State of play on offshore wind CfDs and RO projects

I thought that a list of wind farms and their financial support arrangements might be useful:

RO-accredited operational projects (per OFGEM ROC Register)

Generating Station	MW	Country	Commission Date	Organisation
Barrow Offshore Windfarm - A	90	England	01/01/2006	Barrow Offshore Wind Limited
BLYTH OFFSHORE WIND FARM	2	England	01/02/2001	EON UK plc
Blythe Offshore Wind Turbine WTG 2	2	England	01/12/2000	EON UK plc
Burbo Offshore Windfarm - A (31/01/07)	90	England	01/07/2007	SeaScape Energy Ltd
Kentish Flats Ltd - A,C	90	England	01/08/2005	Vattenfall Wind Power Ltd
North Hoyle Offshore Wind Farm  - A	60	Wales	28/10/2003	Beaufort Wind Ltd
Scroby Sands Wind Farm	60	England	01/05/2004	EON UK plc
Gunfleet Sands I	108	England	24/07/2009	SeaScape Energy Ltd
Gunfleet Sands II	65	England	24/07/2009	SeaScape Energy Ltd
Beatrice Offshore Windfarm	10	Scotland	08/05/2007	REPSOL SINOPEC RESOURCES UK LIMITED
Rhyl Flats Wind farm	90	Wales	15/07/2009	Innogy Renewables UK Limited (Wind)
Ormonde Wind Farm	148	England	18/08/2011	Ormonde Energy Limited
Thanet Offshore Wind Farm	298	England	02/07/2010	Vattenfall Wind Power Ltd
Robin Rigg Offshore Wind Farm (West)	89	Scotland	18/07/2009	EON UK plc
Sheringham Shoal	315	England	02/09/2011	Scira Offshore Energy Limited
Gunfleet Sands Demo	12	England	26/08/2013	DONG Energy Gunfleet Sands Demo (UK) Ltd
Walney Offshore Wind Phase I	182	England	13/01/2011	Walney (UK) Offshore Windfarms Ltd.
Greater Gabbard	500	England	23/02/2011	Greater Gabbard Offshore Winds Limited
London Array Offshore Windfarm	626	England	04/11/2012	London Array Ltd
Teesside windfarm	61	England	05/07/2013	Teesside Windfarm Ltd
FEPODWT	7	Scotland	31/03/2014	ORE Catapult
Westermost Rough	205	England	12/09/2014	Westermost Rough Limited
Humber Gateway Offshore Wind Farm	215	England	02/03/2015	EON UK plc
West of Duddon Sands Offshore Wind Farm	374	England	10/02/2014	Morecambe Wind Limited
Walney Offshore Wind Phase II	182	England	25/08/2011	Walney (UK) Offshore Windfarms Ltd.
Lincs Wind Farm	256	England	27/08/2012	Lincs Wind Farm Ltd
Kentish Flats Extension Wind Farm	50	England	01/09/2015	Vattenfall Wind Power Ltd
Robin Rigg Offshore Wind Farm (East)	83	Scotland	20/04/2010	EON UK plc
Gwynt y Mor	570	Wales	30/09/2013	Gwynt y Mor Offshore wind farm limited
Inner Dowsing Offshore Wind Farm	90	England	20/04/2008	Inner Dowsing Wind Farm Ltd
Lynn Offshore Wind Farm	90	England	15/03/2008	Lynn Wind Farm Ltd
Race Bank	565	England	08/06/2017	DONG Energy RB (UK) Ltd

Contracts for difference - project name, capacity, developer, CfD price, target commissioning date

CfD introductory round (April 2014)

Burbo Bank, 258MW, DONG, £150/MWh, 2017

Hornsea 1, 1.2 GW, DONG, £140/MWh, 2020/21

Walney Extension, 660MW, DONG, £150/MWh, 2017/18

Beatrice, 664MW, Repsol and SSE, £140/MWh, 2018/19

Dudgeon, 400MW, Statkraft/Statoil, £150/MWh, 2017

CfD Round 1 (February 2015)

East Anglia One, 714MW, Scottish Power, £119.89/MWh, 2017/18

Neart na Gaoithe, 448MW, Mainstream, £114.39/MWh, 2018/19

CfD Round 2 (September 2017)

Triton Knoll, 800MW, Innogy/Statkraft, £74.75/MWh, 2021/22

Moray Firth, £57.50/MWh, 2022/23

Hornsea 2, DONG, £57.50/MWh, 2022/23

There are a number of other projects under development at present which may, if they commission in time, be ROC-eligible (e.g. Rampion), or alternatively could apply for CfDs or operate on a merchant basis.

