The Hornsea Four offshore wind farm was finally approved after a two-year struggle with planning laws and a five-month delay, highlighting the difficulties in achieving energy security in the UK.
The UK’s ambitious green power plans may not be realistic without a serious commitment to building the infrastructure required to support its goals.
Sadly, such wonderful dreams of a secure, greener energy future powered by renewable generation also belong down the rabbit hole, where they will not be hampered by the reality of byzantine planning laws, obstinate localism, departmental dysfunction and poorly laid out policies. Last week, energy secretary Grant Shapps finally rubber-stamped Hornsea Four, the 2.9GW wind farm off the Yorkshire coast, which will become the UK’s second largest offshore wind farm.
Offshore wind’s on-land counterparts are facing an even more challenging time, with only two turbines across England and Wales hooked onto the grid last year, less than war-torn Ukraine. The government wants to more than treble the country’s nuclear capacity by 2050, yet only two new gigawatt power plants are close to viability – one deep in the planning stages, the other nearly constructed – while it has fudged funding small modular reactors, opening up a competition rather than coming up with a clear pipeline for projects.
The reality is that regardless of Shapps’ spin linking climate protestors to Labour, no one has managed to ‘Just Stop Oil’ more effectively than this government. This includes simplifying the vast range of energy strategies, reforming planning laws and stabilising policy so that private sector confidence can be rebuilt and investment unlocked – which will mean projects escape logjams and are actually built.
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