Mark Laybourne (2:12)

That's a substantial amount of money for an island this size and it's really going to be something that helps to diversify the economy and bolster our finances.

Tyler Dunn (2:20)

But established island industries warn they could lose out.

Steven Viney (2:23)

Fishermen are being pushed to the side for big business and we don't feel that it's right.

Tyler Dunn (2:29)

That's all coming up on Business Daily from the BBC. Lets start here in Jersey. It's a small British self governing island not far from the northern coast of France. It's probably better known for its offshore finance industry than offshore wind type Jersey into a search engine and there's a good chance you'll see an image of what I'm walking around at the moment. Courbier Lighthouse It's a striking white lighthouse perched on jagged rocks at one end of a sweeping eight kilometre long bay. The word dramatic doesn't do it justice, but this view could one day look quite different because early proposals for an offshore wind farm would see dozens of turbines, each reaching a maximum height similar to the Eiffel Tower, clustered in the sea about 15 kilometers southwest of here, Away from the coastline. In the island's capital, St. Helier, the logos of some of the world's biggest finance firms adorn the office buildings. I walk past a gleaming new business district looked down on from equally new luxury apartment blocks. I'm on my way to the quainter surroundings of the Royal Square, the location of Jersey's Parliament, where I meet the island's Environment minister, Steve Luce.

Steve Luce (3:57)

We have been thinking for some time that an offshore wind farm could tick many boxes and be a win, win, win. It could produce sustainable energy, which we want. It could give security to the island, which we want. It could also make money for the island, which would very much please our Treasury Minister and the Exchequer. So we were very determined that it was a project worth looking at, and we've gone away and spent some considerable money on investigating further. And we're now at the point where we realize we need to pause for further discussions between either ministers and from Jersey and the uk, or ministers from Jersey and France to discuss the export

Tyler Dunn (4:37)

of power in terms of the economic opportunity and the export potential. Do you have any sense of just how much of an uplift in GDP you could get from this project?

Steve Luce (4:49)

We think that we could return somewhere in the region of four times every pound we spend over the course of the wind farm, which is a considerable length of time as well. So we're looking 30, 40 years ahead. But we think, you know, were we to invest £100 million over that time, we would maybe get 400, 500 back. But that's a difficult number to really be clear about before you've had the detailed discussions with either jurisdiction about how you might export that power.

Tyler Dunn (5:24)

Not everyone is blind, blown away by the potential of making more than half a billion dollars. Down the road in St. Helier's harbour, local fisherman Steven Viney invites me onto his boat. He tells me he's worried that the offshore wind farm project could damage his industry, which he says is already struggling.

Steven Viney (5:44)

There's a lot going on with environmental impacts of fishing in areas that we're being displaced from. You know, we fully support protecting areas, but the problem with, on top of that, having a wind farm as well, it means we're squeezed into a smaller and smaller area and it becomes unsustainable. More boats in a smaller area, there's not enough for us to survive basically.

Tyler Dunn (6:08)

How much of Jersey's fishing area will be taken away from the offshore wind farm?

Steven Viney (6:13)

We're probably looking around 10%, probably more than that. When they're building the wind farm, the they usually have quite a large exclusion zones around the areas and then also on top of that you've got the potential of the cables running across the seabed and with all those works going on and losing the ground for quite some time, I'd imagine a project like the wind farm like that, it takes years and you've got obviously the support vessels, etc. In the area. There's a lot going on big scale on a massive building site at sea. Basically.

Tyler Dunn (6:48)

Ministers insist that once the wind farm is constructed, fishing will be possible within its boundaries.

Steven Viney (6:54)

It's a very worrying time because it seems that fishermen are being pushed to the side for big business and we don't feel that it's right. I mean certainly there's other areas that wind farms could be put, whether it be ashore or further off, further away from certainly our shores and to be honest, don't really like the look of them.

Tyler Dunn (7:16)

And do you see the argument about offshore wind just generally speaking for islands across the world, you know, they need to get their power from somewhere. They see this as potentially a solution for gaining their energy independence for other

Steven Viney (7:30)

islands around the world that are a bit more isolated, yes, it could be the answer to their problems on becoming independent on energy and certainly in islands where they have to run petrol, diesel generators, etc. But yes, I think it works for some places. It's not a one size fits all answer to renewable energy.

