Germany Offers Extra Offshore Wind Tenders

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Written by Martin Lynch, European News Editor for Industrial Info (Galway, Ireland)--Germany's ambitious offshore wind plans have been boosted by the government's decision to offer two additional wind tenders in 2017 that will add an extra 3 gigawatts (GW) of power.

The Federal Ministry for Economic Affairs and Energy wants to amend the Renewable Energy Act (EEG) to allow for two additional tenders, each rated at 1.46 GW, to be allowed to go ahead next year. The first draft offshore tender will be offered on March 1 2017 with the second scheduled for December 1 2017. The tenders exceed previous 2017 tender proposals by 500 megawatts (MW), which were attacked as too low by German offshore wind developers. The winning projects are expected to be commissioned between 2020 and 2024 and bidders have been told that bids must not exceed €0.12 ($0.13) per kilowatt-hour. Eligible projects must already hold a licence and be developed to a certain point.

The new offshore draft plan is aiming to have 7.7 GW of offshore wind capacity operational in German waters by 2020, 1.2 GW higher than previous goals of 6.5 GW in the same period. Germany wants to almost double that generating capacity to 15 GW by 2030.

In related news, German grid operator, TenneT TSO BV (Arnhem, Netherlands) said that it delivered 7.4 terawatt hours (TWh) of electricity from German offshore windfarms to the grid, almost six times more than in 2014. The company said that Germany is much further ahead of its offshore wind goals and that offshore supplied 9.6% of Germany's overall wind energy generation total of 77 TWh in 2015, compared to 2.3% a year earlier.

"In the first half of 2015, we boosted our offshore grid connection capacity from 575 MW to 4.3 GW," said Lex Hartman, a member of TenneT's management team.

The latest figures from the German Wind Energy Association (BWE) showed that 546 offshore wind turbines with a total capacity of 2,282 MW were connected to the grid last year. That brought the total number of turbines connected to the grid by the end of the year to 792, with a combined capacity of 3,295 MW. The high connection rate in 2015 was attributed to "catch-up", following years of delays in getting finished projects connected to the grid. For additional information, see December 16, 2013, article - German Offshore Wind gets Transmission Boost and April 29, 2015 article - North Sea SylWin1 Offshore Platform Working.

SylWin1 allows for 864 MW of electricity generated from offshore wind power to be transmitted via a 200-kilometre subsea and underground cable link to a land-based station at Büttel. Three offshore windfarms - DanTysk, Butendiek and Sandbank - each with a capacity of 288 MW, are linked to SylWin1. The power supplied is enough for a million German households.

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