Who Owns Our Offshore Wind Farms?
AUGUST 30, 2022
tags: Electricity, roc, wind power
By Paul Homewood
https://ref.org.uk/generators/search.php
I wrote yesterday about the ownership of the London Array offshore wind farm, To recap, London Array is jointly owned by the German owned RWE, the Canadian investor CDPQ, Orsted the Danish state owned energy company and he strategic investment company of the Government of Abu Dhabi, MASDAR. At current wholesale prices, London Array is making about £800 million a year more than they would have at 2019 prices.
None of the consortium are retail electricity suppliers in the UK, so would be shielded from any windfall tax on or nationalisation of energy suppliers, as has been suggested.
I thought I would like at some of the other big wind farms, which are subsidised by ROCs. The chart above is provided by the Renewable Energy Foundation, and I have listed below the owners of the eight other wind farms with capacity of 300 MW and over.
Race Bank – Macquarie, Orsted, Sumitomo Bank
Greater Gabbard – RWE Renewables, SSE Renewables
Gwynt y Mor – RWE Renewables, Stadtwerke Munchen, UK Green Investment Bank
Rampion – RWE Renewables, Enbridge, Offshore Wind Company
Galloper – RWE Renewables, Siemens, Macquarie, ESB, Spring Infrastructure
West Duddon – Scottish Power, Orsted
Thanet – Vattenfall
Sheringham – Equinor, Statkraft, UK Green Investment Bank
In short, they are nearly all wholly owned by a mix of foreign energy companies, banks and other infrastructure investors. As with the London Array, all of these wind farms/owners would be unaffected by taxes on energy retailers, with the exception of SSE and Scottish Power.
The combined output of these eight and London Array is about 16 TWh a year. At current prices of £375/MWh, the excess profit now being “earned” is around £5 billion a year.
ajmarciniak 