First German Zero-Subsidy Offshore Wind Farm Starts Taking Shape

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December 13, 2023, by Adnan Durakovic

Offshore installation work has started at the 913 MW Borkum Riffgrund 3, the first subsidy-free offshore wind farm in Germany to reach this development phase, Ørsted, the developer of the project, said.

The first of the 83 monopile foundations have now been installed at the site some 53 kilometres off the island of Borkum in the German North Sea by Jan De Nul’s Lez Alizés.

The installation directly follows the foundation work in the adjacent 253 MW Gode Wind 3 project, which is being built in parallel by Ørsted in the North Sea.

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After commissioning in 2025, a large part of the electricity generated by the wind farm will be used for the decarbonization of the industry – through the so-called Corporate Power Purchase Agreements (CPPAs). For the project, long-term power purchase agreements were concluded with the companies Covestro, Amazon, the Energie-Handels-Gesellschaft/REWE Group, as well as BASF and Google.

Shares for Borkum Riffgrund 3 were also sold to an institutional investor well before construction. In October 2021, Nuveen signed an agreement with Glennmont Partners to sell 50 percent of the shares in Borkum Riffgrund 3.

Jörg Kubitza, Managing Director of Ørsted in Germany, said: ”With Borkum Riffgrund 3 we are setting completely new standards for our industry – both in terms of capacity and business model. The project is being built as the first offshore wind farm in Germany to be awarded in the offshore wind tenders with a bid of 0 cents per MWh. With long-term power purchase agreements, we can directly support our corporate customers in their decarbonization. This is only possible on this scale using renewable energies through offshore wind energy.”

Borkum Riffgrund 3 will also be the largest offshore wind farm in Germany to date.

The foundations, which are up to 100 meters long and weigh up to 1,500 tons, are manufactured by Steelwind in Nordenham and in Bladt Industries A/S’s Lindø factory in Denmark.

Next year, the 11-megawatt SG 11.0-200 DD offshore wind turbines will be installed on the foundations for the first time in Germany.

Borkum Riffgrund 3 will be Ørsted’s first wind farm in Germany to be built without an offshore substation. The new connection concept, which is being implemented together with the transmission system operator TenneT, instead provides for a direct connection of the wind turbines using 66 kV connection cables to TenneT’s DolWin epsilon offshore converter platform.