A company chaired by a former Conservative energy minister has unveiled ambitious plans for a £21 billion project to build offshore wind farms near Iceland to supply electricity to Britain.
Hecate Independent Power said that it aimed to build as much as ten gigawatts of fixed and floating turbines in the North Atlantic and a series of subsea cables to carry the power more than 600 miles to the UK grid.
The company, chaired by Sir Tony Baldry, 70, an energy minister under Margaret Thatcher, claims that it expects to have the first 2GW of turbines operational in Icelandic waters by early 2025, supplying Britain using cables that it says will be made at a new factory in northeast England.
That timescale would be significantly faster than has been achieved by most offshore wind or subsea cabling developments and the plans were met with scepticism by sources in the industry yesterday. The company has yet to secure the rights to build projects off Iceland or the funding needed to make the project commercially viable.
It is aiming to secure a contract from the UK government to supply power to consumers and claims that it could do so at a comparable cost to British offshore wind projects because higher wind speeds off Iceland would compensate for the increased cost of the longer cables.