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Tag: Crown Estate Scotland

UK offshore windfarm capacity to triple in ‘one of country’s biggest steps towards net zero’

Posted on by dishanth
UK offshore windfarm capacity to triple in ‘one of country’s biggest steps towards net zero’

Offshore wind farm capacity in the UK is set to triple in what has been hailed as “one of the country’s biggest ever steps” towards achieving net-zero emissions.

Scotland has agreed to lease thousands of square kilometres of its seabed to new projects, which are set to bring in £700m for the country’s government.

The ScotWind programme has given the go-ahead to new wind farm developments which are forecast to boost capacity by 25GW.

According to government figures, the current offshore wind capacity installed in the UK is around 11GW.

Melanie Onn, from trade association RenewableUK, said it marked “the start of a new era” for the country’s offshore wind industry. “ScotWind represents one of the country’s biggest ever steps towards net zero,” she said.

ScotWind is the first auction for wind farm developments to take place in Scotland in a decade.

It was announced yesterday that 17 applications had been accepted, with SSE Renewables and Shell New Energies among the successful bidders.

Ms Onn said the new capacity “is two and a half times the UK’s entire current offshore wind capacity” and equal to “the entire current operational offshore wind capacity for the whole of Europe”.

RenewableUK’s deputy chief executive added: “It will scale up exponentially our ability to slash emissions. In the long term, it will also help to reduce the UK’s vulnerability to international gas prices which are hurting consumers.”

The UK is currently facing an energy crisis amid soaring gas prices, with estimates that millions could see their bills increase by more than 50 per cent.

As Scotland revealed the successful applications for wind farms in their waters, first minister Nicola Sturgeon said: “The scale of opportunity here is truly historic.”

She added: “ScotWind puts Scotland at the forefront of the global development of offshore wind, represents a massive step forward in our transition to net zero.”

The Scottish government has set a goal to reach net-zero emissions by 2045, while 2050 is the goal for the UK as a whole.

Towards the end of last year, Boris Johnson said all electricity in the country should be produced from clean sources by 2035.

Speaking about the ScotWind project, Dustin Benton from the Green Alliance think tank said expanding wind power was “crucial” to meet this target, as well as reach net zero by the set date.

The 25GW increase in capacity is much higher than the 10GW initially hoped to be created by ScotWind.

The new wind farm developments are also estimated to create thousands of new jobs.

Crown Estate Scotland, which was behind the leasing round, said the announcement of the successful bids was only the first stage of a long process that the developments must go through “before we see turbines going into the water”.

 

 

Source Independent

Scottish auction for offshore windfarm permits expected to raise £860m

Posted on by dishanth
Scottish auction for offshore windfarm permits expected to raise £860m

Scotland’s largest-ever auction of permits to construct offshore windfarms is expected to raise up to £860m when the results are announced on Monday.

Crown Estate Scotland, which is running the auction, hopes that windfarms with as much as 10 gigawatts of new generating capacity will be built over the next decade, effectively doubling the amount of electricity generated in Scottish waters in a transition which has the potential to create tens of thousands of jobs.

The programme, known as ScotWind, has attracted frenzied interest from domestic and international bidders, and could set new records for values placed on the plots of seabed being leased for turbines.

In the first ScotWind leasing round, 8,600 sq km of Scottish seabed is on offer across 15 areas, enough to develop windfarms which could power every Scottish household and save more than 6m tonnes of carbon dioxide a year.

The windfarms could more than double the capacity built or planned in the seabed around Scotland over the coming decade. At the moment, offshore windfarms in Scotland generate about 1GW. Projects that have received consent and those being built amount to less than 10GW.

The Moray East windfarm has become Scotland’s biggest source of renewable energy, generating up to 950 megawatts from 100 turbines. It will be overtaken by Seagreen next year with 1GW of capacity. Located around 27km off the Angus coast, the £3bn windfarm is a joint venture between Perth-based SSE Renewables (49%) and France’s TotalEnergies (51%).

The winning bids – and the prices paid – are expected to be announced at 10am on Monday. Crown Estate said in July that 74 offers had been submitted for ScotWind. Many come from consortiums.

Among them is Denmark’s largest energy company Ørsted, which pioneered the first ever offshore windfarm in 1991 and has teamed up with Italy’s Falck Renewables and the floating wind expert BlueFloat Energy.

Other bidders include renewable energy investment funds such as Australia’s Macquarie Bank Green Investment Group, which has partnered with the Scottish offshore wind developer Renewable Infrastructure Development Group; big utility companies involved in existing projects, such as SSE and Scottish Power; and large oil companies, including Shell, France’s Total, Italy’s ENI and Norway’s Equinox.

Crown Estate Scotland lifted the cap for the auction bids from £10,000 to £100,000 per sq km last year. If every bid is submitted up to that maximum cap, the sale could raise £860m.

Melanie Grimmitt, global head of energy at the law firm Pinsent Masons, said this leasing round had shown that there was significant appetite for investment from within the UK and abroad, which bodes well for a second ScotWind seabed leasing round later this year.

“This is crown state Scotland’s first seabed leasing round and marks an important chapter for Scotland’s offshore market, but with proposed windfarms from the leasing round expected to save in excess of 6m tonnes of carbon emissions, it is also an important milestone for the UK’s overall net zero commitments,” she said.

“Developers will be keeping an eye out to see if and how the application process and criteria for the next round might differ from this one given how popular and competitive it has been.”

Crown Estate Scotland is a separate organisation to the crown estate, which manages the Queen’s assets in England and Wales, and its profit is passed to the Scottish government. Some of the proceeds are expected to be ploughed into preparing the workforce for the switch from North Sea oil and gas to wind power. The transition to renewable energy means that as fossil fuel jobs disappear, thousands of workers will need retraining.

 

 

Source The Guardian