London — Britain has increased the budget for its current annual renewable power auction by 50% to 1.5 billion pounds ($1.92 billion), the government said on Wednesday.
The new Labour government, which won power earlier this month, aims to decarbonise the electricity sector by 2030, which will require a rapid increase of renewable power capacity such as wind and solar.
To spur investment, the government invites renewable project developers to bid for government-backed price guarantees for the electricity produced, called Contracts for Difference (CfDs).
The addition of 500 million pounds to the 1 billion pounds assigned by the previous Conservative government took the budget for this year’s sixth such auction to a record high.
A higher budget means more projects can be selected and offered contracts that guarantee a minimum price of electricity. When wholesale electricity prices are lower than the minimum, the budget covers the difference, if they go above, producers pay back the difference to the government.
“This will restore the UK as a global leader for green technologies and deliver the infrastructure we need to boost our energy independence, protect billpayers, and become a clean energy superpower,” Energy Secretary Ed Miliband said in a statement.
Some 1.1 billion pounds of the budget will be dedicated to offshore wind, 185 million pounds are earmarked for other established technologies, such as onshore wind and solar, and 270 million for emerging technologies, such as floating offshore wind and tidal power.
Renewable power developers and industry groups had called on the new government to increase the available funding saying a bigger budget was required for the country to have any chance of meeting goals to expand the country’s fixed offshore wind capacity to 55 gigawatts (GW) by 2030 from around 15 GW now.
If you put a solar panel into space, you generate about 13 times the amount of energy that that same panel does on earth.
Iberdrola, Orsted, Equinor and TotalEnergies, are among the companies with projects eligible to bid for the sixth auction round.
“This will unlock billions in private investment, support thousands of jobs, strengthen our energy security and produce the green and affordable power needed for decades to come,” Keith Anderson, CEO of ScottishPower said in a separate statement.
Analysts at Bernstein said the increased budget might still not be enough to achieve the goal.
“While the potential budget increase would be a step in the right direction, it may still prove short of what is required to achieve the UK Government’s target … especially given the failure of AR5, project cancellations and re-bidding capacity,” the analysts said.
The fifth auction (AR5) held in 2023 failed to attract any offshore wind projects as the incentives offered were deemed too low by developers.
($1 = 0.7798 pounds)
*Susanna Twidale, editing: Tomasz Janowski – Reuters
