract auction was a catastrophic failure, and in fact the biggest disaster for clean energy in almost a decade – because of this, the new government has an uphill battle.”