Clean Power 2030 Action Plan: A new era of clean electricity. New UK Government Powers to Approve Onshore Wind Farms

Key Issues:

On the 13^th December, the Labour Secretary of State for Energy and Net Zero, the Rt Hon Ed Miliband MP, set out a plan, (Clean Power 2030 Action Plan: A new era of clean electricity, which can be seen here , to work with the clean power sector, including industry, trade unions, investors, policy makers and others in order to achieve the goal of ‘Clean Power by 2030’.
The plan involves changes to the planning system in England in order for onshore windfarms to be fast-tracked in certain circumstances, outlined in the ‘Planning and consenting for new energy infrastructure’ section of the document.
This comes as a report by the consultant’s, Lumify Energy stated that only 20.8% of England’s councils have identified suitable areas for wind energy infrastructure in their local plans. As of 2023, it also stated that 32 local authorities have the issue of onshore wind policies in their local plans and that getting a typical wind farm related initial planning application through the planning system from start to finish takes an average of 3.8 years.
According to the Action Plan, the goal of ‘Clean Power by 2030’ will ‘herald a new era of clean energy independence and tackle three major challenges; the need for a secure and affordable energy supply, the creation of essential new energy industries…supported by skilled workers in their thousands’. More specifically, ‘In a typical weather year, the 2030 power system will see clean sources produce at least as much power as Great Britain consumes in total over the whole year, and at least 95% of Great Britain’s generation; reducing the carbon intensity of our generation from 171gCO2e/kWh in 2023 to well below 50gCO2e/kWh in 2030’.
In order to meet the above target, the UK government’s ambition is for the UK to generate 43-50 Gigawatt (GW) of its energy needs from onshore windfarms, with 45-47 GW from solar power, thereby significantly reducing fossil-fuel dependency.
The UK government’s position is that by delivering on Clean Power 2030, the longer-term ambition of decarbonising the wider economy by 2050 can be more easily achieved.
The publication of this document comes at a time when wind turbines have overtaken gas as Britain’s biggest source of electricity and concerns have been raised about how this growing reliance on offshore wind threatens to expose the UK’s energy assets to Russia’s so-called ‘grey zone’ warfare.

Clean Power 2030 – Planning For New Onshore Windfarms Facing Major Reform

On the 13^th December 2025, the Secretary of State for Energy and Net Zero, The Rt Hon Ed Miliband MP, published the document, Clean Power 2030 Action Plan: A new era of clean electricity, which can be seen here. Specifically in relation to planning, page 36 of the document refers to ‘Planning’ being a critical part of the Clean Power 2030 strategy and that ‘Accelerating clean infrastructure projects through the planning system is critical to achieving our goal and unleashing investment to support the Prime Minister’s Growth Mission’. The Secretary of State goes on, ‘Our capacity range will ensure that planners and statutory consultees at the national and local level have a clear sense of which projects to prioritise for consideration and, where appropriate, fast-track through the process to enable decisions on consent to be taken sooner’. The aim of the document is to give greater clarity to the energy sector and infrastructure investors in order for them to have a better overall understanding of what the Labour government wants to see achieved and to offer a clear prospectus of the planning opportunities.

Currently all onshore wind turbines, except for small-scale domestic turbines, require planning permission from the Local Planning Authority (LPA) in England. In September 2023, the UK government updated national planning policy to provide that LPAs should approve planning applications for an onshore wind farm if a) it is an area identified as suitable in the local development plan or in a neighbourhood plan or a supplementary planning document and b), if the planning impacts identified by the affected local community have been appropriately addressed and the proposal has community support. Prior to this, in 2015, the government introduced requirements so that onshore wind farms could be built only where a proposal was located in a suitable area, as set out in the development plan, and had the backing of the local community, with renewable energy groups arguing that this was ‘a de facto ban’ on onshore wind and this phrase was also used in the Clean Power 2030 Action Plan document itself (on page 50). Thus, in recent years there has been growing calls for change within the planning system as the threat of climate change becomes more urgent and therefore more prevalent in public policy making, which the move to cleaner energy taking greater priority amongst decision-makers.

As the Clean Power 2030 Action Plan document outlines, ‘Our current planning systems across Great Britain are not working at the pace required to meet our target for clean power by 2030’ and that, although planning systems are devolved across Scotland, England and Wales, ‘similar problems are encountered in each’. In England, these problems (including the ‘de facto ban’ and lengthy delays in the decision-making process) meant that there was an ’urgent need for change’ and ‘a wide-ranging reform programme’. These reforms include giving LPAs the tools ‘to better flex and prioritise their resource so that they can examine mission-critical projects faster’, as well as the delivery of ‘workforce reform’ and ‘enhanced training’ to enable better decision-making. The ‘Clean Power 2030 Unit’ will also ‘assist planners by ‘convening early engagement between stakeholders for complex applications’. Furthermore, National Policy Statements for Energy and Planning Policy Guidance will be updated this year, with confirmed changes already in place following the publication of the updated National Planning Policy Framework (NPPF) last month (December). Lastly, this year, the Clean Power 2030 Action Plan promises the undertaking of ‘an ambitious programme of legislative reform, including through the Planning and Infrastructure Bill’. In particular, in relation to Nationally Significant Infrastructure Projects (NSIP) and the NSIP planning system outlined in the Planning Act 2008 in England and Wales, changes will be introduced in order for onshore windfarms to be approved faster. An exploration of the Judicial Review processes in relation to windfarm application objections is also promised in the document.

Taken together, this package of reform offers real opportunities for developers and site promotors and, given the devolved nature of our planning system in the UK, ‘tightly coordinated’ plans and effective working between the different levels of government is promised, which is also welcome news. The Labour government seems determined to deliver upon it’s promise on making rapid progress on decarbonising the economy by 2050 and the policy and legislative changes outlined in the Clean Power 2030 Action Plan can be seen as a major step towards this goal. 2025 could well be seen as a year for a ‘wind of change’ in onshore windfarm planning application decision-making!