Thread by @James_BG

***Good News Klaxon***
New Offshore Wind Sector Deal finally arrives and it is pretty unalloyed good news (and not just for the obvious reasons) businessgreen.com/bg/news-analys… BG+

This is an industry that is less than 20 years old and has only been a serious player in the energy mix for 10 years. Now the goal is for it to deliver a third of all our power within a decade. That is a blink of an eye in infrastructure terms.

There's lots of good, co-ordinated stuff in the Sector Deal to help make that happen: skills, supply chain, co-operation, R&D, etc. Sure it would be nice to have a bit more govt funding and clearer auction timetable, but *gestures at everything*

However, alongside all this good stuff there is something else that is hugely important, but less tangible. As @OrstedUK Matthew Wright explained to us recently it is also about signals and priorities businessgreen.com/bg/interview/3… BG+

And this is where it gets really exciting, because everything we know about the history and future projections of the offshore wind industry suggests the goals in the Sector Deal are conservative. Possibly extremely so.

Last autumn there was a brief row when the government seemed to low ball the funding for the next auction (full disclosure: I thought they had at the time), but developers largely shrugged and declared they could still deliver a lot of capacity at the lower levels of support.

Experience curves, economies of scale, new larger turbines. They are all bending the cost curve down far faster than anyone, including the most bullish industry players, expected. Again, Wright explains why:

Again, remember that at scale this industry is only about a decade old. Bigger turbines are coming within the next five years, new sites offer better winds, developers are getting better and better.

Developers are now talking about emulating onshore wind and undercutting fossil fuel power on cost, potentially much sooner than anyone expects.

It is at this point that someone pipes up with 'what happens when the wind doesn't blow?' This is, of course, a totally new observation.

First up, people who actually run the grid are absolutely clear, you can get *a lot* more renewables on the grid before it becomes unstable.

Secondly, huge amounts are being invested in how to manage very high levels of renewables on the grid and really encouraging progress is being made. Batteries, hydrogen, smart grids, demand response. We've barely scratched the surface of what can be done.

In short, only two things stand in the way of offshore wind significantly over-achieving against the 33% power share goal: cost and grid integration.

There are good reasons to think both those issues will be addressed relatively quickly.

At which point:

Add in the very real risk that new nuclear struggles to deliver as planned in the late 2020s/early 2030s and the case for policy measures to ensure offshore wind goes even further and faster is clear.

I'd wager (a lunch at the excellent Vanilla Black) that offshore wind is providing comfortably more than a third of the UK's power by 2030. businessgreen.com/bg/interview/3… BG+

One last point. How has offshore wind achieved this? Well, it has been the one renewable technology to be provided with clear, stable, long term support. There have been mis-steps, but overall it has delivered at reasonable cost and now the rewards could be huge.

There's a lesson in there somewhere and it remains a genuine tragedy that the approach adopted for offshore wind has not been replicated more widely across the green economy.