Octopus submits plan to slash onshore wind development time

The time it takes to plan and build onshore wind farms could be slashed from nearly a decade to less than a year, Octopus has told the government.

At a briefing on the government’s upcoming energy security plan  by the Energy and Climate Intelligence Unit, the supplier’s director of external affairs Clementine Cowton said the average time to develop an onshore wind farm is currently eight to nine years.

But Octopus has submitted a proposal to government that this period could be cut to “less than a year”, she said, adding that the bulk of the time to develop onshore wind is spent on securing planning consents and grid connections.

“There’s nothing to stop that happening. They may not be ready by next winter but we need to get those wind turbines built.”

Cowton also rejected the argument that wind farms are not popular and said 300 communities had submitted written bids to the company to host a wind farm.

Octopus offers customers in communities located close to its onshore farms the opportunity to benefit from cut price electricity when they are generating.

Perceptions about onshore wind farms’ unpopularity are rooted in the past when the process of designing and building them didn’t take communities into account, she said: “Now we recognise the need to incentivise customers, they are very popular.”

Cowton’s comments came against a backdrop of reports that the Cabinet is split over moves to relax planning rules on onshore wind farms in the government energy plan, which is due to be published next week.

Both Boris Johnson and business secretary Kwasi Kwarteng are understood to be keen to ease restrictions on onshore wind development, which were introduced by David Cameron in 2015.

However, they are understood to face opposition from members of the Cabinet, which includes signatories to a 2012 letter, urging the coalition government to cut subsidies for onshore wind.

Julian Jansen, growth and market development Manager – EMEA at storage provider Fluence, told the briefing that last month’s T-4 capacity market auction would deliver £845 million worth of payments over a 15-year period to the 27.6GW of gas-fired peaking plants that won contracts.

He said the process has locked the UK into “high emitting” and “insecure” technologies, contrasting the UK’s auction with that run in Ireland, where the introduction of tougher emissions standards had resulted in only storage and demand-response services winning contracts.

Jansen said the UK’s T-4 auction had also delivered capacity market contracts for 1.1GW of battery storage.

The “significant” pipeline of storage in development means that operational battery storage capacity is expected to double by the end of 2022 compared to 2021.