Miliband’s offshore wind dream in tatters as industry pushes for more cash
An overly ambitious pledge for ‘Clean Power 2030’ might now be a pipe dream for Labour
On the face of it, Ed Miliband’s dream of decarbonising Britain’s power grids died this week – and its epitaph was a single number.
The £1.08bn he wanted to add to Britain’s annual energy bills to pay for new offshore wind farms fell massively short of what would be needed to deliver on his vaunted Clean Power 2030 goal.
His critics were quick to claim that Clean Power 2030 was effectively over. Miliband’s price-cutting meant Clean Power 2035 or thereabouts was a more likely prospect.
“We have a record amount of offshore wind capacity eligible for this auction – more than 20 gigawatts,” said Ana Musat, policy director at wind trade body Renewable UK. “The current budget would only procure about a quarter of that.”
If the idea of clean power by 2035 sounds familiar, that’s because it is. Decarbonising the grid by 2035 was the original target set by the last Conservative government.
Miliband’s decision to scrap that timeline and accelerate decarbonisation to 2030 became a centrepiece of Labour’s manifesto.
To deliver on the plan, Labour had said it would “work with the private sector to double onshore wind, triple solar power, and quadruple offshore wind by 2030”.
The Clean Power 2030 plan that Miliband published after the election went even further, calling for up to 50 gigawatts of offshore wind by the end of the decade.
It laid out ambitions to “put an end to the stop-start failures of recent years”, adding: “We need high levels of renewables to protect consumers and they need to be secured at the best price. Offshore wind has a particularly important role as the backbone of the clean power system.”
Britain is now paying a heavy price for that acceleration.
On the one hand, the burden will fall on consumers whose energy bills are surging under the ever-growing weight of levies needed to underwrite the cost of building swathes of renewables.
For the average household, renewable subsidies already add £185 a year to their bills. In the future, as new renewables projects grind into life, each claiming its own extra subsidy, the levies will grow and bills will go up.
Yet, the repercussions are also political. Because Miliband decided to accelerate all things green – especially decarbonisation of the grid – he smashed apart a delicate consensus.
For two decades, Britain’s main political parties had disagreed on almost everything except climate change. The threat it presented was seen as existential, and net zero was the solution that united all parties.
That is no longer the case. The backlash to Miliband’s clean power plan has led to deep party lines on the issue. It was too much for the Conservatives, who rejected first the policy and then the whole idea of net zero by 2050.
It also opened the door for Reform UK, the party that has made opposition to net zero a centrepiece of its campaigning, alongside immigration. It has won 10 local authorities in 2025 and hopes for many more in 2026.
Yet despite all this, is it really credible that Miliband – whose commitment to his green policies goes back two decades – has suddenly given up on them?
The miserly amount he has allocated to offshore wind might suggest he has surrendered, but is it for real? Could it be a smokescreen for a future stealth assault on our energy bills?
[…]
[However, Miliband’s] dream of leaving behind a legacy of an expensive but largely decarbonised grid by the next general election lives on. And no one can tell the final cost.
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Ed Miliband: Wind Power is Worse Than We Thought So We Need to Subsidise Even More of It
CHRIS MORRISON
At first sight the news that the British Government is reducing forecasts for the amount of energy produced by wind turbines is another nail in the coffin of Net Zero. The Telegraph reports that as a result of “updated modelling” the predicted efficiency of wind turbines is being reduced by more than a quarter. The sceptical might observe a political game being played ahead of the latest annual round of subsidy handouts for future renewable projects. Andrew Montford of Net Zero Watch describes it as “unbelievably deceptive”. The game is one of bumping up the enormous subsidies needed to achieve the Government’s clean power capacity ambitions by 2030 while leaving it to fellow zealots in the media to explain away the future eye-watering electricity costs. Expect therefore organised climate fearmongering to be ramped up, and the large Parliamentary majority currently enjoyed for the next four years by the Labour Government to be utilised to ensure there is no turning back from the Net Zero fantasy.
