Ed Miliband’s Department for Energy Security and Net Zero has just announced the results of the new CfD auction, in what must go down as one of the most blatantly dishonest and arguably fraudulent Government press releases in recent years.

Britain has taken a monumental step towards ending the country’s reliance on volatile fossil fuels and lowering bills for good, by delivering a record-breaking offshore wind result in its latest renewables auction.

The results deliver the biggest single procurement of offshore wind energy in British and European history – confounding the global challenges facing the industry – a major vote of confidence in the UK’s new era of energy sovereignty and abundance.

The Government inherited the fiasco of the previous government’s failed Auction Round 5, in which not a single offshore wind project was secured. The last auction round, AR6, got the industry back on its feet. Now this auction round, known as Contracts for Difference AR7, has secured a record capacity of 8.4 GW of offshore wind which will generate enough clean electricity to power the equivalent of 12 million homes. The ground-breaking result puts Britain firmly on track to achieve its clean power mission by 2030.

These results show offshore wind is cheaper to build and operate than new gas. In new figures published today using the LCOE industry metric, the cost of building and operating a new gas fired power station is £147 per megawatt hour. By contrast, the results for fixed offshore wind in today’s auction were £90.91 per megawatt hour on average – or £65.25 in the commonly used benchmark of 2012 prices – 40% cheaper than the cost of building and operating new gas.

This auction will unlock around £22 billion in private investment, supporting around 7,000 jobs, bringing growth and good jobs to all regions of the country – and particularly to the country’s industrial heartlands. Clean power is also essential to tackle the climate crisis, the greatest long-term threat the country faces.

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