Offshore wind farms to be allowed to apply for contracts before planning consent
The plans are part of a raft of reforms launched by the Department for Energy Security and Net Zero (Desnz) to help the Government reach its ambitious 2030 clean power targets.
Energy secretary Ed Miliband said changes to Contracts for Difference (CfD) rules will give developers 'the certainty they need to build in Britain' and invest in more clean energy projects.
Auctions for the CfD scheme see developers bid to secure a fixed price contract for what they can charge for the renewable power they generate.
This system helps to protect them from market volatility, incentivising investment in new wind and solar farms.
Earlier this year, the Government launched a consultation on the flagship CfD scheme, including proposals to remove planning barriers.
It has now given the green light to changes to the scheme ahead of the next planned auction process, Allocation Round 7 (AR7), which is due to open in August.
Officials have said this will include increasing the length of contracts from 15 years to 20 years for offshore wind, onshore wind and solar projects.
It said this is intended to spread out the costs of energy projects over a longer period and potentially reduce costs for consumers, while also improving investors confidence.
Changes will also include allowing offshore wind projects to apply for a contract while awaiting full planning consent, in a bid to reduce completion times.
The department will also change how budgets are set and published to allow the energy secretary to view developer bids before setting his final budget.
Mr Miliband said: 'We need to go further and faster to make Britain a clean energy superpower, end our reliance on volatile global gas prices and make working people better off with homegrown power we control.
'These reforms will give developers the certainty they need to build in Britain, helping deliver more clean power projects and supporting thousands of jobs – all part of the mission to bring bills down for good through our plan for change.'
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23 minutes ago
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Israel bombs Syrian forces entering Druze city after sectarian clashes
Israel says it has bombed Syrian government forces around Suweida, as they entered the predominantly Druze city following two days of deadly sectarian clashes. At least 200 people have been killed since the fighting between Druze militias and Bedouin tribes erupted on Sunday, UK-based monitoring group the Syrian Observatory for Human Rights (SOHR), reported. Israel's prime minister Benjamin Netanyahu said he had ordered strikes on forces and weapons in the Suweida area because the government "intended to use [them] against the Druze". Syria has condemned Israel's involvement and said the strikes had resulted in the deaths of members of the armed forces and civilians. This is the first time that Syrian government forces have been deployed to Suweida since Islamist-led rebels overthrew President Bashar al-Assad in December. Many minority communities - including the Druze, whose religion is an offshoot of Shia Islam with its own unique identity and beliefs - are suspicious of interim President Ahmed al-Sharaa's government despite his pledges to protect them. Until now, the province of Suweida had remained largely under the control of Druze militias which resisted calls to join the security forces. Netanyahu has said he is committed to preventing harm to the Druze in Syria because of their deep ties to those living in Israel and the Israeli-occupied Golan Heights. Syria's foreign ministry said in a statement on Tuesday that Israel holds full responsibility for the latest attacks on southern Syria and the consequences. The Trump administration has now asked Israel to cease its strikes on Syrian military forces, US news outlet Axios reported, citing a US official. Israel reportedly said it would stop the attacks on Tuesday evening. Earlier on Tuesday, Syria's defence minister announced a ceasefire in Suweida, saying an agreement had been reached with local dignitaries for security forces to deploy there. However, one Druze spiritual leader urged local fighters to resist. Following the deployment of Syrian forces, SOHR accused government forces and their allies of the summary executions of at least 19 Druze civilians, including 12 at a family guest house. The SOHR further said members of the ministry of defence had carried out "systematic acts of vandalism targeting civilian homes and property" including "stealing the contents of homes, smashing doors and windows, and then setting fire to some of them". Men in military uniform were seen burning and looting homes and shops, Reuters news agency reported. Syrian authorities did not immediately responded to the allegations. A Suweida resident told BBC Arabic the situation in Suweida was "catastrophic", with indiscriminate shooting prompting people to "flee towards the countryside" despite a curfew declared by Syrian authorities. Dozens