Healey to Veto Offshore Wind Farms That Cannot Lower Bills
New offshore wind projects bidding for subsidy contracts will be signed off only if the grid can absorb their power without pushing up consumer costs, the chancellor says. “There’s no sense building power that can’t connect and then paying to switch it off,” he wrote in the Times.
Mr Healey insists “this is not a retreat from clean power. It is the credible route to it”, but renewables experts read it, alongside more than £3bn of cuts to the energy department’s budget to fund defence, as a further step away from the 2030 clean-power target and Ed Miliband’s agenda. The National Audit Office warned in September that constraint payments to idle turbines could reach £7.8bn a year by 2030. Heat-pump subsidies were also trimmed in the Budget: about 60,000 a year are fitted in existing homes against a 2030 target of 250,000. The test comes at the next renewables auction, where the new grid condition will apply for the first time.