Offshore wind could monopolise the £3billion of funds available from the Green Investment Bank (GIB), experts have warned.

The Government is giving £3billion to green technology via the GIB and hopes to attract an extra £15billion from third parties on top of this. But the scale of UK targets for offshore wind, to get 25GW of power generation by 2020, means that other green projects could be muscled out of GIB funds, suggested speakers at The Carbon Show in London today.

Iwan Walters at Eversheds’ Clean Energy and Sustainability Group, said: “The amount of money required to deliver the 25GW required from the offshore sector is so vast that the amounts we’re talking about form the initial kick off for the GIB could be sucked up quite easily just on that one project without leaving any room for the energy efficiency or anything else, so we need to be careful.”

James Wilde, Director of Strategy at the Carbon Trust, agreed: “If you look at the scale of construction for offshore wind it could consume all of the money from the first tranche [of the GIB]. We need to make the Green Investment Bank is used sensibly to leverage as much private sector capital… There are ways of making your money go further.”