Essay by Eric Worrall

First published JoNova; Even in green energy subsidised Britain, developing renewables does not make economic sense.

Why wind farm developers are pulling out at the last minute

Published: June 10, 2025 2.41am AEST
Thomas York
Postgraduate Researcher in Human Geography, University of Leicester

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The government aims to generate at least 43GW of offshore wind power (current capacity is 14.7GW) and 95% of all energy from renewable sources by 2030.

These targets are now in jeopardy. The cancellation of Hornsea 4 follows a similar decision by Swedish developer Vattenfall, which stopped work on its 1.4GW Norfolk Boreas wind farm in 2023.

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Building a wind turbine requires significant amounts of steel, copper and aluminium, all of which doubled or tripled in price between 2020 and 2023. Turbine manufacturers have raised prices in an effort to recover recent losses. This affects the profitability forecasts of wind energy developers like Ørsted and the viability of each of their projects.

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Rising costs mean that even one of the world’s biggest wind farms, Dogger Bank in the North Sea, will not be profitable for its developer, Equinor. As a prospect for generating financial returns, renewable energy still cannot compete with oil and gas.

This is the key argument of economic geographer Brett Christophers in his recent book The Price is Wrong. Christophers argues that, if national governments continue to rely so heavily on private sector investment to build renewable energy, decarbonisation is unlikely to proceed as fast as it needs to. It is simply not profitable enough.

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Read more: https://theconversation.com/why-wind-farm-developers-are-pulling-out-at-the-last-minute-256842

The call for government funding magic sauce to fix the economic failures of green energy is hilarious. Government funding can’t fix a failure of this magnitude.

And the problem Thomas York is discussing is just the cost of the renewable generators and grid connections. When you factor in the cost of the days or weeks of battery backup which would be required to absorb overcapacity on good days, and feed the grid during prolonged wind droughts, there aren’t enough government printing presses in the world to produce that kind of money.

Wind outages can last more than a week. Britain went nine days without wind power in 2018;

Wind power outage in 2025;

Wind outages can stretch across vast geographical areas, for example the entire continent of Australia was without wind last year – and not for the first time.

A wind drought which covered much of Europe occurred late last year;

The sooner governments abandon this fantasy solution to the world’s energy needs, the better.