Aviation restrictions could be a major hurdle to prevent the UK from meeting its target of generating 30GW of offshore wind by 2030, the Global Offshore Wind 2019 conference in London heard today.
Multiple projects currently on the drawing board could fall foul of regulations imposed by the country’s Ministry of Defence, according to Innogy head of energy and regulatory policy Zoe Keeton.
“At the minute, in terms of the projects that we’ve currently got either in planning or with consent but not yet into construction, we believe nine are impacted by aviation objections,” Keeton told the conference.
Keeton said those nine projects had a combined generation capacity of around 12GW.
To be sure, Keeton said the UK’s recent offshore wind sector deal could provide industry and government representatives with more leverage to find solutions.
“What the sector deal has given us is a platform,” she explained. “This isn’t a wind industry problem anymore: the government wants to procure these volumes of electricity and the government needs to decarbonise.”
Iberdrola offshore business manager Jonathan Cole, meanwhile, cited three other potential barriers to project development: site selection, grid planning and grid integration.
A lot of new sites for new wind farms will need to be found “very quickly” if the UK is to meet the 2030 offshore target, Cole said.
With regards to grid planning, he called for a progression beyond a current “project-to-project and beach-to-beach” planning approach.
“We need a more strategically planned network, a resilient inter-connected network which will be more cost effective, which will be more reliable, which will be more environmentally responsible.”
Now that the wind industry had proven that its technology could work at scale, Cole said its “next big challenge” would be integrating large volumes of renewable energy into the grid.
“Once we’ve cracked that there’s actually nothing that can stop us,” he said.
Clarke MacFarlane, the head of Siemens Gamesa Renewable Energy’s UK business warned the industry not to automatically assume that future governments would continue to support the 2030 targets.
“We’ve got to remember to take whatever the next governments are and public opinion with us,” he said.
“The sector deal was us getting to the starting line.”