Wind farms could power half of Britain’s homes, but jobs could go overseas

Ben Webster, Environment Editor

Nine giant new wind farms in the seas around Britain will be announced today, but few of the 6,000 turbines needed are likely to be built here.
Ed Miliband, the Energy and Climate Change Secretary, will say that the world’s biggest expansion of offshore wind power, costing £75 billion, will create 70,000 jobs in Britain by 2020. However, the Government has failed to persuade any of the major wind turbine manufacturers to open a factory in Britain. The companies granted licences today to build the farms will not be obliged to source any parts from domestic manufacturers and most are expected to buy turbines made in Denmark or Germany.
A taskforce of officials from Downing Street, the Treasury and the business and energy departments has held talks with suppliers in recent months including Siemens, Vestas, Mitsubishi and General Electric, but none is yet willing to commit to manufacturing in Britain.
The country’s only turbine blade manufacturer — the Vestas factory on the Isle of Wight — closed last summer after the company said that the British market for turbines had been too slow to develop.

Almost all the manufacturing contracts for London Array, the biggest wind farm in British waters approved before today, have been awarded overseas. Less than 10 per cent of the £1.7 billion investment will be spent in Britain. Clipper Windpower is developing one of the world’s biggest turbines at a research centre in Blyth, Northumberland, but it is several years away from starting commercial production.
The nine farms announced will generate enough electricity to power more than half of Britain’s homes, but only when the wind blows.
The turbines will be twice as large as those on land, typically rising 170m (557ft) from sea level to the tip of the blade. They will stand in up to 70m of water, compared with only 10-25m for existing offshore turbines.
They will also be much farther away from the coast, with the biggest, Dogger Bank, starting 130 miles off the North East coast. Residential platforms will be built near the turbines to accommodate hundreds of workers who will carry out servicing and repairs.
The developers, which will include some of Britain’s biggest energy suppliers, will pledge to build enough turbines to create 25,000 megawatts of electricity, the equivalent of 21 Sizewell B nuclear power stations. There are currently 228 offshore turbines with a capacity of 688 megawatts.
The timetable for the construction will depend on how quickly the finance can be raised and what happens to the price of the fossil fuels with which wind energy competes. None of the farms is likely to be generating electricity before 2015.
The British Wind Energy Association said yesterday that the cost of building wind turbines had doubled in recent years, partly because of the fall in the value of sterling and a growing reliance on imports. Each megawatt of wind capacity announced today will cost up to £3.1 million, compared with £1.5 million for the first offshore wind farms approved a decade ago.
John Sauven, director of Greenpeace UK, said: “The Government’s role is clear: train and equip Britain’s workforce to ensure that the thousands of jobs that will be created are filled by British workers, and provide the economic certainty investors need to complete these projects on time and on budget.”