The costs of both technologies are falling fast but for the moment we will still need “good baseload power” from sources such as new nuclear.
“The costs are coming down but right now I don’t see the huge scale that would be necessary if we had, for example, a high pressure zone over the UK in the middle of winter where there’s very little light and there’s very little wind,” said the ETI’s strategy manager for offshore renewables Stuart Bradley.
He noted the contract which Dong Energy won in Denmark in July to build two winds farms at a price of €72.70/MWh (around £63/MWh). Experts have estimated that the total cost is likely to work out at around £80/MWh with grid connection costs included.
“That’s really aggressive costing and you can see that in the next five to ten years’ time you can see that getting the cost down on offshore wind is very, very doable,” said Bradley. “We could certainly see £85/MWh by the mid-2020s, but actually we could go a lot lower than £75/MWh.”
Nevertheless, he said the idea that offshore wind and storage could outright replace Hinkley needs “a bit more work”. Bradley’s comments came after the director of energy, minerals and infrastructure for the Crown Estate, Huub den Rooijen, appeared to suggest they could fill in for Hinkley if the government decided not to press ahead with the nuclear plant in Somerset.
“The sector has undergone a sea change over the last few years, driven by rapid advances in technology, cost, and industry’s ability to deliver on time and to budget”, said Rooijen, writing in The Guardian.
He drew attention to innovations in demand-side technology and battery storage, which he said is “rising fast with every new electric car that zooms out of the showrooms”.
“We have an inexhaustible supply of reliable and clean power right on our doorstep, and competitively priced offshore wind now offers a mature part of the solution for the UK’s energy mix”, he concluded.
In May a number of big players in offshore wind pledged to bring costs down to below €80/MWh by 2025.