Britain Awards 10 Contracts for Offshore Wind Projects

The British government on Tuesday awarded price support contracts for a series of offshore wind farms as part of a wider package for renewable energy, a reversal from a disappointing auction last year in which there were no takers for offshore wind projects.

“The government has shown it takes renewable energy seriously,” Duncan Clark, the head of Britain and Ireland for the Danish wind developer Orsted, which received support for two projects in the auction, said in a statement.

Overall the government awarded support for 131 renewable energy projects including onshore wind as well as solar and tidal power. RenewableUK, an industry group, estimates that the installations, if completed, could attract £14 billion, or about $18 billion, in investment and power nearly 11 million homes.

The government of Prime Minister Keir Starmer is betting on offshore wind as “the backbone of the clean energy mission” to shift from oil and gas to renewable energy sources in a matter of years.

The governing Labour Party realized that if it wanted to retain Britain’s leading position in offshore wind installation, it needed to substantially increase price supports to help developers tackle the estimated 40 percent increase in the costs of building these projects in recent years. Offshore wind is attractive in Britain because of abundant wind and large areas of shallow seabed off the coasts, especially in the North Sea. Investors are also attracted to the profits from these projects, which can cost billions of dollars.

Stephen Bull, chief executive of Vargronn, which received support for a floating offshore wind farm off Scotland called Green Volt, said in an interview that the auction may not have reversed the impact of last year’s failure, but the results put Britain “on the right track.”