Question to the Department for Business, Energy and Industrial Strategy:

To ask the Secretary of State for Business, Energy and Industrial Strategy, what assessment his Department has made of the potential merits of setting a target for onshore wind ahead of COP26.

Renewable technologies will make a critical contribution to meeting our 2050 net zero commitment, alongside firm low carbon power such as nuclear and gas or biomass generation with carbon capture, usage and storage, and a significant increase in flexibility.

As outlined in the recent Energy White Paper, there is no single optimal mix of technologies to decarbonise electricity generation. Targets can be useful in giving certainty to sectors with long investment horizons, however we do not believe that government should prescribe the proportion of generation that will come from all specific technologies; rather the role of government will be to enable the market to deliver the levels of deployment required whilst minimising emissions at a low overall system cost.

Whilst the Government has not set specific 2030 targets for onshore wind, we recognise that achieving our 2050 net zero target will require increased deployment across a range of renewable technologies, including sustained growth of onshore wind. This is why we announced on 2 March 2020 that onshore wind and other established renewable technologies such as solar PV will be able to compete in the next Contracts for Difference (CfD) allocation round. The round will open in December 2021 and aim to deliver up to double the renewable capacity of last year’s successful round.