Wales to get €2bn offshore wind farm
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RWE Innogy, Stadtwerke München and Siemens have entered into a joint venture to build the Gwynt y Môr offshore wind farm 18km off the North Wales coast.
RWE Innogy will hold a 60 per cent stake in this joint venture, with Stadtwerke München holding 30 per cent and Siemens the remaining 10 per cent.
The total investment, which will be divided between the partners, amounts to more than €2bn (£1.7bn), including the grid connection to the coast.
Gwynt y Môr is to be built with an installed capacity of 576MW in Liverpool Bay off the North Wales coast. Work will start towards the end of 2011 to erect the first foundations for a total of 160 wind turbines.
All permits for the wind farm, covering an area of 79km2, have already been obtained.
In its first phase of expansion, the wind farm is planned to generate electricity as early as 2013. The project is expected to be completed in 2014. From then onwards it is forecast to generate around 1,950 gigawatt hours of electricity annually, which is claimed to be enough to supply 400,000 households.
For this project, Siemens Energy will receive the contract for the supply, erection and maintenance of the wind turbines, plus electrical connection to the mainland. The value of the contract for Siemens is around €1.2bn.
Using high-voltage sea cables, power will be transmitted to the Welsh town of St. Asaph and then distributed by inland distribution. Siemens will also be responsible for maintenance of the wind farm for five years, with the option of an extension for a further seven years.
To build Gwynt y Môr, RWE Innogy has arranged for another offshore construction ship to be built by the Korean shipyard Daewoo.
The first of these offshore construction ships, the largest in the world, was ordered by the company at the end of last year for the erection of the German offshore wind farm Nordsee Ost (North Sea East). The order value for each ship is around €100m.
Readers' comments (8)
Andrew Tracey | 7 Jun 2010 2:29 pm
Great news for Britain's infrastructure. Presumably our contribution to the project will be the burger vans supplying the German engineers, Italian technicians and Polish workers actually building the project, with their fresh butties. Will this power be delivered to consumers by RWE (German) or EDF ( French). I think I hear Lord Marshall turning in his grave
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LES BOYCE | 7 Jun 2010 3:29 pm
Wonderful news - why bother to design and build when we can just buy it all in from somewhere abroad?
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Steve | 7 Jun 2010 4:36 pm
And where are the British companies involved here ? More valuable currency flowing to mainland Europe along with the skills and experiance such projects offer our work force. Surely its time for the Government to realise the time of talking up manufacturing is over, its TIME TO ACT !
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Dave Davies | 7 Jun 2010 8:03 pm
I agree...it makes me angry. If we can still build (practically useless) aircraft carriers, why cannot we at least build the construction ship?
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John Wale | 7 Jun 2010 9:37 pm
I am old enough to remember the time we could done this ourselves and exported to the rest of the world. Sad days.
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Barry | 8 Jun 2010 10:17 am
What do you ecpect when the UK goverment let these things happen, any other country would of demanded a certain percentage of the work be completed by UK companise or they would stop the project. We in the UK are just too nice to all other countries hence we are sinking into no manufacturing.
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gavin | 9 Jun 2010 10:00 am
Granted the wind turbines will be built in Europe but the platform will be built in the UK by British workers as will the sub-station. The majority of the jobs on this project fall in the NE of England. It will be designed, and ran, in the UK by, again, British workers and supply Electricity for British National Grid. Granted some of this is going abroad but it's not quite the doom and gloom that some perceive it to be.
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David Cutter | 10 Jun 2010 2:39 pm
I read that Siemens are the Eu prime source for the rare earth magnets used in the generators and this is mainly sourced from China.
Could Switched Reluctance Drive generators be used instead?
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