BEIS urged to make ‘speedy’ response on Vanguard

Vattenfall has urged the government to make a “speedy” decision in redetermining planning permission for its Norfolk Vanguard offshore wind project after a High Court quashed the development consent order granted for the 1.8GW windfarm in July last year.

In his ruling yesterday (18 February), Justice Holgate said the business and energy secretary at the time, Alok Sharma, had failed to adequately justify his decision not to consider the cumulative impacts of the onshore infrastructure for Norfolk Vanguard and its equally sized sister project Norfolk Boreas, and had thereby acted unlawfully.

Responding to the judgement, Vattenfall head of market development offshore and UK country manager Danielle Lane said: “Although the findings of the judge were not against the project itself, and that’s really good for us, the delay we’re now facing obviously makes us a bit concerned that we won’t be ready in time for the auction at the end of the year.

“We’re still absolutely committed to delivering to that and we believe it’s really important because these projects are fundamental to the 2050 decarbonisation targets and in fact before that to the 2030 40GW target that the government set.”

Lane expressed frustration that the projects are now being held up due to the secretary of state’s decision, stating that, contrary to his assertion, Vattenfall did provide “sufficient evidence” to assess the combined impacts of the onshore infrastructure: “We’re going to have new infrastructure, we’ve got lots of local communities that maybe haven’t seen it before and we need to it to happen because although the pandemic may have been bad, the overriding threat of climate change is still with us and something that we need to be acting on now.

“And I think it’s something of a shame that in this year of all years, with COP26 coming up, we’re in a position where small decisions taken by the government in how they are looking at an application then lead to us to a point where we see big delays for good projects.”

She said: “The two projects are sister projects and in fact we made big efforts to make sure that the impact on local communities would be minimised by agreeing that we would build the transmission infrastructure for both projects together and it was one of the key mitigations we put forward. We undergrounded the cable, we moved the convertor station, and we co-located the connection.”

Lane continued: “We’re looking at what it means but the decision as to what happens next is very much in the government’s hands. They could appeal or they could redetermine the consent and, simply put, that means having a further consultation on aspects on the projects and inviting further representations from stakeholders.”

She said redetermination is their preferred option: “How long that will take I think is a decision that the government can make. It could be made relatively quickly and certainly we would encourage them to act in a speedy way on this because all of the data is available for them to look at.”

Lane said she believes it is still possible for the Norfolk Vanguard to be entered into the next Contracts for Difference, provided that the Department for Business, Energy and Industrial Strategy (BEIS) takes fast action: “Yes, we believe it’s feasible and we’re working on that basis.”

“These projects are not easy to turn around quickly,” she noted. “If you think about it, in the lead up to the auction not only do we have to all the economic analysis to see what type of price we would bid, but we have to line up all of our supply chain so we have contracts ready to go if we win the auction, and we would be working towards a final investment decision within 12 to 18 months of winning a CfD.

“We can’t just down tools and stop work and wait to see what happens because if we did do that, we won’t manage to start up again in time to deliver the project should we win a CfD. It’s a real balance for us because we’ve got trust that BEIS will move quickly and we are able to then participate, because otherwise we won’t be in the auction.”

With regards to the development consent order being sought for the Norfolk Boreas project, Lane said: “The Examining Authority has submitted its report so it’s currently with the secretary of state for consideration. I think realistically we were expecting a development consent order decision in April but it’s more likely it will be after that now with this decision yesterday.”

“Our expectation is that they won’t issue the Boreas consent until they resolved the matters surrounding Vanguard,” she added.

“I’d like to be clear here that at this point today we haven’t had any information from BEIS on either of the two projects or their decision of what the next steps will be, and we believe they’re still considering what they will be.”

Lane said the episode is illustrative of one of the main challenges the energy industry will face in the coming years: “The more of these projects that come forward, the more we need a planning system that is fit for purpose and is able to deal with the balance between the need for new infrastructure and the individuals that live in that area and may need to come to terms with change happening in their region and the impacts that will have locally.

“I don’t want to diminish what that means for people because we have to be sensitive to the needs of local communities and everyone has the right to say no, but at some point we have to as a country make a decision between the national need – the global need even – of climate change and the need of the individual.

“I do believe there’s going to be a challenge for future projects getting consent.”