Here at Sennen we have been watching the recent Scotwind results with much interest. Like many in the industry, we were fascinated by the results posted by Crown Estate Scotland.
One of the notable aspects of the round was the sheer volume of floating wind included in the mix. Not only that, there has been a lot of discussion about the fees paid. Here at Sennen we decided to look a little deeper and rank the projects by fee to be paid per Megawatt. As you can see there is quite a range from Shell New Energies through to Northland Power.
It’s a great result for floating technology, which will be used at most sites. On average, option fees per MW paid for floating sites were only slightly (<10%) lower than fixed foundation. The option cost per MW is quite varied across all sites as some operators are planning to get twice as many MWs from a square kilometre than others.
In total, 16 of the 17 bids reached the maximum £100,000/km2 option fee. The clear outlier, Northland (N2), was won with a £10,000km2 bid. While we should be mindful that this auction fee is just one fraction of the overall DEVEX, it does on the face of it appear to be an amazing deal!
We’re looking forward to seeing how Scotwind develops and how the consortiums are going to solve the engineering and technical challenges to realise these ambitious projects.
