Offshore Wind

Alex Sobel Excerpts

Wednesday 14th January 2026 Commons Chamber

[Ed Miliband]

My hon. Friend makes a really important point. We will be setting up five technical excellence colleges in clean energy, and they will be incredibly important in training young people for this clean energy future. There is a huge number of opportunities out there. Part of this is about the training, but another part is about young people getting to know about these opportunities. I was at an amazing jobs fair in the north-east—organised by Kim McGuinness, the mayor of the north-east—which brought together some of the developers with young people, and the excitement among those young people about this future was so palpable. We need to do more of that.

[Alex Sobel (Leeds Central and Headingley) (Lab/Co-op)]

I congratulate my right hon. Friend on proving that contracts for difference for offshore wind really do work. I am particularly pleased to hear how much floating wind is in this contract. I know he is always looking to the future, so could he update the House on what his Department is doing about emerging offshore technologies such as offshore thermal, offshore wave and offshore tidal?

[Ed Miliband]

Those are incredibly important technologies, and we need to do more to help bring down their cost. Tidal schemes will be in the next auction pot, and we are continuing to look at how we can deploy more of them in our country.