New rules are planned in the UK to support the need to speed up the development of offshore wind farms.
The Government has unveiled a new Offshore Wind Environmental Improvement Package (OWEIP) to help to reduce the time taken in the planning process for proposed developments.
It can currently take around four years to gain consent and the new process aims to reduce this to around 12 months.
The OWEIP is designed to strengthen commitments in the Government’s British Energy Security Strategy (BESS). Published in April 2022, this set out how the UK will accelerate its transition away from oil and gas, moving towards renewable sources of energy.
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Government proposals state the UK is already a global leader in offshore wind and the British Energy Security Strategy has ambitions to deliver up to 50 gigawatts by 2030, including up to five gigawatts of innovative floating wind.
The OWEIP aims to accelerate deployment of offshore wind while continuing to protect the marine environment.
The Government say that, with smarter planning, it is possible to maintain high environmental standards while increasing the pace of deployment by 25 per cent
Current delays are often caused by an assessment of impacts on the environment identified within Habitat Regulation Assessments (HRAs).
Now the Government is seeking amendments to the Energy Bill to:
- Give the Secretary of State powers to tailor HRAs that are required before an offshore wind farm is consented;
- Enable measures to compensate for impacts on the marine environment to be taken at a strategic level across multiple projects; and
- Set up a marine recovery fund to help deliver these strategic measures.
Offshore wind farm developers are required to provide information to the Department for Business, Energy and Industrial Strategy to inform an HRA. If there are likely to be significant effects, developers must provide information on how impacts can be avoided, reduced, or mitigated. If this cannot happen, compensation will be required.
Such compensatory measures are relatively new in the marine environment and, government officials say, designing packages of compensatory measures has proved to be challenging. This has led to significant delays while such packages are developed and agreed.
New legislation will enable the delivery of strategic compensatory measures, facilitating collaborative work between developers and government to work collectively across offshore wind projects to compensate for negative environmental effects that cannot be avoided, reduced, or mitigated. Considering compensatory measures upfront and strategically through new HRA legislation will reduce the time spent resolving issues project by project, say the Government.
The Department for Environment, Food and Rural Affairs, often known as Defra, is working in partnership with industry and environmental stakeholders on pilot projects to identify effective compensatory measures. These will be added to a library and be made available to developers as good examples of how to move forward where compensation needs to be considered.
A new industry-funded Marine Recovery Fund will support delivery of strategic compensatory measures. The intention is for the fund to be operational and able to receive payments from late 2023.
Introducing the legislation, the Government says: “Our island’s resources, with its shallow seabed and high winds, offers us unique advantages that have made us global leaders in offshore wind and pioneers of floating wind.
“There are 12.7 gigawatts already generating electricity in Great Britain, enough to power around 10 million homes. In 2021 offshore wind generated 11.4% of the UK’s electricity. We have another 6.8 gigawatts already in construction, due to come online by the mid-2020s, and a further 7.3 gigawatts preparing for construction. The BESS will enable us to build more faster and meet our 50 gigawatts ambition.”
