This is OUR island.
OUR home. OUR heritage.

No energy security

From the outset, the power from Mooir Vannin was intended for the UK grid. Talks of a possible direct supply — or an Ørsted-floated “price discount” of around 10–15% — remain unsigned options, and any retail price would still be set by Manx Utilities and Government. There's no guarantee we'd receive the power, gain real energy security, or see cheaper bills — and it won't help us meet our own 2030 clean-energy targets.

Bringing any of it ashore is estimated to cost Manx taxpayers £120M+ in capital alone. If Mooir Vannin land the undersea connector cable at Groudle Bay, Manx Utilities would need to connect there, carry it across to Pulrose and upgrade our grid to handle 100MW — plus ongoing balancing costs. That money could build our own renewables, for real energy resilience.

Minimal financial benefit

The benefit to the island is estimated at less than 1% of our GDP a year — and only payable when there's a profit. Mooir Vannin would first write down capital costs of around £4.5 billion before showing any profit, so when the Island would see meaningful revenue is anyone's guess. Seabed payments to date have been about £10,000 a year — but those are pre-construction option payments; what the Island would earn once the turbines are operating remains undisclosed.

On Treasury's own central case the project would deliver around £34m a year — less than the £43m a year the Manx visitor economy already delivers to the exchequer, the very industry this development puts at risk. Treasury's modelling even shows revenues could be £0.7–1.9bn in real terms — figures the Treasury Minister has not endorsed and no one has independently verified. Not a penny is yet secured, ring-fenced or allocated.

Key documents — including the 2015 Agreement for Lease — remain unpublished, so the public can't properly weigh the benefits against the harms. And although Mooir Vannin is Manx-registered, the Treasury confirmed (June 2026) that the Island's current tax framework doesn't even allow these profits to be taxed here — the law would have to be changed first.

Fewer jobs than promised

Ørsted now concedes the project would create only 5–10 Isle of Man jobs per phase — not the 30 first suggested — and that most of the roughly 2,000 construction jobs would be filled from off-island. The lasting local employment is a fraction of what the marketing implied.

Environmental damage

We risk permanent damage to our landscapes, seascapes and dark skies — and our status as the world's only Whole Nation UNESCO Biosphere. Around 80% of our visitors come for exactly this.

Years of construction, operation and maintenance threaten our birds, bats, marine mammals, fish and the sea bed itself — and the fishing grounds beyond.

Manx Wildlife Trust has warned that “several of the baseline ecological assessments are inadequate” and that “Manx ecological impacts have to date been understated” — meaning that, for some species, the modelled annual deaths are greater than the entire Manx over-wintering population.

Industrialised waters & future expansion

This risks permanent loss of sea room for navigation and ferry routes. The East Irish Sea Transmission Project already refers to offshore "farms" — plural — and a Multi-Purpose Interconnector: infrastructure sized to serve many more installations than this one.

With no marine plan and an opaque lease, we risk ceding our waters for decades to uncontrolled, unconsulted expansion — unable to use our own sea for our own energy projects.