Wind power wasted- can Labour help?

The UK has an enviable wind resource, but much of it has not yet been developed  – with on shore wind blocked by planning rules, and planning delays holding overall progress back. In response, the Labour Party has said it will overturn the Tory ban on new onshore wind projects in England and introduce ‘tough new targets’ to reduce the time clean energy projects like this take in planning ‘from years to months’. Labour leader Keir Starmer said it can take up to 13 years to develop a new offshore wind farm. Moreover, he said, the backlog in power projects trying to connect to the National Grid has now got so bad that projects from the leasing round last year have been told they will not get a grid connection until 2033 – over a decade later.

It is certainly a bit of a mess- and it’s not just about planning. A Carbon Tracker report says that ‘the electricity grid is not fit for purpose because investments are not increasing in step with the rapid growth of wind power’. The report says that ‘on more than 200 occasions in 2022, bottlenecks in the transmission system meant National Grid ESO had to pay Scottish wind farms to stop generating zero-carbon power and pay gas power stations in England to increase output to compensate. This added £800 million to consumer electricity bills and increased greenhouse gas emissions by 1.3 million tonnes’.  

It notes that Scotland has 10GW of wind farms but accounts for only 10% of GB electricity demand, so much of the power they generate is consumed in England. However, the grid can currently only transmit a maximum 6GW across the border, so on windy days this generation must be curtailed due to what the report calls ‘wind congestion’ and gas stations fired up to meet any demand shortfall. If no action is taken on this issue, it says ‘wind congestion costs could treble in the next three years’. However, by prioritising investments in grids and flexibility, ‘potential congestion costs of £3.5bn could be halved by 2030’. 

There certainly do seem to be problems with the grid and a need for action. The UK Energy Networks Association says that 200GW or so of green projects are awaiting grid connection, with ‘164 GW of new connection requests in the year to Oct. 2022 alone…around 3 times the capacity of our grid today.’ The BBC put the value of the stalled projects at £200bn. National Grid said ‘significant reform is needed across policy, regulation and the energy industry’. Ofgem has stepped in, but it will take a major revamp to get things moving, including new grid links - and there are all sorts of local issues .

For example, there have been problems with the new T shaped pylon. They are being used in Somerset for linking to the new nuclear plant at Hinkley and may be used elsewhere. The Telegraph has reported that residents who live beneath them claim that they are noisier than their lattice predecessors, interfere with WiFi and damage the value of their homes. They have allegedly already driven some locals to sell up and move away. The new design is meant to be no more noisy that than old lattice design, but it is shorter and the cables are lower so it seems that the range of noise can extend 50m further than their lattice counterparts. The T pylons are much faster to install (days not weeks), but are more expensive (more steel) and, though the first wave was built entirely in Britain, they are now imported from China.

If and when new on-shore wind projects get the go ahead, problems like this will have to be dealt with, and as offshore wind continues to develops the UK will also need new grid links, for example across East Anglia. Wales also needs grid upgrades. However, major new grids sometimes attract opposition from environmentalist and local residents, especially in scenic parts of the country, and in the Scottish Highlands in particular, with there often being bitter battles over routes.  Sometimes conflicts can be avoided by careful community engagement,  More radically, offshore grid links, for example between the west of Scotland and north Wales, are possible, although they are costly. However, we may need more links like this for balancing grid supply and demand within the UK and also over over a wider area- trading power with and from Europe, using HVDC super-grids for low-loss long-distance power transmission.   

Quite a big agenda then for Labour, if it wins the forthcoming election, even just in terms of grid systems and planning. And going beyond that, under its Green Prosperity Plan, Labour says it will establish ‘GB Energy’, a new publicly-owned champion of ‘clean and affordable power generation’, to be based in Scotland, with Starmer, announcing this at Nova Innovation, the tidal company in Leith in Scotland, saying ‘the skills are here’. 

The overall aim is to get to 100% ‘clean and affordable’ power by 2030. That’s pretty ambitious, especially since Starmer had to cut back of his initial plan to invest £28bn every year until the end of the decade on building up green industries. He blamed high interest rates. But he still hopes to make the UK a ‘clean energy superpower’ by 2030, with Labour ‘harnessing the power of marine and tidal energy, quadrupling offshore wind, doubling onshore wind, tripling solar power’.  Arguably that may be hard if Labour also tries to have high-cost new nuclear in the mix. Along with as yet unproven large scale carbon capture and storage- to allow for continued use of fossil gas. 

Those aspects aside, Labours plan is quite radical, with wind doing very well: Labour has set a target of 60GW of offshore wind by 2030, 10GW more than in the Conservative government’s plans. And although the fine details of Labours plan are still a bit vague, it has been mostly well received, including by industrial groups in the field (if not those in oil and gas!) and by most environmentalists, the later especially welcoming the proposed block on new oil and gas exploration. While some, like the GMB Union, claimed that we would then have to import more gas, Carbon Brief claimed the overall package would lead to less need for imports. And so the debate on energy policy specifics goes on, and, with more details of plans from all parties likely to emerge, it will no doubt continue right up to the election day- whenever that is. 

The debate will likely focus on targets and dates, with, for example Labour clearly pushing hard on wind, though perhaps a bit less so on solar- its plan is to triple PV by 2030, whereas the government has an ambition to expand it five-fold to a massive 70GW by 2035. But a bit of competition on targets and dates may arguably be all to the good - as long as it leads to more well site capacity installed faster, with sensibly planned grid links where needed.