Six new offshore wind farms will be built in Germany following the country’s second auction for the technology.
The country’s federal network agency (Bundesnetzagentur) says that it has granted licenses to six projects with a combined capacity of 1610 MW in the auction. The average of the winning prices was €46.6/MWh, an indication that the offshore wind sector is maintaining the low costs that it has achieved in recent years, industry association Wind Europe said in a statement.
Ørsted bid €0/MWh to develop the 420 MW Borkum Riffgrund West 1 wind farm in the North Sea. The highest winning bid was €98.30/MWh. Innogy won with the 325 MW Kaskasi wind farm, while Iberdrola won two projects in the Baltic Sea. The winning bidders will build the wind farms between 2021 and 2025, and also gained the right to onshore connections and operation rights for 25 years.
“These results show that zero-subsidy bids are possible for some developers in some markets under certain conditions but that they are not the norm,” said Wind Europe CEO Giles Dickson. “But they also show that offshore wind is sustaining the low costs it’s achieved over the last two years.”
Last year, Orsted and EnBW won a total of 1490 MW of offshore capacity permits for 2024/25. Around 1380 MW of the total will be operated with zero subsidy.
Germany is aiming to build 15 GW of offshore wind capacity by 2030 to meet its renewable energy goals. “The six wind farms that won this latest auction can be accommodated within the existing grid [but] they’ll need to deliver on their grid expansion plans to accommodate these higher long-term volumes,” commented Dickson.
