Labour has vowed to build 37 new offshore wind farms if it gets into government.
Under the party’s plans, the new wind farms will produce enough electricity to power 57 million homes, with offshore wind creating as much energy as 38 coal power stations by 2030.
Meanwhile, the wind-farms would be 51% publicly-owned, with 20% of the profits from the publicly-owned stake pumped into a ‘People’s Power Fund’.
This money – between £600 and £1,020 million-a-year – would be spent on infrastructure in “held-back coastal communities”, the party said.
The rest would be invested in new renewables, climate transition and improvements to the wider energy system.
The announcement comes a week after the offshore wind prices fell by 30% to below £40 per megawatt hour of electricity. But Labour said that deployment was “still too slow”.
Announcing the party’s plans, shadow energy secretary Rebecca Long-Bailey said that wind would soon become the UK’s “largest energy source”.
“By taking a stake in offshore wind, we can collectively benefit from the profits, investing them back into our held back coastal communities,” she said. “That wind will turn into harbour fronts and libraries.
“Instead of jackets for wind farms located in Scotland being made in Indonesia, we’ll bring those jobs back to Fife.”
Labour claims the plans will create at least 67,000 new highly-skilled jobs in Scotland, Yorkshire & Humber, East Anglia and North-East England.
But business secretary Andrea Leadsom said Labour’s proposal to “nationalise huge swathes of the energy network” would “damage the economy and our vital efforts to tackle climate change”.
“Boris Johnson and the Conservatives are putting the need to tackle climate change at the core of everything we do,” she said.
“Business has an important part to play in achieving this ambitious target, and it is by working with business that we’ve ensured offshore wind will provide more than a third of our electricity by 2030, tripling the number of jobs in the industry and keeping bills low for consumers.”