Speed up wind power expansion or miss net zero targets, Labour is told

Labour's clean energy targets may be in jeopardy just weeks after the party came to power with doubts about the promise to quadruple Britain's offshore wind power, according to senior industry executives.

- Jillian Ambrose

The offshore wind industry has said there will not be enough time to develop the projects needed to create a net zero electricity system by the end of the decade unless the government increases the ambition and funding of its forthcoming "make or break" subsidy auctions.

A delay to Labour's planned renewable energy rollout - which calls for a doubling of onshore wind, tripling of solar power and quadrupling of offshore wind capacity - would also risk derailing Britain's legally binding climate ambition to have complete net zero carbon emissions by 2050.

"It's crunch time," said Damien Zachlod, the managing director of the UK arm of the German energy company EnBW. "How close we get to the government's 2030 offshore wind target depends on whatever happens in the next 18 to 24 months." The government may have already missed its chance to meet its 2030 target, according to Zachlod, because "the fastest that you could develop an offshore wind farm is seven years" and "more often than not it takes 10 to 12 years".