PM has ‘a dream’ to create a giant floating wind farm

Boris Johnson envisions Irish Sea project finished within a year in effort to improve energy security

BORIS JOHNSON is pushing energy firms to build a “colossal” offshore wind farm in the Irish Sea within 12 months.

The Prime Minister told industry leaders that he has “a dream” that a giant floating wind farm could provide “gigawatts of energy and do it within a year”, according to a government source.

Mr Johnson was addressing wind energy firms at a roundtable discussion in Downing Street, as the Government finalised its energy security strategy.

The document is expected to highlight offshore turbines as key to ramping up Britain’s home-grown electricity supply by 2030, with an aim to increase the country’s current offshore capacity from 11 gigawatts to 50 gigawatts.

“He said, ‘I have this dream that you can build a colossal offshore wind farm floated out to the Irish Sea’”, according to the source. Industry representatives at the discussion are said to have smiled at the Prime Minister’s suggestion.

But Mr Johnson asked why, given scientists were able to produce a Covid-19 vaccine within a year, a similar result could not be achieved with an offshore wind farm, as Britain seeks to dramatically reduce its reliance on oil and gas imports from abroad.

He is said to have pressed industry leaders to set out what barriers they would face to developing a new offshore site within a year, including planning restrictions and other red tape, which could be eased by ministers.

The Prime Minister’s latest ambition comes after he shelved his idea for a bridge or tunnel spanning the Irish Sea, after a review concluded it would be too technically challenging and expensive.

After last week’s meeting, a Downing Street spokesman said: “While the UK was already a world leader in offshore wind, the Prime Minister told attendees that he had an insatiable desire to further maximise supply.

“This would support high-wage, high-skilled jobs, while ensuring the UK can deliver net zero by 2050 and meet its energy needs for the future.

“Attendees discussed a range of issues relevant to the sector, including auctions, improving the resilience of the energy grid, reducing costs and exploring what more could be done to ensure that locally supported wind farms can be built in good time.”

The Prime Minister ended by reaffirming his commitment to ramp up the supply of wind power and thanked industry for their collaboration as part of this effort.”

Before the first Covid-19 jab, the fastest vaccine from development to deployment was the mumps vaccine, in the 1960s, which took about four years.

Wind farms already built in the Irish Sea include Gwynt y Môr, a 576 megawatt set of turbines on a site in Liverpool Bay, leased from the Crown Estate.

The wind farm received environmental approval from the then Department of Energy and Climate Change in December 2008, but construction did not begin until January 2012, and it became operational in mid-2015.

During the construction process, the developers disposed of three unexploded bombs from the Second World War that were found in the seabed.

A government source said: “The only offshore wind farms at the moment were given the green light by Gordon Brown [whose premiership ended in 2010].

“The Prime Minister is impatient and thinks that is shocking. He doesn’t want the PM after the PM after him to be opening them – he wants to be opening them himself.”