The United Kingdom's fifth contract auction attracts no offshore wind bids
Allocation Round 5 of the United Kingdom's Contracts for Difference scheme closes with not a single bid from a fixed-bottom offshore wind project — the first such outcome since the scheme began, and a direct result of an administrative strike price set before the sharp rise in interest rates, steel and cable prices and installation vessel rates. The government raised the parameters for the following round, which then cleared. The episode is included because it is the clearest single demonstration that offshore wind does not behave like a manufactured learning-curve technology: its costs rose, quickly, in response to macroeconomic conditions, at a time when solar module prices were falling.
Historical — it happened, and the record is settled.
Subjects
- The horizontal-axis wind turbine · technology · global; offshore concentrated in the North Sea, China and East Asia · not located
Evidence
Partly verified — Core facts are sourced; some optional detail is deliberately absent.
World Energy Outlook (annual series)
The reference source for world energy balances, final energy consumption by carrier, generation mix, technology cost trends and scenario pathways used throughout this pack. V55 verification basis: no edition was retrieved in this session — iea.org was refused by the network egress proxy — so every figure attributed to this series is stated as a magnitude with the specific gap named on the citing record, and no current-year quantity should be presented to a reader without confirmation against a named edition.
International Energy Agency, Paris · Partly verified
IEA, World Energy Outlook, annual editions
Recorded on The horizontal-axis wind turbine
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Related
Related because they share a subject in the Atlas — never because the text looks similar.