Equinor and Gwynt Glas win UK floating offshore wind leases
LONDON, June 19 (Reuters) - Equnior (EQNR.OL), opens new tab and Gwynt Glas, a joint venture between EDF Renewables UK and ESB, have won seabed leases to build floating wind farms in the Celtic Sea off the coast of Wales and South West England, The Crown Estate said on Thursday.
Britain is aiming to largely decarbonise its electricity sector by 2030 to reduce its reliance on fossil fuels and drive down cost and is seeking to increase offshore wind capacity to 43-50 gigawatts (GW) by the end of the decade, from around 16 GW at present.
'Floating offshore wind will be transformative for economic growth in Wales and the South West, unlocking thousands of jobs in places like Port Talbot and Bristol, bolstering our energy security and delivering industrial renewal,' Britain's Energy Secretary Ed Miliband said in the Crown Estate press release.
The Crown Estate, which acts as manager of the seabed around England, Wales and Northern Ireland, said Equnior and Gwynt Glas had both won leases giving them the rights each to build 1.5 gigawatt (GW) floating wind projects in its latest seabed leasing round.
The companies will pay 350 pounds ($468.55) per megawatt per year for the leases, the Crown Estate said, meaning both groups will pay 525,000 pounds per year for the sites excluding VAT.
Floating wind projects can be installed in deeper waters than fixed-bottom foundations, harnessing stronger and more continuous wind to generate more power.
The Crown Estate is an independently run, commercial business, whose profits go to the Treasury but its profits are also used as the benchmark for the level of public funding for the Royal Family.
($1 = 0.7470 pounds)
Hashtags
Try Our AI Features
Explore what Daily8 AI can do for you:
Comments
No comments yet...
Related Articles
Reuters
7 hours ago
- Reuters
Russia's Sechin says China is moving towards exporting energy
ST PETERSBURG, Russia, June 21 (Reuters) - Rosneft ( opens new tab CEO Igor Sechin, one of the most influential men in Russia's energy sector, said on Saturday that China was seeking complete energy independence and that in the foreseeable future it could become a major energy exporter. China's economic and military rise over the past 45 years is considered to be one of the most significant geopolitical events of recent times, alongside the 1991 fall of the Soviet Union which ended the Cold War. Sechin said that a massive increase in electricity consumption was changing the entire landscape of the global energy markets as populations soared in Africa and Asia and the digital revolution triggered massive demand for power. Speaking at the St. Petersburg International Economic Forum, Sechin said that China accounted for a third of global investment in the energy sector, was ramping up renewable energy capacity and was now one of the leaders in nuclear power. "China, which has already ensured its energy security, is confidently moving towards complete energy independence, forming a stable energy balance based on its own resources," Sechin said in a speech which referenced both Greek mythology and Niccolo Machiavelli. "There is no doubt, taking into account the persistence and professionalism of our Chinese comrades, that in the foreseeable future they will achieve the desired result, which will turn China from an importer of energy resources into a major energy exporter." China is currently the world's largest importer of crude oil and a major importer of natural gas. Russia is the world's second largest oil exporter and holds the world's largest reserves of natural gas. Sechin, who worked alongside Vladimir Putin in the former imperial capital of St Petersburg and later under the president in the Kremlin, has run Rosneft since 2012. Rosneft accounts for about 40% of Russian oil production, 14% of the country's gas production and 32% of the refinery market. It is also the biggest Russian exporter of oil to China. Sechin said that the decision by OPEC+ to speed up an output increase now looked far-sighted and justified in the light of the confrontation between Israel and Iran. He added that the OPEC+ group could bring forward its output hikes by around a year from the initial plan. He drew attention to the vast U.S. debt pile, warning that great powers from Habsburg Spain and pre-Revolutionary France to the Ottoman Empire and Britain had declined due to high levels of public debt. The expansion of the Western military-industrial complex was diverting enormous resources away from productive sectors and unlikely to be a panacea for the problems in Europe or the United States, Sechin said. "There is always an asymmetrical answer," he added. But his focus was on China's role, giving the example how the growth in the sales of electric vehicles had resulted in significant slowdown in motor fuel demand over the last year. "If this trend continues – it may have a significant reverse impact on the oil market balance," Sechin said. He added than an important part of China's strategy to reduce dependence on energy imports was the processing of coal into synthetic fuels and chemical products. About 40 million tons of coal is used to produce synthetic fuels and more than 260 million tons for ammonia and methanol production, he said.
