Vattenfall’s Piers Guy on UK Onshore Wind

For our final Quarterly Drinks networking event of 2017 last month, we were pleased to welcome Piers Guy as guest speaker. Piers is UK country manager at Swedish utility Vattenfall, and until recently has been its director of offshore development.

He has worked in the industry for over 25 years, and his biggest projects in recent years have included bringing the 92.4MW Aberdeen Bay offshore wind farm to financial close in 2016. The project is set to trial next-generation offshore technology – and has famously provoked the wrath of Donald Trump.

In our Q&A interview with Piers, we heard from him about a couple of the key talking points for UK onshore and offshore wind in 2018. Here are some of the key points:

• Support for UK onshore wind: Piers said the low strike prices achieved in the most recent Contracts for Difference auction in September have helped push offshore wind up the UK Government’s agenda, but he is surprised by how positive the reaction has been from the government and media.

• For onshore wind, though, it is unclear how this increasing support could translate into tangible policies. Piers said the Government could allow more onshore wind farms to compete in future CfD auctions, which would help developers to stabilise their revenues. He said that onshore wind developers needed this government support to be able to build schemes profitably.

• One potential stabilisation mechanism would be a zero-subsidy Contract for Difference – in other words a CfD in which, over the lifespan of the contract, the subsidy would effectively be zero. Under the current low-carbon budget there will be two more CfD auction rounds, but whether the government opens the competition to onshore depends on the success of the industry in arguing the case for value for money.

• Vattenfall’s e-mobility plans: Piers argued that the electric vehicles market is inefficient, because consumers need around 15 vehicle charging cards from different suppliers in order to ensure they can charge their car when needed. With major aggregation of the market, the experience of consumers could be much more straightforward, and Piers said he thought the market would end up with three or four main charging point operators, of which Vattenfall intend to be one, as a result of a mixture of partnerships and acquisition.

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