What shall we do with the drunken sailor?
Director's column
16 Aug 2024
Written By Andrew Montford
This week, National Grid announced plans for an offshore grid in the Celtic Sea, to the north of Cornwall and Devon. This is apparently to connect a planned 4.5 gigawatts of floating offshore windfarms to markets.
No costs were given for the project – windfarms pay for the connection to the transmission grid themselves, but it’s clear that the windfarms and their cables are going to cost a great deal of money. Our two floating offshore windfarms to date – Hywind and Kincardine – have been catastrophically expensive, producing power at four times the cost of gas-fired electricity. In the current renewables auction, new ones are being offered a price that suggests costs are not coming down any time soon. So a plan to deploy offshore wind on such a vast scale appears indistinguishable from outright insanity.
https://www.netzerowatch.com/all-news/miliband-drunken-sailor
