2030 target so ambitious that Britain could risk running out of steel for undersea cables, report claims.

Labour would need to build offshore wind farms at an unprecedented rate in a scramble to hit net zero targets, energy experts have warned.

Sir Keir Starmer’s plans to make Britain carbon-neutral by 2030 would require a five-fold increase in turbine installations and a massive expansion in port capacity, according to a confidential report commissioned from leading analysts Aurora Energy. The Telegraph has the story.

The scale of the expansion is so ambitious that it could even put Britain at risk of running out of steel for the undersea cables to connect them to the grid, Aurora said.

Since 2015, offshore wind has expanded by about 1.4 gigawatts per year – equivalent to about 150 to 200 turbine installations annually.

Labour’s targets would mean increasing annual installations to 7.5Gw or 750 turbines, a huge task in itself. Aurora warned that such a rapid expansion also risked a series of knock-on effects.

The study said: “Labour’s aim of deploying 60GW offshore wind by 2030 will require significant expansion of the transmission network and a rapid scaling up of supply chains.

“Installing 60GW of offshore wind by 2030 would require increasing the yearly deployment rate by a factor of 5× between 2024 and 2030, at a time when supply chains are increasingly constrained due to the aftermath of the Covid-19 pandemic and rising global demand.”

Aurora’s study is among the first analyses of Labour’s energy policy since Sir Keir announced the party was cutting spending plans on green projects from £28bn a year to just £4.7bn.

It says Labour’s policies are very similar to the Conservatives – with the key difference being shadow energy secretary Ed Miliband’s plans to implement them at record speed.

He and Sir Keir Starmer have pledged to achieve 100pc clean power by 2030 based on a huge increase in offshore wind, equivalent to adding 20 large nuclear power stations the size of Hinkley Point C.

Labour also plans to lift the ban on onshore wind farms to install several thousand more turbines on uplands across Great Britain, as well as turning an area of countryside bigger than Middlesex into solar farms.

In a speech to the Green Alliance, a Westminster-based think-tank on Tuesday, Mr Miliband said the forthcoming general election was the most important on climate and energy the UK has ever had.

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