Great Britain has successfully concluded its most competitive and financially generous offshore wind subsidy auction to date, securing enough new capacity to power 12 million homes. This landmark achievement is poised to inject £22 billion in investment into the sector and create 7,000 new jobs, marking a crucial step towards the government's ambitious target of achieving a clean power system by 2030.

The auction, the seventh of its kind in the UK, saw contracts awarded for 8.4 gigawatts (GW) of offshore wind capacity. Ed Miliband, the energy secretary, hailed it as a “historic auction” and “the biggest single procurement of offshore wind in the UK and mainland Europe,” asserting that it proved government doubters wrong. The UK pioneered the “contracts for difference” (CfD) scheme, a reverse auction model where the lowest bids win, incentivizing investment in low-carbon energy projects like wind, solar, and nuclear while ensuring value for money for consumers. Unlike initial 15-year guarantees, the latest auction offered 20-year contracts, a move designed to secure lower bids from developers in exchange for extended support.

Clean energy developers submitted bids indicating the lowest price they could accept for each megawatt of electricity. Funding was awarded to a total of 8.4GW, including both standard windfarms fixed to the seafloor and a new generation of floating windfarms designed for deeper areas of the North Sea. The standard windfarms secured contract prices averaging £90.91 per megawatt-hour (MWh) – specifically, £89.49/MWh for projects in Scotland and £91.20/MWh for those in England and Wales. The two floating windfarm projects, Erebus off Pembrokeshire and Pentland off Dounreay, were granted a contract price of £216.49/MWh.

German utility RWE emerged as the most successful bidder, securing contracts for almost 7GW of the total 8.4GW, including its Dogger Bank South (off Yorkshire) and Norfolk Vanguard (off East Anglia) windfarms. SSE also won a contract for the first phase of its significant 4.1GW Berwick Bank project off the Scottish coast, marking the first new Scottish project since 2022. Awel Y Mor in the Irish Sea became the first Welsh project to win a contract in over a decade. These projects contribute significantly to the UK's goal of becoming a