Still waiting for cheap offshore wind
Wednesday 17th November 2021 | Andrew Montford
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For the last year or so, I have been looking at the financial accounts of offshore windfarms, and in particular those developments that have been awarded Contracts for Difference at very low prices. These are said to herald the start of a new era of low cost renewable energy.
The first of these was the 1 GW Moray East, awarded a CfD at £58/MWh in 2017. Unfortunately for those tales of super-cheap power, its 2020 accounts revealed that its construction cost would likely be around the £4 billion mark, putting it pretty much in line with previous offshore windfarms in the UK.
The Seagreen 1 windfarm received an even lower CfD, valued at just £42 in 2019, and the build cost that was announced at around the same time certainly seemed low: £3 billion for over 1 GW (including apparently, the cost of the offshore transmission assets) would have represented a step change from anything seen before, and seemed rather implausible, given the figures for Moray East, a windfarm of similar size, and similarly situated in deep waters off the coast of Scotland.
https://www.netzerowatch.com/seagreen-windfarm-costs-high/
