This article appears as part of the Winds of Change newsletter.

"There is," a director at one of ScotWind’s most-progressed projects told me, “a conflict between policy and market." That conflict revolves around what's called transmission charging, TNuOS (transmission network use of system) charges, and it represents a jeopardy to Scotland's offshore wind.

"You can’t,” said Mark Baxter, project director for Caledonia, an Ocean Winds project in the outer Moray Firth, “have policy driving a renewable revolution and industrialisation opportunity in Scotland, on the one hand, and then an energy market saying 'don’t build renewables in Scotland'. If you genuinely want the outcome of offshore wind development you’re going to have to do something to the market situation. ”

What Baxter was referring to as we chatted at last week's Scottish Renewables Offshore Wind Conference, is an archaic system of transmission charging devised for an era of coal and gas-fired power stations, that leaves Scottish projects, particularly those in the blowy north, charged more to feed into the grid than those in the south, closer to demand. Some projects in the south of England even get paid to connect!

It’s an unfair system that is set for reform in 2029, but still looks set to scupper Scottish projects in the interim as they prepare to bid in the next auction round for crucial UK government price guarantees called contracts for difference.

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Offshore wind developers are pushing for an interim solution. But at the conference, Chris Stark, head of Mission Control at the UK Government's Department for Energy Security and Net Zero ,........

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