The Guardian
9 hours ago
- The Guardian
Ancient trees are shipped to the UK, then burned – using billions in ‘green' subsidies. Stop this madness now
How green is this? We pay billions of pounds to cut down ancient forests in the US and Canada, ship the wood across the Atlantic in diesel tankers, then burn it in a Yorkshire-based power station. Welcome to the scandal of Drax, where Britain's biggest polluter gets to play climate hero. The reality is that billions in public subsidies has enabled Drax to generate electricity by burning 300m trees. Now the government is trying to force through an extension that would grant Drax an estimated £1.8bn in public subsidies on top of the £11bn it has already pocketed, keeping this circus going until at least 2031. This isn't green energy. The mathematics alone should horrify anyone who cares about value for money or the environment. Burning wood creates 18% more CO2 emissions than coal. Even if you replant every tree Drax destroys, it takes up to a century for new growth to reabsorb the carbon released. We're supposed to reach net zero by 2050, not 2125. Yet through circus-trick accounting, all of Drax's massive emissions magically disappear from Britain's climate ledger. They've simply been wished away – counted as 'zero', while the company becomes our largest single contributor to climate breakdown. Extraordinarily, this scandal unites opposition across the political spectrum. From the Greens to Reform, from the Morning Star to the Daily Telegraph, there's rare consensus that Drax represents everything wrong with our approach to climate policy. The Labour-dominated public accounts committee condemned Drax as a 'white elephant' that's been allowed to 'mark its own homework' while claiming 'billions upon billions' in subsidies. A Lords committee agreed, saying parliament needs to see key documents before approving any more funding. I don't agree with Ed Miliband on everything – we clearly have different views on nuclear power. I respect the energy secretary's commitment to tackling climate crisis, and it is worth noting that the further subsidies are half of what was previously on offer for Drax. But that's exactly why continuing to subsidise Drax at all is so disappointing. When Miliband announced his plans to 'ramp up' biomass burning back in 2009, he was genuinely trying to find alternatives to fossil fuels. But 16 years on, this policy has gone badly astray. What was meant to be a bridge to renewable energy is actually making emissions worse. If, on Monday, the House of Lords votes to extend this unabated wood burning for another four years, what is to stop these subsidies being extended again and again? And why should the government deal with a firm as untrustworthy as Drax? Perhaps most damning is what Drax refuses to reveal. After the BBC's devastating Panorama investigation into the company's destruction of Canadian primary forests, Drax asked auditor KPMG to investigate, hoping for a clean bill of health. However, the evidence was so damning that the reports are still being hidden from the public. If Drax has nothing to hide, why not publish these reports? A former top Treasury official turned whistleblower accused it of deliberately concealing unsustainable practices to secure subsidies. The case, now settled, raises questions of dishonesty that should disqualify any company from public funding. The extra billions Drax is seeking could help build enough wind and solar capacity to power millions of homes. It could create permanent jobs in genuine renewable industries, not temporary employment destroying irreplaceable ecosystems. Every pound spent subsidising tree burning is a pound not invested in technologies that could actually deliver net zero. While other countries race ahead with wind, solar and battery storage, we're burning money on the most primitive fuel known to humanity. There's a huge loophole in the government's pledge to stop Drax burning trees from primary forest. Their restrictions on Drax only apply to subsidised electricity supplied to the grid. Drax wants to power private data centres but there is no plan that prevents it from destroying ancient forests to power 21st-century AI searches. That means Drax could be cutting down even more primary forests than it does today. MPs have lost trust in the government's ability to hold Drax to account – the criticism from parliamentary committees has been brutal. The environmental movement didn't fight to establish renewable energy so politicians could facilitate the burning of ancient forests that took millennia to grow. Real climate action means making hard choices, not hiding behind accounting tricks that make our emissions disappear on paper while making them worse in reality. It is time for Labour MPs to speak up; the fight for net zero is hard enough. More subsidies for Drax's wood burning in the name of sustainability is just more fuel on that fire. Dale Vince is a green energy industrialist and campaigner
BBC News
12 hours ago
- BBC News
Could Kent and Dungeness be part of UK's nuclear 'golden age'?
