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The Prosser Perspective.... a weekly column from Dover and Deal MP Gwyn Prosser.

14 May 2009

Two years have passed by since I first met with representatives of London Array, the consortium of companies planning to build the world’s very first gigawatt-scale offshore wind farm and in the meantime the group has been through some very troubled waters.

It was to be installed in the outer Thames Estuary some 12 miles offshore from Margate and it was billed to represent a massive capital investment – but then things started to go wrong.

First the project was threatened with uncertainty when Swale Borough Council opposed the sea-to-shore plug-in unit and caused expensive and damaging delay. Then the forecasted financial returns were squeezed, some of the group’s main players like Shell Oil pulled out of the project and for a while the whole venture was at risk of collapsing. That would have been a major setback for our environment, the people of East Kent and for Great Britain UK.

Fortunately, thanks to the Government’s decision to increase its support for renewable energy generation, the project has been saved and the new consortium have just announced a £2.2 billion investment to re-launch the project.

When complete the wind farm will be capable of supplying more than the entire domestic electricity demands of the whole County of Kent. It’s supported by all the major environmental groups including the RSPB and it will create thousands of new jobs in East Kent and beyond.

The promoters calculate that this project will save nearly 2 million tons of carbon dioxide and make a significant contribution to meeting the Government’s electricity renewable target and it’s not surprising that it has support from Business Link and the South East England Development Agency.

Local people in Dover and East Kent have even more immediate reasons for supporting this project because during the construction phase and well into London Array’s fifty years licence period there will be great job opportunities. The consortium has identified the Port of Ramsgate as it’s main logistics base and they are looking at brown field sites between the Dover District and Thanet for creating their onshore construction yards.

The construction phase will suck in lots of traditional skills, many of which are transferable from the shipping and marine engineering sector which we have in abundance around the coast. In addition there will be opportunities to re-train local people in the specific skills associated with this relative new technology.

All this means that here in Dover and East Kent we will have the ability to create a major centre which would meet the skill needs of Array and also become a major training hub to service the wider wind power industry which will take off and flourish now that the sector is benefiting from the new support provided by the Government. This gives us a unique opportunity to exploit first mover advantage to become a worldwide centre of excellence for offshore wind power – it’s an opportunity we can’t afford to miss.