UK ‘needs 20GW more offshore wind by 2025’

The government must guarantee a contracted additional 20GW of offshore wind over the next four years, according to a broad-based coalition of charities.

Boris Johnson is expected to outline a ten-point plan for a “green industrial revolution” in a speech next week, heralding the long-awaited publication of the energy white paper and national infrastructure strategy.

The Climate Coalition, the membership of which ranges from The Women’s Institute to Greenpeace, has outlined its own ten-point plan for a green recovery ahead of the prime minister’s announcement.

This includes a call for the government to guarantee that an additional 20GW of offshore wind will be contracted through a “regular pipeline” of auctions over the next four years. The coalition says this new target is designed to get the UK on track to meeting Johnson’ recent pledge of achieving 40GW by 2030.

This additional rollout must be supported by a new process for marine strategic spatial planning, the coalition insists.

It says support for community energy, onshore wind and solar should also be “significantly boosted”.

The blueprint also calls for the government to announce the phase-out of new fossil fuel cars by 2030 and provide a further £5.8 billion to support heat pumps deployment during the current parliament.

This funding, which would be additional to the Conservative Manifesto commitment to invest £9.2 billion in energy efficiency, would support the installation of 10 million heat pumps. The combined investment in energy efficiency and heat pumps can support more than 300,000 jobs, while reducing energy bills, tackling fuel poverty and slashing carbon emissions, claims the coalition.

Separately, a fuel poverty campaigner told MPs yesterday that the Energy Companies Obligation (ECO) is “not effective” at tackling the issue in rural areas off the gas grid.

Giving evidence to the Environmental Audit Committee’s ongoing inquiry into energy efficiency, Peter Smith, director of policy and research at National Energy Action, said the industry backed energy efficiency programme is not meeting the needs of the 200,000 fuel poor households living in isolated villages and hamlets.

“We know it (ECO) isn’t an effective way of reaching people most in need with the biggest affordability issues (in rural areas).”

He said the government urgently needs to bring forward a Home Upgrade Grant programme, targeted at fuel poor rural households when it unveils its spending review to complement the extension of ECO to 2026.

He added that it is “crucial” that proposals to enhance the energy efficiency of private rented homes, which were outlined in a recently published government consultation paper, are taken forward “swiftly”.