How can such a plan possibly fail when you have trusted messengers still claiming wind is nine times cheaper than gas? All hope is surely not lost when Fiona Harvey of the Guardian can write a recent story headlined: ‘Wind power has cut £104 billion from UK energy costs since 2010, study finds.’ It might not be a complete surprise that this veteran Guardian headbanger is reporting on statistical modelling from UCL, an academic institution that hardly covered itself in mathematical glory during the Covid pandemic.
In the real world, of course, the further dismal downplaying of wind power is a nail in the Net Zero coffin. It means much higher electricity bills for UK consumers, further deindustrialisation and loss of currently well-paid jobs, increasing likelihood of blackouts and runaway public finances. Nine times cheaper than gas was a Green Blob-funded Carbon Brief hilarity, so how we laughed when a group of top British energy executives told a recent Parliamentary committee that future electricity prices in Britain would not fall even if the price of gas fell to zero.
Chris Norbury, CEO of E.ON UK, laid it on the line for often deluded Parliamentarians. “If I look at the non-commodity costs – policy costs, network costs – then certainly some of the modelling that we have suggests that you could get to a position by 2030 where if the wholesale price was zero, bills would still be the same as they are today because of the increase in those non-commodity costs.” Simone Rossi, Director of Economics at Octopus Energy, highlighted a lack of budgetary control over policy-driven expenses, an obvious reference to £15 billion of renewable subsidies and expenses loaded straight onto UK electricity bills every year without legislative oversight.
By 2030, the hated gas turbines will be running down with no immediate prospect of replacement, while nuclear will also be in short supply until the opening of Sizewell C. Do Edward Miliband and his band of weird wonks at the Energy Department care? Probably not – if your ultimate political aim is command-and-control of the heights of the economy, what are a few blackouts when an elite-ordered socialist nirvana is the ultimate prize? Is it not time to stop routinely calling him ‘Mad’ Miliband, a dismissive insult from his enemies he probably enjoys and even promotes, and start treating his sinister plot with the serious attention it deserves?
Needless to say, the news that energy from wind turbines is nothing like as powerful and plentiful as originally though has been known for some time. In March 2023, the Daily Sceptic reported on a paper published by the Global Warming Policy Foundation (GWPF) noting that “wind power fails on every count”. Even at the time it was charged that governments are ignoring “overwhelming evidence” of the inadequacies of wind power “and resorting to bluster rather than reasoned analysis”.
Written by Oxford University mathematician and physicist Professor Wade Allison – who is also a researcher at CERN and Fellow of Keble College – the short paper concentrates on working out the sums behind natural fluctuations in wind speed. At 20 mph, calculated Professor Allison, the power produced by a wind turbine was 600 watts per square metre at full efficiency. If only the wind stayed at 20 mph all day and night, power generation would be a lot easier. Alas it does not: if the wind speed drops by half, the power available drops by a factor of eight. Conversely, and almost worse, notes Allison, if the wind speed doubles, the power delivered goes up eight times, and the turbines have to be turned off for their own protection.
Want to know why the Miliband zealots are going hell for leather to connect as much wind capacity as they can at whatever price is necessary? Consider the graph below, published in the GWPF paper.
The brown dashed line shows the installed nominated generating capacity in the EU and UK in 2021. This was 236 GW but the highest daily output was only 103 GW, recorded on March 26th. Most other days it was substantially lower.
Professor Allison was doing the sums a couple of years ago and they are the same today since they were based on physics and freely-available information. “Whichever way you look at it, wind power is inadequate. It is intermittent and unreliable; it is exposed and vulnerable; it is weak with a short life-span,” he concludes.
Chris Morrison is the Daily Sceptic’s Environment Editor. Follow him on X.
dailysceptic.org/2025/10/30/ed-miliband-wind-power-is-worse-than-we-thought-so-we-need-to-subsidise-even-more-of-it/
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