Jobs blow revealed in wind energy report

By Fiona Harvey, Environment Correspondent
Published: October 20 2008 03:00

The massive planned expansion of renewable energy may produce far fewer jobs than the government has claimed, a study has found.
Producing enough renewable energy to meet government targets would create about 36,000 jobs in the wind energy sector by 2020, according to a study by Bain & Company for the British Wind Energy Association, to be published today.
Wind is expected to account for most of the renewable energy produced by 2020, as the potential for the expansion of other sources of energy - such as hydro-electricity, wave and tidal generation - is limited.
But the Bain estimate is far adrift of government claims.
Ed Miliband, secretary of state for energy and climate change, said last week that the offshore wind sector alone had "the potential to provide up to 70,000 new, green jobs" in the next decade.
In its renewable energy strategy, published over the summer, the government claimed it would create 160,000 new jobs by 2020.
The UK has committed, as part of a European Union proposal, to produce 15 per cent of its energy from renewable sources by 2050, which - given the difficulty of using renewables for heat and transport - would translate into generating 35 per cent to 40 per cent of the country's electricity from renewable sources by that date.
Achieving these targets will require the construction of about 27 gigawatts of wind generation capacity, the Bain study has found. The UK currently has about 2.2GW of capacity, and the wind industry employs about 5,000 people.
Most wind employees are in the construction, planning, maintenance and operation of wind turbines. About 40 per cent are employed in manufacturing wind turbines, an area in which the UK lags behind countries such as Germany and Denmark.
Attracting more turbine manufacturers to the UK would be crucial to generating more renewable energy jobs in the UK, said Markus Boettcher, author of the Bain report. He said that if a third of the wind turbines needed to make the government's targets were manufactured in the UK, that would create 36,000 jobs. If 50 to 60 per cent of the turbines were manufactured in the UK, and if a proportion were built for export, there could be 57,000 jobs in the sector by 2020 in the most optimistic of Bain's estimates. However, that would be hard to achieve as the UK's current wind turbine manufacturing base was "very moderate", Mr Boettcher said.
An installed capacity of 27GW of wind would require a total investment in the sector of about £26bn between now and 2020. At current energy prices, this would result in annual revenues of £8.2bn.
The UK's development of the wind sector was being held back by several factors, Mr Boettcher said. The most important were the lack of connections to the national grid from potential wind farms, which tend to be remote, and the delays faced by wind farm developers in gaining planning permission. The supply of labour was also a problem, Mr Boettcher said.
Copyright The Financial Times Limited 2008