Offshore Wind Worldwide Regulatory Framework in Selected Countries 5th Edition 2024 - Flipbook - Page 331
Offshore Wind Worldwide 2024
331
offshore wind fivefold to 50GW and deliver
18GW of electricity interconnector capacity.
their growth trajectories, with heightened
targets and significant auctions. 8
(c) COP28 Conference
The 28th UN Climate Change Conference of
the Parties was held in Dubai, United Arab
Emirates in November to December 2023
and was attended by over 80,000 accredited
participants, up from 49,000 the previous
year. 23,500 of the participants were from
government teams.
In the UK, the commitments discussed at
COP28 reinforced and gave further impetus to the growth of offshore wind and the
publicity created by the conference increased public support for further expansion of
renewable energy generation of all kinds,
but especially offshore wind, which is widely
recognised as being crucial to the UK’s energy transition plans.
The conference featured the first global
stocktake, an assessment of action towards
the goals of the 2015 Paris Agreement. In
Paris, countries committed to holding global
temperature rises “well below” 2˚C and to
pursue efforts to limit heating to 1.5˚C. It was
billed as a critical moment to “keep 1.5˚C
alive” as global temperatures fast near this
threshold.
The headline outcome of the conference
was an agreement to “transition away from
fossil fuels” as part of the global stocktake,
the first COP text to mention a global shift
away from using fossil fuels.
Ahead of COP28, the Renewables Consulting
Group (RCG) issued the Global Offshore
Wind: Annual Market Report which highlighted that early-stage project development
had increased 34% from markets all around
the world since COP27 and that China had
overtaken Europe in total operational offshore wind capacity, with Europe's North
Sea regions, including the UK, Germany, the
Netherlands, and Denmark, maintaining
(d) Contract for Difference
The Contracts for Difference (CfD) scheme
is the UK Government’s primary mechanism
for supporting low-carbon electricity generation. The scheme was introduced in order
to drive down the cost of projects (especially those involving new technologies) and
help leverage £90 billion of private investment by 2030.
The scheme has already proved successful
at bringing down the per unit price of offshore wind by around 65% since the first
auctions were held – helping the UK become
one of the world’s largest generators of wind
power.
(i) Auction Round 3
In September 2019, the UK Government
announced the results of CfD auction round
3 (AR3), in which UK offshore wind projects
secured 15-year CfD contract support at
auction clearing prices of between £39.65 £41.61 / MWh (2012 prices).
8 https://www.erm.com/globalassets/insights/cop28-global-offshore-wind-update_v3.pdf.
