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“Falling offshore wind prices are a game-changer”
The steep fall in the cost of offshore wind power caught even the renewable energy lobby on the hop when the results of the latest contracts for difference auctions appeared this week.
It changes the politics of energy too. Lord Adonis, the Labour chair of the National Infrastructure Commission, is not the only figure to see Monday’s announcement as a “game changer”.
It means the clean growth strategy, which has taken so long to produce, will finally emerge in a very different political context that it would have done six months ago.
The proof that renewable energy can be generated more cheaply than gas and nuclear can be expected to further embolden climate change minister Claire Perry to publish the kind of “ambitious” plan she has previously promised.
The Tory grassroots backwoodsmen, whose hostility to windfarms has driven policy for the past couple of years, had already lost influence following their party’s failure to win a parliamentary majority.
It will be harder now for climate change sceptics to hide behind value-for-money arguments. And in a sign that the green energy bug is catching across Whitehall, Nick Hancock was loudly banging the drum at the international trade department for solar power this week.
Next month’s Conservative conference is likely to offer a warmer reception for Perry’s crusade to tackle emissions. After this week, the political debate on energy generation will never quite look the same again.
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