killed in clashes between Druze and Bedouin in southern Syria Deadly clashes in Syria's Druze areas raise fears of widening unrest 'We're not safe here anymore' - Syria's Christians fear for future after devastating church attack The fighting between Bedouin tribes and Druze militias in Suweida was reportedly sparked by the robbery and abduction of a Druze merchant on the highway to Damascus last Friday. On Sunday, armed Druze fighters reportedly encircled and later seized the city's al-Maqwas neighbourhood, which is inhabited by Bedouin. The clashes soon spread into other parts of Suweida province, with tribesmen reportedly launching attacks on Druze towns and villages on the city's outskirts. As the death toll reached 30, Syria's interior ministry announced that its forces and those of the defence ministry would intervene and impose order, saying the "dangerous escalation comes in light of the absence of relevant official institutions". There was a brief period of calm on Sunday night, after mediation between Bedouin and Druze leaders resulted in the release of people kidnapped by both sides, according to activist-run news outlet Suwayda 24. But on Monday, it said the fighting had resumed in the countryside west of the city after drones attacked villages at the same time as government forces deployed in nearby areas of eastern Deraa province. Later, Suwayda 24 reported that villages in the area were also hit by mortar fire and that dozens of dead and wounded had been brought to local hospitals. Meanwhile, the Israeli military said it had struck several government tanks to prevent them advancing towards Suweida city. Israeli Defence Minister Israel Katz said the strikes were a "clear warning to the Syrian regime". Among those killed in the fighting are children, Druze, Bedouin and Syrian security forces personnel, according to the SOHR. The BBC has been unable to independently verify casualty figures. On Tuesday morning, the Druze spiritual leadership said they had agreed to allow government forces to enter Suweida province in order to end the bloodshed and called on all armed groups there to co-operate and hand over their weapons. But hours later, influential Druze Sheikh Hikmat al-Hajri posted a video calling on Druze fighters to "resis[t] this brutal campaign by all available means", accusing government forces of bombarding Suweida city in violation of a ceasefire agreement. As security forces entered the city, Defence Minister Maj Gen Murhaf Abu Qasra announced a "complete ceasefire", saying an agreement had been reached with "notables and dignitaries". "Suweida neighbourhoods will be under the control of Internal Security Forces as soon as combing operations are completed in order to control the chaos, secure return of residents to their houses," he added. Early on Tuesday afternoon, Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu and Defence Minister Israel Katz said they had directed the Israeli military to immediately attack Syrian forces and weaponry sent to the Suweida area "that the regime intended to use against the Druze". They accused the Syrian government of contravening "the demilitarisation policy they decided on" and of endangering Israel by deploying forces there. The Syrian Observatory shared a video that it said showed at least one member of the security forces who was killed in an Israeli strike on a convoy. There was no immediate response from the Syrian government. 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Yahoo
an hour ago
- Yahoo
United Torah Judaism announces decision to quit gov't, coalition
The Sephardi haredi party Shas remained mum on Monday about whether or not it would join UTJ. The United Torah Judaism (UTJ) announced on Tuesday its decision to quit the government and the coalition, according to a statement released by the party's two factions, the Lithuanian Degel Hatorah and Hassidic Agudat Yisrael. Degel Hatorah's sole representative in the government, Deputy Transportation Minister Uri Makleb, submitted his resignation on Tuesday, along with MK Moshe Gafni, who resigned as head of the Knesset Finance Committee, making the decision official. MK Yakov Asher resigned as head of Knesset Interior and Environment Protection Committee. In a dramatic political development earlier on Monday, the Lithuanian-haredi Degel Hatorah MKs announced their resignation after the party's two spiritual leaders, Rabbi Dov Lando and Rabbi Moshe Hillel Hirsch, ordered the party to leave the government over its failure to pass a bill to exempt yeshiva students from IDF service. A few hours after Degel Hatorah's announcement, at approximately 9 p.m., a series of reports emerged regarding a breakthrough in negotiations, which were conducted in Knesset Foreign Affairs and Defense Committee chairman MK Yuli Edelstein's office. The reports could not be corroborated by press time, but if true, the bill would likely still require the approval of Rabbis Lando and Hirsch before Degel Hatorah's threat is removed. The rabbis' orders already came on Sunday evening, but the party decided to give Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu one more day to try to have a version of a bill published. Lando wrote, 'Since the governing authorities are showing intentions to increasingly restrict the lives of Torah learners in various ways, through attempts to demean and crush them – and repeatedly fail to uphold their commitments to legally regulate the status of yeshiva students and dear Torah scholars, the crown of creation and the secret of its existence – it is therefore my opinion that participation in the government and coalition should be immediately terminated, including resigning without delay from all related roles. May God deliver us swiftly.' Hirsch added his signature on Monday morning. United Torah Judaism (UTJ) said earlier on Monday that it expected to leave the coalition within the next 24 hours if a draft proposal of a law regarding haredi enlistment was not presented. "In coordination with the great rabbis of Israel, it was decided to wait a few more hours tonight before publishing the statement, in order to provide one last opportunity for a resolution. This was done with the understanding that United Torah Judaism had not originally sought to dissolve the government, but that the failure to meet the agreements left them with no other option," Lando's office said. Although the directive was only directed at UTJ's Lithuanian faction, the members of its hassidic faction, Agudat Yisrael, will likely follow suit, according to a source. The Sephardi haredi party Shas remained silent on Monday about whether or not it would join UTJ. KAN reported on Sunday evening that party chairman MK Arye Deri had threatened Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu that Shas might also withdraw from the coalition before the end of the Knesset summer session on July 27, if the party saw that no draft law had advanced. Even if both haredi parties leave the coalition, the government will not fall immediately. In order for it to fall, either Netanyahu must call an election himself, or the Knesset must pass a bill to disperse itself, a process that is unlikely to happen while the Knesset is on summer recess. Still, if the two parties' combined 18 votes officially leave the government, the prime minister's ability to implement policy will be severely hindered. Opposition party members on Monday morning sought to gather Shas's support for such a bill, but Shas refused, according to a Channel 12 report. KAN reported that for now, the parties will not support dissolving the Knesset before the summer recess The announcement by Degel Hatorah served as a new peak in a pressure campaign against Netanyahu. The party nearly supported an opposition preliminary vote on a bill proposal to disperse the Knesset on the eve of June 12, a day before the Israeli attack against Iran, but backed down after reaching agreements with Edelstein. It later became apparent that Edelstein and other negotiators were aware of the impending attack, and backed down in part because of it. The June 12 agreements stipulated that an increasing quota of haredi draftees would enlist annually, with the ultimate goal of enlistment of 50% of each graduating class within five years. The bill included a series of sanctions that would apply to draft dodgers gradually, with some relatively light sanctions applying immediately and heavier sanctions added at six-month increments. Financial sanctions would also be applied to yeshivot that do not reach draft quotas. In the meantime, current sanctions against draft dodgers – which include blocking funds to yeshivot and the cessation of state-subsidized daycare – would be lifted. The head of the Finance Ministry's Budget Department, Yoav Gardos, wrote in a letter to Frenkel-Shor on July 2 that the agreement would actually serve as an incentive not to enlist or work, and in effect perpetuate the issues that it had set out to solve. Gardos pointed out that the idea of quotas may already be a nonstarter, since there was no a specific requirement for individual haredim to enlist. In addition, Gardos explained that the immediate sanctions would not significantly affect many young haredi yeshiva students. In the meantime, the law's passage will free up funds to yeshivot and to parents, which are currently frozen because of students' draft evasion. The previous exemption for haredi men officially ended with a High Court ruling in June 2024, and since no new bill has passed, the current legal status requires the enlistment of all of the approximately 80,000 eligible haredi men. Attorney-General Gali Baharav-Miara has held monthly meetings since then to ensure that the High Court ruling is being implemented. In a letter to Netanyahu on Monday, Baharav-Miara wrote that the government was legally required to use more tools in its power to enforce the law against draft-dodgers. She wrote that the fact that the government was increasing the burden on some parts of the population while not doing all in its power to recruit other parts was a 'severe' violation of the constitutional principle of equality.
