Offshore Wind

Lord West of Spithead Excerpts

Monday 11th September 2023 Lords Chamber

[Lord Callanan (Con)]

I know that the noble Baroness is passionate about onshore wind. I hope the changes that we announced will produce more capacity. As I said, we have just let 24 projects under the latest CfD round. She is right that the industry said in advance of this round that it wanted to be paid more. Across all the different areas of government for which I have been responsible, I have never met a private developer who want to be paid less for what they do. Let us be realistic: this is a negotiation process. Of course, industry will say, “We need to be paid more; we need to be given larger contracts”. That is entirely understandable. We have to bear in mind our responsibility to the bill payer who ends up paying these costs. We of course want to see more renewable capacity laid out—it is intermittent but it is cheap. We need to produce a strike price that is fair to the developers, so that they get a return, but also to the bill payers.

[Lord West of Spithead (Lab)]

My Lords, the Minister is right that we should praise ourselves for the offshore wind farms, which I must say are most impressive. However, the interconnectors and so on lie along the seabed. Like so many other aspects of our energy supply and other things, the seabed has certain vulnerabilities. We have seen Russian ships from the main directorate of undersea research regularly in the North Sea, going along areas where these lie. Is the Minister happy that we have put enough effort into monitoring and tracking where they are all the time and then using ships, aircraft and whatever else to go and make sure that those lines are still safe?

[Lord Callanan (Con)]

The noble Lord makes a good point. There are a number of such areas of critical national infrastructure, including gas-interlinking pipelines and electricity interconnector cables with other countries, as well as our interconnector cables with the offshore wind farms. These are all critical vulnerabilities and the noble Lord can be assured that we monitor these things closely. We are well aware of the possible threat presented to them.