Lord Whitehead (Lab)

I thank the noble Baroness for that intervention. It gives me an opportunity to confirm the two floating offshore wind projects that have been agreed under this auction round. I might add, by the way, that the auction rounds were not a sort of shoo-in for anybody who wanted to come along and invest, as some people have portrayed them. They were very competitive. The number of entrants to the auction was substantially larger than the number of contracts finally agreed. Among other things, this shows that there is a real appetite for this kind of investment going forward. That is the case with floating offshore wind. Although the two schemes that were agreed—one in Scotland and one in the Celtic Sea—are not, shall we say, final, full-scale arrays as far as floating is concerned, they represent a tremendous step forward in the development of offshore beyond the continental shelf in the UK. Huge new areas offshore from the UK can be opened up to offshore wind. Of course, that price is not the same as the price we achieved with the mature, bottom-based offshore wind that we have been talking about, but, if we look at the original administrative strike prices when offshore first took off, they were not dissimilar to the sort of prices that we are now seeing for floating offshore wind. I am confident that, once those arrays get larger, and with the flow of fabrication and assistance which the noble Baroness will probably know is already happening very positively, in the Celtic Sea in particular, the net benefit for Great Britain of floating offshore wind will not just be a large number of jobs and more income coming into different areas of the UK than has been the case for bottom-based offshore at the moment. It will represent a technology that really will allow the whole of the UK to participate in the offshore wind revolution, not just the areas which hitherto have had the main developments in their particular zones. The Celtic Sea, in particular, is just a taster of what is going to come in the not too distant future—and, by the way, it will be a future in floating offshore wind that will be a British future. Home-grown technology will lead in this particular area, which will not only have an impact in UK but will have a substantial export impact as well.