This week the UK Government announced a number of projects that will see new investment opportunities in renewables and green technology.
As part of the Department for Business, Energy and Industrial Strategy’s (BEIS) plan to ‘level up economic opportunities in regionally deprived areas by investing in infrastructure, innovation and people’, it has been revealed by reNews that a new investment programme will be launched to boost the UK’s offshore wind manufacturing.
In addition to this, the Government also announced it is to set up ‘green finance hubs in Leeds and London’ that will encourage investment in renewable energy and sustainable agriculture.
These initiatives in turn signal the Government’s intent to make the UK a global leader in the green and renewable sectors and achieve its ambitious 2050 ‘net zero’ targets. What’s more, they come alongside the encouraging news that in 2020 the UK used more electricity from renewables than fossil fuels over an annual period for the first time ever.
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There’s the potential for 60,000 new green jobs
The 'offshore wind manufacturing investment support scheme' will allow UK-registered businesses to apply for grants to help them begin the manufacture of the components needed to produce the new wind farms. This is set to include the creation of ‘blades, towers, export and array cables, monopile foundations and other strategically important components’.
This opportunity is also exclusively only open to businesses in disadvantaged or deprived areas of the country, in a bid to help the economic recovery of areas hit hard by the pandemic. What’s more by 2030, the scheme is expected to bring an additional 60,000 direct and indirect jobs to these areas.
The BEIS also championed its plan for its potential to both further establish the UK’s position as a green energy powerhouse and also help bring down the price of renewables, with a spokesperson for the department stating:
“[The scheme] will ensure that offshore wind continues to contribute to reducing costs and is more cost competitive in the UK market, and that the UK can meet domestic targets, which include delivering 40GW of offshore wind capacity by 2030 and achieving net zero by 2050, enhancing the UK’s contribution in overcoming the global climate emergency.”
The finance hubs will help companies of all sizes
In a similar vein, the proposed green finance hubs will see the Government provide £10m to banks, lenders and investors in Leeds and London to help them access ‘world-class data and analytics’ and ‘better support their investment and business decisions by considering the impact on the environment and climate change’.
This project is set to launch in April and will aim to help companies of all sizes create more green jobs. There will also be a particular focus on supporting businesses involved with the creation of products and services that help to combat climate change.
How might all this affect consumers?
Should these plans come to fruition, there are a number of potential benefits for UK consumers.
If you’re currently on a green energy tariff, for instance, you could benefit from lower energy bills, as the increased production and efficiency of the tech involved in our wind farms makes collecting and harnessing wind energy much cheaper. Equally, this could then make the energy markets themselves more competitive and encourage more suppliers to offer a wider choice of tariffs that purely use renewables, or at least have a greener fuel mix.
While this will of course be good news for the UK in the coming decade, it also makes a strong case for switching to a green energy supplier now to get ahead of the curve. A quick online energy comparison will show you there are a growing number of renewable tariffs available from leading green suppliers like Bulb Energy and Octopus Energy. Moreover, these two suppliers in particular are now ranked amongst the best energy suppliers around at the moment.
On top of this, you can now find similar green tariffs from many of the Big Six suppliers and a lot of these deals are typically cheaper than most fixed-price energy tariffs. As mentioned above, the best way to assess this is by comparing the energy markets with an online energy price comparison tool and using it to filter your results by the best green energy providers.
