Dear Prime Minister,

It’s time to unlock onshore wind to support climate targets, businesses and bill-payers.

We support the government’s commitment to the UK playing its part in tackling climate change by reaching net zero by 2050. Along with the people across the UK who we represent, we welcome onshore wind as a vital tool to help achieve this.

Renewable electricity is clean, cheap and can be produced domestically. It also presents a huge opportunity to attract economic investment, create good jobs, increase energy security and cut consumers’ energy bills. With extremely high public concern about both the climate crisis and rising energy costs, there’s an urgent need to expand our clean energy supply. Making better use of our own clean energy resources in the UK would cut bills as well as cutting emissions, with electricity from new onshore wind projects costing three times less than from gas power stations.(1)

As the cheapest and one of the most abundant sources of energy available to the UK, onshore wind is vital to providing reliable, home-grown energy to businesses and consumers. Onshore wind is highly popular in the UK, with 80% support.(2) Two-thirds of people would be happy to have onshore wind projects built near where they live, with fewer than one in five opposed.(3) To tackle the climate crisis, we will need to more than double our supply of onshore wind energy by 2030.(4)

Yet new wind projects face multiple barriers, including planning restrictions in England which are more onerous than for new fossil fuel projects, and which remove the right to make decisions from local communities and block projects from going ahead even when they have local support. There are no targets for the increase in onshore wind (or solar energy) which is needed to power up the UK, or any plan to ensure that we get enough new capacity to provide the clean energy supply we need. There is also no route to market across the UK for community energy projects, so communities are missing out on a vital source of cheap, reliable energy, as well as local investment and the community benefit funding which these projects provide. 

Onshore wind energy is now so cheap that it does not require subsidies. What is needed to allow clean, lowest-cost, locally produced energy to support communities and businesses across the UK is a removal of red tape, a return of decision making to local authorities and a route to market for appropriately sited projects with local support. 

As MPs, council leaders, mayors and members of devolved assemblies and parliaments who want to support the climate, our local area and the UK, we are calling for greater ambition to expand onshore wind energy, and ensure that communities that want to generate their own energy are able to do so. 

We therefore ask you to:

• Allow sufficient capacity each year in Contracts for Difference auctions to ensure the UK has enough onshore wind and solar to meet our climate targets - and create the increase in renewable energy supply that will be needed to power the decarbonisation of heat and transport.

• Remove the planning blocks on new onshore wind projects in England, and replace them with a proportionate system which prioritises local involvement and local benefit, and does not allow lone dissenting voices to veto projects which have wide community support.

• Ensure a route to market for community energy projects, such as a community Contracts for Difference pot and a viable Smart Export Guarantee tariff.

• Ensure Ofgem has a zero-carbon mandate, and the national grid enables power feed in by renewable energy projects across the UK.

Yours, 

Ian Paisley MP

Gavin Robinson MP

Liz Saville-Roberts MP

Virendra Sharma MP

Tommy Sheppard MP

Cat Smith MP

Munira Wilson MP

Mohammed Yasin MP

(1) MacDonald, P. & Brown, S. (2022, Jan 17). UK energy crisis is a fossil fuel crisis – and gas is the villain. Renew Economy.
(2) BEIS (2021). BEIS public attitudes tracker: Energy infrastructure and energy sources. Department for Business, Energy & Industrial Strategy.
(3) European Climate Foundation (2021, Oct 20). Europeans support new wind and solar projects in their local area. Europeanclimate.org.
(4) Climate Change Committee (2020, Mar 3). CCC welcomes Government re-commitment to onshore wind and solar. TheCCC.org.