Offshore Wind

Baroness Bennett of Manor Castle Excerpts

Monday 19th January 2026 Lords Chamber

[Baroness Bennett of Manor Castle (GP)]

My Lords, for the Green Party I welcome both this Statement and the decisions that it records.

I have a question about a specific area which is going to need vastly more development. The allocation includes two floating offshore wind projects. They have higher prices but there is a clear strategic intent if the Government are going to meet their target for offshore wind. We do not have enough sites for turbines embedded in the seabed and we are going to need these floating turbines.

If the Government are going to move beyond these demonstration-type levels and deliver pipeline depth and cost reductions, this will need to advance very fast. Can the Minister give us a picture and a sense of where the Government see this going in terms of floating offshore wind?

[Lord Whitehead (Lab)]

I thank the noble Baroness for that intervention. It gives me an opportunity to confirm the two floating offshore wind projects that have been agreed under this auction round. I might add, by the way, that the auction rounds were not a sort of shoo-in for anybody who wanted to come along and invest, as some people have portrayed them. They were very competitive. The number of entrants to the auction was substantially larger than the number of contracts finally agreed. Among other things, this shows that there is a real appetite for this kind of investment going forward.

That is the case with floating offshore wind. Although the two schemes that were agreed—one in Scotland and one in the Celtic Sea—are not, shall we say, final, full-scale arrays as far as floating is concerned, they represent a tremendous step forward in the development of offshore beyond the continental shelf in the UK. Huge new areas offshore from the UK can be opened up to offshore wind.

Of course, that price is not the same as the price we achieved with the mature, bottom-based offshore wind that we have been talking about, but, if we look at the original administrative strike prices when offshore first took off, they were not dissimilar to the sort of prices that we are now seeing for floating offshore wind. I am confident that, once those arrays get larger, and with the flow of fabrication and assistance which the noble Baroness will probably know is already happening very positively, in the Celtic Sea in particular, the net benefit for Great Britain of floating offshore wind will not just be a large number of jobs and more income coming into different areas of the UK than has been the case for bottom-based offshore at the moment. It will represent a technology that really will allow the whole of the UK to participate in the offshore wind revolution, not just the areas which hitherto have had the main developments in their particular zones.

The Celtic Sea, in particular, is just a taster of what is going to come in the not too distant future—and, by the way, it will be a future in floating offshore wind that will be a British future. Home-grown technology will lead in this particular area, which will not only have an impact in UK but will have a substantial export impact as well.

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[Lord Whitehead (Lab)]

I do not recognise the scenario that the noble Lord paints. Not only is this AR7 settlement good for energy prices—indeed renewables and low-carbon energy have reduced overall prices by 25% because of the effect of the merit order and the driving of gas to the margins in terms of prices—but the industrial work that will be undertaken will be enormously good for a large number of jobs with the fabrication and erection of piles, jackets and all sorts of things which go with this. By the way, the Government are producing a clean energy bonus to make sure that that work is in Britain, so it is a major industrial step forward for this country in its own right.

The noble Lord mentioned that I had not said anything about intermittency. I thought that I had dealt with that issue by saying that one thing we have to do as far as our energy is concerned is run the whole system smartly. Wind, both onshore and offshore, has tremendously increased its efficiency—ie, the proportion of time it produces wind—and the issue at the moment is not whether wind collectively produces a large output on a reliable basis. After all, we had over 80 days last year when renewables and low carbon completely fuelled our energy economy. The fact is that intermittency is a problem only if you do not have a smart system to use that energy where you have it in the smartest possible way. That is why, among other things, there has been such a development imperative on batteries and other low-carbon forms of storage that distribute the energy in a much more coherent way from the sources that we have.

It really is not a scenario that I recognise. I do not think the British economy is going to be ruined by this; on the contrary, this is going to be a great leap forward for the British economy. After all, as has been said on a number of occasions, the green economy in Britain is growing three times as fast as the general economy. This is where the growth is going to come from over the next period, and is very much a leading part of that growth and the new industrial future.

[Baroness Bennett of Manor Castle (GP)]

My Lords, the Minister referred to onshore wind. Under previous Governments, we saw onshore wind come to a grinding halt for reasons of apparent short-term political advantage. Onshore wind has the potential to be part of community energy schemes. Offshore wind inevitably tends to involve large multinational companies, but onshore wind gives communities the chance to decide for themselves how to generate their own energy and use local resources. Can the Minister outline where the Government are going with that?

[Lord Whitehead (Lab)]

I am sure the noble Baroness will be aware that one of the first things that the new Labour Government did when we took office was, literally at the stroke of a pen, to remove the ban on onshore wind. We have subsequently made sure that onshore wind enters the allocation rounds. At a local level, Great British Energy will undoubtedly be supporting quite a lot of onshore wind and a number of other community and local renewable resources. The future for onshore is set very fair. After all, it is even cheaper than offshore and just as reliable and long term—indeed, it is marginally better in its overall performance. Onshore is something that we very much want to see as part of the overall package. The noble Baroness will have to wait for about a week before she sees what we have come up with as far as the allocation of further pots is concerned.