Bloomberg
an hour ago
- Bloomberg
Sen. Tillis on Rescissions Package, Not Seeking Reelection
Live on Bloomberg TV CC-Transcript 00:00Does this rescissions package have your hard yes vote? Will it have enough votes to pass in final passage? Yeah. I had actually indicated that I was a lean years before the amendment came out. The main thing that's important about this bill is to make sure that the questions from members who have not yet decided on how they're going to vote get answered. Are there there are commitments that those broad authority that they're providing the administration to make cuts is not going to surprise them in the future. The reason that's important is this is a spiced $9 billion bill. I hate to dismiss the concept of 9 billion, but there's a promise of tens of billions of dollars in rescissions that I hope that we're voting on in the future as a result of some of the government efficiency efforts. And we do not want to erode the support for future rescissions packages by not getting this small one right. It's a great test case, and that's why I'm inclined to support it. This apparently is a test case for some Democrats as well. Senator, it's your point in the grand scheme, $9 billion is a drop in the bucket and a lot of Democrats say you will lose support from any members across the aisle when it comes to crafting a budget for the new fiscal year. Doesn't clawing back congressionally approved funding send the message to Democrats that they can't trust a deal if there is one on spending? I think it's a fair argument, which is exactly what the the advisers, the president's advisers on where these cuts hit really should fit in the category of of fraud or waste or abuse. If you use this with the general support from Republicans to rescind measures that may have been used to negotiate a budget deal in the past, then why on earth would they risk that while on earth would they trust us in the future? So I think getting it right is very important. What I'm talking about our future rescissions votes that I hope that are sent to us and we process like the one before us today. What you're talking about is basic trust. And if we negotiate an appropriate year end appropriations deal that the Democrats feel like they the spirit of that negotiation is not going to be undone with a future rescission. I think that'd be a huge mistake. I can't imagine the president would intuitively want to do it. Hopefully none of his advisers would encourage them that that's a good idea. It's a bad idea. Well, as it may take Democratic cooperation to get appropriations passed, it also will take Democratic cooperation to get crypto legislation through both chambers. As I'm sure you well know, Senator, the House has dubbed it Crypto Week, and yet it seems they're struggling to advance a package of bills, one that would be the genius Act that already passed the chamber, another being the Clarity Act market structure legislation. It seems that the holdouts who did not vote for this procedural advancement are concerned that they cannot make changes to the Genius act that you and your colleagues passed. If they do so, would it be able to pass the Senate once again? Would you do anything if they're able to pass the Clarity Act with it, or would that require change as well? I'm just my Republican colleagues in the House need to hear this. I was one of the four members that teamed up with four Democrats to pass Senate Bill 2155, which was regulatory tailoring for small and regional banks. We had an agreement that that bill wasn't going to change, and we carried it all the way through, over the objections of Sherrod Brown, the chair, and Elizabeth Warren on the Banking Committee. If our House members send an amended bill back to us that doesn't fit, or is it already pre-conference with the Democrats who helped us pass that bill out, they can expect that that bill will never see the light of day. So I respect that they may want to make some changes, but they may want to send that in a separate vehicle to us and go ahead and send the Genius Act to the president's desk. If they don't, then they may own they the responsibility for not getting that done. And it's a great start, but we've got a lot of work to do. And, of course, Senator, you also found yourself on the same side as many Democrats in voting against the president's so-called big, beautiful bill. And it led to a major decision for you to decide to bring your Senate career to a close here. President Trump talked about your vote here. If you didn't hear what he said, let's bring it to our listeners and viewers here on Bloomberg. Tell us. I guess it was an owl, right? He was an owl. And he they said he was brave. He said no to the president, but he resigned the following morning. So anyway, that was terrible, I thought. Senator, weigh in on that as you please. That was from yesterday at the White House, by the way. Have you talked to President Trump? Has he called you or have you called him since that happened? Oh, we haven't spoken since. But the president knew that night before. Number one, that I was a no because I told him personally. And number two, I told him now would be a good time to