The UK's emerging offshore wind industry has only just started work on ambitious plans to build more than 30GW of new capacity, and is not yet looking to invest in a fourth round of offshore wind farms.
That is the clear message from the Crown Estate, the body responsible for leasing the seabed to developers.
The Crown Estate has previously said that it could start leasing sites for so-called Round 4 offshore wind farms in the second half of this decade.
But speaking to BusinessGreen last week, Crown Estate offshore wind development manager Chris Lloyd downplayed the prospect of a new leasing round in the medium term.
"We're on Round 5 already," he quipped at first, before stressing that developers and the Crown Estate are not looking beyond the current Round 3 programme, which is not expected to be fully completed until 2025.
"We haven't even suggested there will be a Round 4. All we've said is that we will review the need for further development opportunity," he explained.
"At the moment there's nearly 50GW of development opportunity out there and there's a whole range of developers working incredibly hard developing that. Until we see signals from the market that there is a need for further opportunity, we're not going to make move in that direction."
The news may come as something of a disappointment to industry players, some of which have already called on the government to develop a plan for offshore wind farm development that stretches beyond 2020.
Trade body RenewableUK has already published analysis arguing that there is a an early need for Round 4 or Round 3.5 "to avoid a sharp drop in activity" during the second half of the decade.
The report proposed that applications for Round 4 should be open by 2018 to deliver a "healthy industry" scenario, or could even be launched as early as 2015 if the government wants to deliver a more ambitious rollout that would see the rapid deployment of offshore wind capacity and huge investment in the supply chain.
Similarly, Scottish Enterprise has said that a Round 4 will be required to maintain activity levels, particularly within the growing UK supply chain, once Round 3 projects start to get underway.
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