We are entering a "golden age of nuclear", says Energy Secretary Ed Miliband, and calls are being made for Kent to be included in the planned new has proved to be a big month for nuclear power, with £16.7bn committed to developing the Sizewell C reactor as well as small modular reactors (SMRs) to meet growing electricity with the government looking to select an SMR site later this year, voices in the county say that Dungeness, with its existing infrastructure, is ideal for the latest low-carbon energy opinions are split, with opponents saying that new nuclear in Dungeness will be at the expense of the environment. Before defuelling began in June 2021, Dungeness B generated enough electricity for a million homes a year on average across its 38-year lifespan, according to energy company the plant has been shut since 2018 due to "significant" technical challenges, Kent County Council's newly elected Reform UK councillor David Wimble, cabinet member for environment, said he hoped Dungeness would be "on the list" for an SMR. Speaking to Radio Kent, he said: "People are scared by the word nuclear. We would really love to have new nuclear on Romney Marsh and would favour that over covering half of the marsh in solar panels."Mr Wimble said building an SMR in Dungeness would be "very simple" with the infrastructure to join the National Grid already in place from the former power station. 'Multiple options' The government's new era of nuclear energy focuses around small modular reactors, which are to be built by Rolls-Royce, and over £2.5bn has been pledged to the scheme as part of the recent Spending a site is selected later this year, the government hopes to have the new SMRs connected to the grid in the Cheetham, of the Nuclear Institute, said it was "more than possible" for an SMR to be built at Dungeness while decommissioning of the previous reactor took place. And, with the infrastructure and skills already in the area, he said there were "multiple options for the future of the site".He added: "We are seeing investment and the government are well aware that these investments need to be made now to have nuclear power for the next 10 to 40 years." 'Particularly problematic' The debate over whether Dungeness could return to the nuclear power fold has been long-running, even before decommissioning began on the current 2010, the government published its examination on sites it believed to be fit for new reactors by the end of its assessment, Dungeness was not deemed to be a potentially suitable site, as it believed that no new reactor could be built without more sea defences which would damage the site at a Special Area of a result, in 2023 a minority-Green Party administration Folkestone and Hythe District Council committed to a "new era of clean energy production". Richard Outram, of the Nuclear Free Local Authorities campaigning group, said Dungeness was a "particularly problematic" site because of the environmental impact. He said: "There's a very high possibility of flooding in Dungeness."The fact is that nuclear power will be too slow to have a meaningful impact on climate change."I think that, realistically, we don't have the time to wait for this 'golden age' to be delivered."But, with the end of 2025 now much closer on the horizon, the decision crucially did not rule out future then-Coalition government recognised the strength of feeling from residents, with most respondents in favour of Dungeness as a potential report added: "A new nuclear power station at Dungeness would be likely to have long term positive impacts on employment, the economy and communities at the local level."With Dungeness B now in the defuelling process, it was also argued that job losses from its decommissioning could be offset by construction and operation of a new remains to be seen how Dungeness and Kent will pay its part in any potential nuclear "golden age".A government spokesperson said no decision had yet been made on sites for the new SMR programme but that a decision was expected to be made later in EDF spokesperson said it welcomed discussion about Dungeness and was "happy to engage with projects looking to develop the site" but was focussing on its current sites as well as developing Hinkley Point and Sizewell C.