Tyler Dunn (7:53)

This is Business Daily from the BBC World Service.

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Tyler Dunn (9:00)

I'm Tyler Dunn, and today we're asking whether offshore wind farms could make islands richer and more energy secure.

Mark Laybourne (9:07)

I've been in the offshore wind industry for about 18 years with a background in engineering, a PhD in wave energy, and I've been working across the world in offshore wind.

Tyler Dunn (9:16)

This is Mark Laybourne. His company, Dyna Energy, is based in Jersey and wants to develop the island's offshore wind farm. Before starting his business, he helped to set up the global offshore wind development project for the World Bank.

Mark Laybourne (9:28)

There's a big long list of islands that are looking at this different levels of maturity. So we've got Jersey, Guernsey, the Channel Islands, very much moving ahead with offshore wind. Bermuda, which is in its very early stages of tendering offshore wind. Then you've got countries like Malta, which has also been running a tender recently for offshore wind. There's also Mauritius. Sri Lanka as well, has made quite a bit of progress too.

Tyler Dunn (9:54)

And what is it about the geography of islands that makes this form of renewable energy so attractive?

Mark Laybourne (10:01)

So islands often have an issue with energy because they're often heavily dependent on importing energy, and often they don't have enough size of land mass to be able to develop wind and solar onshore to meet all their needs. If you look at the island of Jersey, it's got an area of sea that's 20 times larger than its island. So that's a huge resource that is out there that's got incredible wind speeds and natural conditions for offshore wind. So it's natural for an island to look at that and go, well, can we use that for our own energy use? As we've seen in recent years with the macroeconomic shocks, we've seen islands that are really struggling to pay for their energy consumption because they're having to import it. We're seeing volatile prices and they need security not only from their actual supply of energy, but the cost of that energy as well.

Tyler Dunn (10:51)

Advocates for offshore wind point out that over the long term, prices have been falling, but that trend was well and truly bucked in 2023. Developers didn't place a single bid in an auction for projects held by the uk, a world leader in offshore wind, because the price offered by the government to buy their energy was too low. Recent auctions in Germany and the Netherlands have also struggled to attract developers. Here's Mark Leybourne again.

Mark Laybourne (11:17)

We've had a trend over the last 10 years where we've seen offshore wind prices drop dramatically, you know, 70 or 80% in some cases, down to being the cheapest form of electricity in some markets. That was an incredible trend and it was helped by the really, really low cost of capital, the very, very low cost of consumables and commodities. But that all changed in the last few years. When we had Covid war in Ukraine, it inflated everything. Cost of capital, cost of steel, everything doubled, in some cases went up huge amounts. So, yes, the prices did go up. And I think the government's auction that was not successful assumed that prices would keep coming down. Even though the feedback from the industry was actually going up. We need the price to be higher. So, yes, that was a failure of that auction and there was a correction. But it's important to say that the prices that came in, in the corrected auction afterwards were still at the same level as the grid price.

Tyler Dunn (12:21)

Do you get a sense that island states and territories across the world looked at the rising cost of offshore energy from 2023 onwards and thought maybe these projects aren't as feasible as maybe we hoped?

Mark Laybourne (12:38)

There's definitely been difficulties in the industry and a lot of bad press and, and it's growing pains. Every industry is cyclical. Offshore wind is still relatively new. Yes, countries will look at this and go, is this the right thing we should be doing? But if you still look at the fundamentals and you look at the price and compare that to what islands are struggling with now and the rising price of fossil fuels, it is still a really, really good value opportunity for them and it's still something that they really have to consider.

Tyler Dunn (13:15)

The sound of an old fashioned windmill, the ones that come to mind if you think of the Netherlands, the sails turn in the breeze. The energy is then used to pump water or grind grain.

Deborah Greaves (13:27)

Wind turbines really work in a similar way to windmills that we're familiar with.

Tyler Dunn (13:32)

Deborah Greaves is a leading ocean engineer and a professor at the University of Plymouth in the southwest of England.

