Ofgem Reveals Shortlist for £1.15 Billion Offshore Grid

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Researched by Industrial Info Resources (Sugar Land, Texas)--The United Kingdom's energy regulator Ofgem has revealed a shortlist of 13 companies that will be allowed to bid for nine multimillion pound contracts to build and operate high-voltage transmission links with offshore windfarms.

Energy companies such as DONG Energy (Skaerbaek, Denmark), RWE npower (Swindon, England), Electricity Supply Board (ESB) (Dublin, Ireland) and Scottish and Southern Energy plc (OTC:SSEZY) (SSE) (Perth, Scotland) are among those celebrating making it to the tender stage.

The tenders are collectively worth £1.15 billion ($1.84 billion) and involve contracts to link nine offshore windfarms with a capacity of more than 2 gigawatts (GW) to the national grid. More than £15 billion ($24 billion) will need to be invested in transmission links for the offshore windfarms. According to Ofgem, the final offshore transmission links will be able to connect enough wind-generated electricity to power more than 10 million homes.

Ofgem Chief Executive Alistair Buchanan said: "Offshore generation has a crucial role to play if Britain is to meet its climate change targets. That is why selecting the first 13 firms to bid for the ownership and operation of £1.15 billion of high-voltage transmission links is so important. The quality of the firms selected for the tender round shows how strong the competition is to operate these offshore transmission links."

The 13 firms and consortia selected are as follows:

• ABN Amro Infrastructure Capital Management Limited
• Balfour Beatty Capital Limited
• DONG Energy Sales and Distribution A/S
• Equitix (a consortium of Equitix and AMP)
• ESB International Limited
• Frontier Power Consortium (a consortium of Frontier Power Limited and Infracapital Partners LP)
• Imera Limited
• Macquarie Capital Group Limited
• National Grid Offshore Limited
• RWE npower plc
• SSE Offshore Transmission Limited
• a consortium of Statkraft UK Limited and StatoilHydro UK Holdings Limited
• Transmission Capital Partners (a consortium of International Public Partnerships Limited, Transmission Capital Limited and Amber Infrastructure Limited)

Despite a high-profile campaign, Warren Buffett's Mid-American Energy, which reached the qualification stage, was not selected for the final 13. Buffett has previously expressed ambitions to invest up to £1 billion ($1.6 billion) in the U.K's green-energy push.

The competitive tender will run until March 2010, when the winners will be announced. Work will start next summer and the windfarms are expected to be transmitting power to the grid by 2011.

The windfarms that will be connected to the grid by 2011 are:

• The 90-megawatt (MW) Barrow project being developed in East Cumbria by DONG Energy A/S and Centrica plc (OTC:CPYYY) (Windsor, England)
• The 165-MW Gunfleet Sands 1 and 2 projects in Essex, and the Walney 1 and Walney 2 projects, which are 183 MW each, and are being developed East Cumbria
• The 173-MW Robin Rigg project being developed by E.ON AG (OTC:EONGY) (Dusseldorf, Germany) in Robin Rigg in Dumfries and Galloway
• The 317-MW Sheringham Shoal project being developed in Norfolk by Scira Offshore Energy Limited (London)
• The 300-MW Thanet project being developed in Kent by Vattenfall AB (Stockholm, Sweden)
• The 504-MW Greater Gabbard project being developed in Suffolk by Airtricity (Dublin), part of Scottish and Southern Energy (LSE:SSE) (Perth, Scotland), and npower (Swindon, England), part of German energy giant RWE AG (OTC:RWEOY) (Essen)
• The 150-MW Ormonde project in East Cumbria being developed by Eclipse Energy Company Limited (Grantham, England) and owned by Vattenfall.

For additional information, see related news item from July 27, 2009 - Ofgem Invites Bids for Transmission Licenses for Nine U.K. Offshore Windfarms.

IIR's Renewable Energy Database provides extensive coverage on the Wind Energy, Geothermal, Hydroelectric, Landfill Gas-to-Energy and Utility-Scale Solar power plants throughout North America, and is now expanding coverage across the world.

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