What's the plan for more renewables?

The 2030 targets, technology by technology

The plan roughly triples offshore wind, doubles onshore wind, and nearly triples solar - all within five years - while building enough storage to soak up the variability that comes with it.

"Today" figures are approximate installed capacity as of the plan's December 2024 baseline. The government estimates the buildout will need around £40 billion a year in investment between 2025 and 2030.

How the auctions have gone

Most new offshore wind gets built through Contracts for Difference (CfD) auctions, where developers bid a "strike price" and the cheapest bids win. The last few rounds have been a rollercoaster.

Offshore wind capacity awarded per allocation round (AR4–AR7).

• AR4 (2022)~7,000MW awarded, record-low £37.35/MWh
• AR5 (2023)0MW - zero offshore wind bids, prices had moved on
• AR6 (2024)5,340MW offshore wind (9.6GW total clean capacity)
• AR7 (results Jan 2026)8,437MW offshore wind, clearing around £89–91/MWh
• AR8applications closed 7 August 2026 - over 17GW of fixed-bottom offshore wind eligible, results expected Q3–Q4 2026

AR5's zero result in 2023 was a genuine shock: rising interest rates, construction costs and supply-chain inflation meant the maximum price on offer no longer covered the cost of building a project, so nobody bid. The government raised the price ceiling for AR6, which recovered strongly, and AR7 - described by industry commentators as the most competitive round in the scheme's history - beat that again.

Source: CfD Allocation Round and Energy UK. Last checked: 23 August 2026.

Clearing the grid connection queue

Building the generation is only half the problem - new wind and solar farms also need a grid connection, and Great Britain's connection queue had become badly clogged. By January 2025 it held roughly 770GW of proposed projects waiting for a slot, several times more than the system could ever need.

On 15 April 2025, Ofgem approved NESO's TMO4+ reform package, replacing the old "first come, first served" queue with "first ready, first needed, first connected" - projects that aren't progressing can be pushed back or removed, freeing up capacity for those that are actually ready to build. NESO began reissuing connection offers from autumn 2025, prioritising projects needed to hit the 2030 target first.

The queue itself is public: NESO publishes every contracted project - name, connection site, capacity, status, and expected connection date - in its Transmission Entry Capacity (TEC) Register, updated twice weekly. As of this page's last check it listed 2,201 project entries; NESO itself cautions that summing capacity straight down the register can double-count staged and multi-technology projects, which is why the 770GW headline above comes from NESO/Ofgem's own reported figure rather than a total calculated from the raw file here.

Is it on track?

Independent forecasters are less optimistic than the government's own targets. Cornwall Insight's 2025 analysis projected Great Britain would miss its combined offshore wind, onshore wind and solar targets by around 32GW - offshore wind coming closest (its 47.1GW forecast actually lands inside the 43–50GW target range), with solar the furthest behind at a forecast 29GW against a 45–47GW target.

2030 target (midpoint of government range) vs. Cornwall Insight's central 2030 forecast, each in GW.

Cited reasons include persistent grid connection delays (the problem TMO4+ is meant to fix), higher capital costs from elevated interest rates, market saturation in some battery segments, and ongoing policy uncertainty around long-term revenue support. AR7's unexpectedly strong result suggests offshore wind's trajectory may already be better than that forecast assumed - auctions this volatile are hard to predict much beyond a year or two out.

Sources

• GOV.UK: Clean Power 2030 Action Plan - main report (December 2024).
• Carbon Brief: "Analysis: How the UK plans to reach clean power by 2030".
• ORE Catapult: Allocation Round 6 results and analysis; Energy UK: Allocation Round 7 offshore wind results.
• The Energyst: on AR5's zero-bid result; AgentZero: AR4 auction framework analysis.
• Norton Rose Fulbright: TMO4+ connection reform approval; NESO: Connections Reform.
• NESO: Transmission Entry Capacity (TEC) Register - the underlying project-by-project connection queue data (CSV/API, updated twice weekly).
• Cornwall Insight: "Government projected to miss revised Clean Power 2030 targets by 32GW".