The effects of government policy on industrial development and employment relations in North Sea offshore wind

Project Description:

A guide to ‘The New Economics of Offshore Wind’ claimed that the factors driving the fall in the cost of offshore wind generation were increasing turbine size, innovation in O&M, stream-lined supply chains, and better financing arrangements (Aurora 2018). Welisch and Poudineh’s (2020) analysis of CfD was concerned with information related aspects of renewables auctions, understanding competition in terms of access to perfect information (at the expense of any concept of e.g. labour productivity effects). While these studies have made specific contributions to the economics of large-scale offshore wind, they also indicate a notable gap in critical research into the political economy of the OSW sector and its implications for crucial questions from employment, macroeconomic and infrastructural perspectives.

There is an absence of studies which analyse the connection between the types of market and competition which offshore wind operates under and through, the nature(s) of the industry, and the industrial relations that have emerged with its development. This project would address this deficit through research into how the particular strategies and features of the growth of offshore wind energy in the UK’s North Sea region are constitutive of a reconfiguration of commodity chains and the relations between between natural resources, the state, firms and their employees. This will be an innovative and multi-disciplinary project, drawing approaches and ideas from the fields of ecological economics, critical political economy and labour sociology to analyse the performance of industrial strategy for wind energy in terms of a sustainable and just transition. Its purpose is to arrive at a critical understanding of industrial strategy and the offshore energy transition process in order to re-think how and why these might be managed.

The project will begin from the main research questions: what has been the role of the British state in reconfiguring employment relations during the expansion of offshore wind energy under the CfD scheme? How do the material properties of the offshore wind resource shape this relationship?

This agenda is specified with the empirically focused questions: how is this reconfiguration expressed in the growth of offshore wind energy in terms of investment and profits, the cheapening of development, and changing ecological costs? How are these phenomena and the energy transition understood by various industrial and state actors? How do employers and workers understand their position and agency within this process?

this process?

These questions provide the basis on which to develop a novel interpretation of the significance, causality and nature of the expansion of offshore wind in the energy transition, assessing the CfD and global value chain models in terms of establishing sustainable economic strategies and industrial relations based on decent work. An exploration of the role of the state and the industrial development of offshore wind can contribute to key gaps both in understanding the sectoral and technical issues with offshore energy integration and growth, pointing towards alternative policies from those generally discussed in economics and industrial policy literatures.

Methodology

The object of study is the relationship between the British state, developers, manufacturers, and the conditions of work across the supply chain for wind farms off the north-eastern English coast. The project will adopt to a meso-level method (Lamarche et al 2015; Thompson and Smith 2017). It will consist of three areas of study:

1) Document analysis on the evolution of the state in relation to offshore wind in the UK through both industrial strategy and CfD (outcomes of allocation rounds 1-4, the time period for the study).

2) Comparative analysis of data on industrial relations and production processes across the offshore wind supply chain for North Sea developments.

3) Fieldwork in the form of structured interviews with a variety of industrial stakeholders: employers and management; employees; investors; consultants; and policy groups.