Floating Offshore Wind Projects

Alan Whitehead Excerpts

Tuesday 18th October 2022 Westminster Hall

[Dr Alan Whitehead (Southampton, Test) (Lab)]

We have had what I would characterise as one of the most sensible debates that I have heard in quite a long time in this place, and I congratulate the right hon. Member for Preseli Pembrokeshire (Stephen Crabb) on bringing that debate to us. I also congratulate him on covering all the bases on offshore wind because the debate is not about pie-in-the-sky reflections on something that might be. It is about something that can make an enormous contribution in pretty quick time to the UK’s energy requirements, and do so in a way that unlocks a lot of resources that we have in this country, but which have hitherto been rather set aside because we have been concentrating on other technologies in other parts of the country.

Floating wind in particular is the energy answer for the western side of the UK, just as offshore fixed wind is the answer for the east coast. As far as the east coast is concerned, we have the great benefit of having an only slightly drowned large offshore island called Doggerland to come to the aid of wind. Offshore has successfully been planted in sea depths of 50 feet or less, but of course that is not the case for the west coast of the UK. Floating offshore wind is the answer to that problem: it can be established in much greater depths, and—as we know from the Scottish floating wind farm that has already been established—its efficiency level is far higher than fixed offshore. An efficiency level of 57% has been recorded for the Scottish floating offshore wind farm, compared with an average of about 40% for fixed offshore wind.

We in the Labour party are completely convinced that floating offshore not only can but will play an enormous role in the ambitious targets that we are now setting for wind overall to supply a very large proportion of our future energy needs. We have heard important and thoughtful contributions, not only from the mover of the resolution, the right hon. Member for Preseli Pembrokeshire, but particularly from my hon. Friend the Member for Aberavon (Stephen Kinnock). He concentrated on the things we need to do to really get offshore floating wind underway, particularly in the Celtic sea. Those include what we do about fabrication, the installation of floating offshore wind—because the techniques for installation are quite different between floating and fixed—and how we land the power we are going to get from floating offshore and integrate it into the grid system generally. We will have to address all those issues very quickly if the potential of floating offshore wind is to be realised as well as we hope it will be.

The industry has its own targets that it thinks it can install: about 18 GW of floating offshore by the early 2030s. Those are realistic appraisals, including supply chains and all sorts of other factors. To give Members an idea of the contribution that would make, that is 1.5 times the present installed capacity of all the offshore wind we have at the moment—which, as I say, is mainly fixed. An enormous contribution can be made, and I personally think that our targets—the original 1 GW target for 2030, now increased by the energy security strategy to, I think, 5 GW—can be easily exceeded over the immediate coming period.

However, as the hon. Member for North Devon (Selaine Saxby) alluded to quite substantially in her contribution, we need a great deal of anticipatory investment to make sure we can secure the potential that we know is there. That means proper investment in port infrastructure. From my hon. Friend the Member for Aberavon and the right hon. Member for Preseli Pembrokeshire, we heard that there is an opportunity for joint arrangements between Milford Haven and Port Talbot to secure fabrication, servicing, assembly and so on in areas where we have the resources to do so. That will service what is beginning to be a tremendous opportunity in the Celtic sea for floating offshore wind. It is a tremendous opportunity not only within the UK. As hon. Members have mentioned, it is an opportunity to be an international leader in floating offshore wind: sited in the UK, using UK components and perhaps exporting not just to countries around the Celtic sea, which are also beginning to think about floating offshore, but to a much wider canvas.

The UK component element of the task, which includes getting the Crown Estate around the table and giving them a good talking to about the UK content in bids, is not important just because bringing some industry to the UK is a nice thing to do. It is important because, by developing all the supply chains, skills, know-how, fabrication and so on in the UK, we can become an international leader in floating offshore in the way that, as hon. Members have mentioned, we failed to do in previous iterations of offshore wind. I want to see us supplying floating offshore wind to Denmark, rather than Denmark supplying us with offshore turbines and various other things, as it has so successfully over many years.

Today’s debate has summed up both where we are with floating offshore wind and where we need to be in the not-too-distant future. That leads us to what the Government need to do now to ensure that this revolution can succeed. It means proper anticipatory investment in ports and infrastructure. It means a great deal of anticipatory investment in the grid: both the development of the offshore grid, and the ability to land and incorporate energy properly into the onshore grid. We absolutely must not repeat the mistakes that we made in offshore grid connections: we connected each wind farm separately, just on the basis of the concerns of that particular wind farm, on a point-to-point basis with cabling. We must ensure that the infrastructure is available—in south Wales, Cornwall and Devon—to take the power, and to extend that out into the Celtic sea in particular, so that we are able to develop a collective collection of the resource.

Hopefully, there is a very rosy future for floating offshore wind; Labour is absolutely committed to that rosy future. As my hon. Friend the Member for Aberavon mentioned, one of the vehicles, I am sure, will be the GB energy company that we intend to set up in Government. That will be able to take the anticipatory investment forward, and will be a leading partner in the development of everything that is necessary to make floating offshore wind a great success. I look forward to hearing what the Government’s contribution to this exciting prospect will be. I hope that it will be positive; I am sure it will be. Together, we can then move forward to the rosy future of floating offshore wind.