Question to the Department for Business, Energy and Industrial Strategy:

To ask Her Majesty's Government what plans they have to increase the amount of energy generated from wind power; and how they plan to assist private and public sector businesses (1) to start, or (2) to increase, generating wind power on land they own or occupy.

Achieving our ambitious 2050 Net Zero target will require significant increases in renewable electricity generation, and we will need to increase deployment across a range of technologies, including wind.

We now have 14.2GW installed onshore wind (ONW) capacity and we are a world leader in offshore wind (OFW) with installed capacity of 10.1GW (which will rise to 19.5GW by the mid 2020s).

On 6 October 2020, my Rt. Hon. Friend the Prime Minister announced new plans to Build Back Greener by building on the UK’s success in wind energy. As part of this, we increased the offshore wind ambition to 40 GW by 2030, introduced a new target to deploy 1GW of floating wind by 2030, and to support up to double the capacity of renewable energy in the next Contracts for Difference (CfD) auction, which will open in late 2021.

This CfD allocation round will be open to both onshore and offshore wind (as well as other technologies) as announced on Monday 2 March 2020.

The Contracts for Difference scheme is the government’s main mechanism for supporting new renewable generation projects in Great Britain and to this date has secured clean energy for 12 million homes. Both public and private sector businesses are entitled to bid into the Contracts for Difference scheme.