Another bidder kicked out of Norway's floating wind tender
At least one more consortium of local developers doesn’t fulfil strict qualification criteria, leaving only three or four bidders in race for Utsira Nord zone
Norway’s upcoming tender for the 500MW Utsira Nord floating wind zone is becoming ever less competitive after strict qualification criteria pushed out the Siravind consortium of developers RES and Zephyr.
That leaves the auction with only a handful of prospective bidders after a series of heavyweights had already pulled out of the tender earlier, among them renewables giant Statkraft, Shell and Ocean Winds.
“RES remain committed to developing offshore wind globally."
RES didn’t give more details, but the criterion that likely impeded its participation in the tender was related to past experience in the installation and grid-connection of offshore wind farms.
Among the updated qualification criteria set by the Norwegian government in May was a requirement to have had experience with the “development, installation and commissioning of one offshore wind project with a capacity of 200MW or more” as well as “experience with development, installation and commissioning of a grid connection solution with a voltage of at least 66kV”.
In addition, the regulation specified that a reference project showing that experience must have been fully commissioned for the past 10 years, while the bidder must have owned at least a fifth of the project through its commissioning.
Among them is Norway’s A Energi, which was left without an experienced partner after Macquarie-owned Corio Generation also pulled out in June. Unless A Energi has found a new partner, it is also out.
- -Norwegian oil & gas giant Equinor and local energy outfit Vargronn
- -French nuclear giant EDF and local company Deep Wind Offshore
- -Germany’s EnBW
- -And possibly Ingka Investment, the investment arm of Ikea owner Ingka Group, Japan’s Kansai, Norway’s Odfjell Oceanwind and Source Gallileo
It is not fully clear, whether one of the companies in the last group passes the experience qualification test. The investment arm of Ingka Group has a gigascale pipeline in offshore wind, mostly in the Baltic Sea, but none of the projects have been built so far.
Kansai Electric owns a 49% stake in the under-construction Windanker project in the German Baltic Sea that Iberdrola plans to commission next year, and also has a partnership with RWE on floating wind. But that isn’t the same as an already grid-connected, commissioned wind farm.
"No further comments until then."
Most companies are very tight-lipped when it comes to confirming their participation in upcoming tenders, so it is difficult to assess which of these potential bidders will really take part.
Norway's outgoing government aims to get 30GW of offshore wind capacity in the water by 2040, up from a mere 101MW currently, but a possibly flop of the Utsira Nord tender would put that into question.
Norway earlier this decade was still seen as one of the most promising future markets for wind at sea. But torturous delays to its first offshore wind tenders, coupled with factors affecting the industry in general and floating wind in particular (cost inflation, supply chain bottlenecks, rising financing costs), cooled down investor interest.
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