CfD Wow!

The results of the 2021/22 and 2022/23 CfD auctions are out this morning and they show an amazing reduction in the strike price for new offshore wind projects.

Triton Knoll, a Round 2 project of 860 MW has a strike price of £74.75/MWh for 2021/22 start up, and the Round 3 projects of Hornsea 2 (1.4 GW) and Moray Firth East (1 GW) have both got strike prices of £57.70/MWh for 2022/23 start.

This is almost half the level in the first auction in 2015, and well below the level of strike price for the controversial Hinckley Point nuclear contracts.  These contracts are also shorter term, representing much better value for consumers.  The prices for offshore wind appear to be in free fall.

As seemed likely, there's no wave or tidal in the auction, as these technologies weren't allocated their own funding pot, and they really aren't ready to compete with offshore wind at this stage.

Tidal devices - performance review

Following the Scottish Renewables Marine Energy conference in Inverness, a couple of interesting performance metrics emerged.

Atlantis recently announced that the MeyGen project had generated 700 MWhr during August, apparently from 2 AndritzHydroHammerfest (AHH) turbines.  We thought it might be interesting to extract an average capacity factor from these figures.

2 turbines at 1.5 MW - 3 MW installed capacity.

Number of hours in August: 31 * 24 = 744

Total potential output = 744 hours * 3 MW = 2.232 GWhr

Actual output: 700 MWhr

Capacity factor: 0.7/2.232 = 31.4%

This may be a slight over-estimate, as the third AHH turbine may have made a minor contribution late in the month following its re-installation, but even with that proviso, these are not bad figures for a full month (i.e. neaps and springs).

ScotRenewables made a similar claim - that its 2.0 MW SR2000 had generated 116 MWh over week.  This equates to a capacity factor of 116/(24*2*7) = 34.5%, and we understand that this period was intermediate between spring and neap tide.

As runtimes extend and reliability improves, we hope to see these numbers go up too.

Swansea Bay - greenish light at the end of the tunnel

Exciting news as it appears that the Government is leaning towards the Swansea Bay tidal lagoon.

Rated at 320MW, the lagoon isn't a silver bullet for the UK's energy mix and carbon targets but it does offer a means of demonstrating the (already well-established) technology in the UK.

There's talk of a strike price for a CfD of around £90/MWh, which makes the power cheaper than Hinckley point, and the technology is expected to operate for 120 years (and leave no nuclear waste!).

The company website states that the project will generate >530 GWh/yr and has installed capacity of 320 MW.  This indicates a capacity factor of 18.9% (see www.tidallagoonpower.com/projects/swansea-bay/key-statistics/ for the company's data).  As a capacity factor, this isn't high: onshore wind aims for 30%+ in England and up to 50% in Scotland, but ultimately it's the cost per MWh that counts.

The technology has been well proven in any number of dams but also at La Rance tidal power station in France.  La Rance, according to Wikipedia, has been in operation since 1966 - 50 years - and produces an average 57MW against installed capacity of 240 MW - 24% capacity factor).

One concern we've heard voiced about tidal schemes in the Bristol Channel is that they could interfere with the resonant nature of the tidal movement in the area.  Think of the water in the Bristol Channel as a tuning fork, but vibrating back and forth every tidal cycle and with the rotation of the earth providing a regular push to keep the system vibrating.  By changing the volume of water, the resonance of the system could change and if the resonant frequency moved far enough from the frequency of the push, the whole system could break down.

In the case of the Swansea Bay project, this seems unlikely, as the proportion of the volume of water in the lagoon compared to the Bristol Channel upstream of the site is very small.  We guestimate the surface area of the lagoon to be around 2 square miles and the area of the Bristol Channel upstream to be approximately 600 square miles.  So even as an area proportion, the lagoon is 0.3% of the total.  In terms of volume, it will be even lower as the average depth of the Bristol Channel is greater than the average depth in the lagoon.  If the average depth is three times as much, the volume of water in the lagoon is 1/1000 or 0.1% of the total.  It's hard to see that affecting the resonant frequency very much.  Imagine trimming 1/10 of a millimetre off the tines of a tuning fork - the frequency it generates isn't going to change much.

It's a different story for a tidal barrage, of course, where much greater volumes are affected, and even the Cardiff project, which has an area of 70 km2 might be getting large enough to have an effect.  We'll try to look at this more in the coming weeks.