BORIS JOHNSON must be more ambitious if he is to deliver on his new pledge to have every home in Britain powered by wind-generated electricity by 2030, the Unite union said today.

During his keynote speech to the Tory Party conference, the Prime Minister raised the possibility of offshore wind power being used to heat homes.

He pledged £160 million to “manufacture the next generation of wind turbines,” which he said would create 60,000 jobs.

Unite welcomed Mr Johnson’s “late-conversion to wind farms” but added he had displayed a “poverty of ambition,” and that his proposed spending “pales into insignificance” compared with the sums that France and Germany are investing in wind power.

Mr Johnson also attracted ridicule after he said that, 20 years ago, people “used to sneer at wind power … and say it wouldn’t pull the skin off rice pudding.”

It emerged later that Mr Johnson had said this himself in 2013, when he criticised wind farms set up under the last Labour government while calling on its Tory-led successor to “look at” fracking for shale gas. 

When this contradiction was pointed out, Downing Street claimed that the obscure allusion to his comments was meant to be “tongue in cheek.”

Currently, there is just under 10.5 gigawatts (GW) of offshore wind turbines around Britain, generating about 10 per cent of the country’s electricity.

The Conservative government has a manifesto pledge to boost its previous 30GW target to 40GW by the end of the decade, but Labour’s Alan Whitehead, shadow minister for energy and the green new deal, said that this would be less than half the total capacity needed.

If homes switch to wind power for heating and charging electric cars, he argued, the demand for such power will further increase. Commercial and public buildings would also create more demand.

Mr Whitehead added that other forms of low-carbon energy, such as solar panels, tidal lagoons, biomass stations and hydrogen, were needed to offset the variability of wind as a power source.

Unite assistant general secretary Gail Cartmail said: “The Johnson rhetoric will turn out to be a mirage without a strong economy, retention of skilled jobs and investment in apprenticeships.

“This means that Chancellor Rishi Sunak needs to continue to do much more to protect employment as we go through the coronavirus pandemic.”

Unison assistant general secretary Christina McAnea called for “firm and fast” action to create a renewable energy system, warning that the government is “falling behind” on its legally binding target of eliminating greenhouse gas emissions by 2050.