Deborah Greaves (13:38)

We've been harnessing the energy from the wind for centuries.

Tyler Dunn (13:43)

Wind farms at sea are relatively new, though the first one was built in Denmark's waters in the 1990s. Deborah tells me the latest innovation is floating wind turbines, which can operate in deeper areas of water.

Deborah Greaves (13:56)

Offshore wind is a very interesting solution for island states. I think now that we've seen new solutions for deeper water being developed in offshore wind, it becomes more feasible for situations for island states because they often have deeper water surrounding them. The Challenge, of course, is that for a floating offshore wind solution, there's still quite a lot of innovation needed in order to really develop those solutions. And the floating offshore wind, it very much depends on the infrastructure, the ports infrastructure and the vessels for constructing and operations and maintenance for floating offshore wind turbines.

Tyler Dunn (14:39)

Even for large countries, how challenging is it actually to develop an offshore wind farm in terms of supply chain, the logistics, the skills required, the staff?

Deborah Greaves (14:49)

Well, it takes a long time to go from the, even from the point of securing a lease for seabed rights in order to develop your wind farm towards getting it built and operationally up and running. So there are many steps to go through, to go through the consenting and permitting process, to go through the finance raising process, the design process, and then pulling together the supply chain in order to manufacture and to fabricate and to put things together and to install them offshore. It can take sort of, I don't know of the order of 11 years or so. It's an area that is the focus of quite a bit of research and development and activity towards how can we speed up the project development process?

Tyler Dunn (15:42)

Mauritius, an African island nation in the Indian Ocean, is in the early planning stage of developing offshore wind. Professor Khalil Allahi from the University of Mauritius is the chairman of the country's Renewable Energy Agency. He says a wind farm could help cut the island's reliance on imported fossil fuels. But he's also clear eyed about the challenges and the costs.

Khalil Allahi (16:03)

We always have to add probably 10, 30, even 40% extra because if you do the project, for instance, a particularly large scale project in China, or probably if you want to get more realistic costing in Europe or elsewhere, it's going to be less. But when you do try to do the same thing in Africa or in the context of a small island state, you do have additional costs to take here, for instance, a single blade or wind turbine blade would be probably 50, 75 or 100 meter wide. And importing that, which means taking it from a manufacturer in Europe, for instance, or China, and bringing it to Mauritius and then transporting it probably online on the island and then to where it has to be implemented and fixed. I think that we have challenges in terms of logistics, we have challenges in terms of transport, we have challenges of course, in terms of capacity building and people who have to be training in this area.

Tyler Dunn (17:13)

Islands across the world, you know, they are in many ways on the front line of climate change, specifically rising sea levels. So how important is it for a country like Mauritius to set an example in terms of cutting emissions by adopting more renewables.

Khalil Allahi (17:31)

I think this is the question we ask ourselves each time, because our contribution to global gas, greenhouse gas emissions is almost negligible. And yet we are the most vulnerable, most affected, and might be tempting at times to say we shouldn't do the sacrifice, some say, of moving away from fossil fuels, but because they are available, they are dominating right now the energy landscape locally and elsewhere. Why should we go for renewable energy when we are not responsible for, so to speak, of the global climate problem? But I think locally, in Mauritius, I think it's also a shared vision at the level of the authorities, the government, and also the private sector and civil society that we should be coherent. I mean, we are the victims. And as such, probably even it does take for us to do probably more than in others. We can't persist in that direction of increasing use of fossil fuels.

Tyler Dunn (18:39)

Island states have ambitious targets for cutting greenhouse gas emissions, despite being among the lowest emitters. Renewables, including offshore wind, could help them hit these goals, which in turn could give them more authority to pressure bigger polluters to tackle climate change. Back here in Jersey, it occurs to me that islands have been buffeted by the will of larger nations almost as long as they've been buffeted by the wind. Whether they can harness the latter to become more independent, grow their economies, cut their emissions, would depend in part on them having the political will to take a risk and on a global industry outside their control. Thanks for listening. That's all from Business Daily on the BBC World Service, produced and presented by me, Tyler Dunn. You can listen to more episodes wherever you get your BBC podcasts.

Khalil Allahi (19:36)

Foreign.

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