start looking for my replacement. And it was after that that the president posted that he'd be seeking, you know, interviews for my replacement. But I was pretty clear with the president, unless he forgot that discussion the night before, I noticed he was trying to check to see if I voted no, but I was pretty clear I was going to be a no. The reason I was a no. And the reason it was so difficult for me is the vast majority that Bill I supported. I was here to vote for jobs and tax cuts, and I wanted that back in place. There were a number of provisions. The House bill for the Medicaid market was fine, but here's my challenge to anyone. We have fully released our analysis of the hit of the Medicaid bill that the president signed on July 4th. I would love nothing more than somebody to do the work to discredit the analysis. This this is it words. This is math. We did the math. We have three independent assessments that came to the same conclusion. This is going to be very difficult for states like North Carolina and many others to absorb. We already have a member today. I think it was Josh Hawley who's filing a bill to try and fix the Medicaid damage that he voted on last week. I decided that what we ought to do is go back to the house, Mark, great work, work requirements. The $800 billion in savings. Waste, fraud and abuse. The whole difference between me and the president came down to something that somebody in the White House suggested that the Senate put in the bill that saved 200 billion more dollars. But it's going to cost this country and potentially this party elections next year, in the coming years, as it gets implemented. It just seemed like it wasn't very well thought out. And I think the president was given bad advice to put it into the bill. Well, I wonder, Senator, if we should expect there to be more differences between you and President Trump or the majority leader, for that matter, as you said, when you decided not to seek reelection, that it gives you the freedom to call balls and strikes? Are you still a reliable Republican? Yes. Vote. Yeah. A lot of effort that happens from here. I need to be very clear. I am a transaction person. What I wanted to make clear was that if anybody thought that my decisions are driven by whether or not I can get reelected or get an endorsement, I wanted to take that off the table. That's not how I operate. I am a trained management consultant who looks at everything that we do here through the lens of execution. Will this work? Can the states absorb the change? Is it in the best interest of our country and our party in that order? And in my judgment, it was in every future transaction will not be influenced by this Medicaid vote. Hopefully, we can fix a lot of the damage that occurred by rushing it through for a 4th of July signature. But I'm on to the next transaction and I will do everything I can to try and make the defects in that bill work. Or, like I said, the U.S. government has probably access to more research capability than anyone else. Don't tell me that my estimates are wrong because you believe they're wrong. We provided all this information, the methodology for the impact, disprove it. I'd love nothing more than to know that I was wrong, because that means I don't have a lot of work to do to get North Carolina ready to potentially take 663 people, thousand people, off of Medicaid in a couple of years. Sure. Well, Senator, a lot of people think that that makes you one of the more brave members of the Senate right now. We had Democrats calling this a profile in courage. And I wonder, with that said, what that means when President Trump reaches out, when John Thune reaches out, will this be the same conversation when they need your support for legislation? How does this change your view? The only thing that I've tried to encourage the president, I've seen several and said, look, the president of the United States has a difficult job. He can't possibly be expected to be an expert in any area. What I'm trying to advise him on is that he has people advising him who pretend like they're him when he's not in the office and sometimes are not thinking through policy. I happen to have the rare combination of execution discipline with Fortune 500 companies and 20 years in legislative service, including Speaker of the House. So I've been able to understand the execution maybe a little bit better than other people, certainly people who have never been elected and who have never had a political role before, who advising the president. I'm just simply saying, take my advice for what it's worth, but it may help you look around a few corners. And I think that that's where we'll ultimately end up on this Medicaid provision in an otherwise big, beautiful bountiful. Old baby Bill. Whatever they want to call it. The fact of the matter is, most of the bill is good. I was talking about this one area that it ended up getting into that over $200 billion. We ended up having that sort of a dust up. It doesn't make sense to me. But again, I don't think it was the president's call. I think he had somebody want to put their foot on the accelerator. And I respectfully disagree with that. That was.
