French energy major TotalEnergies and German energy group Energie Baden-Württemberg (EnBW) have been announced as winners of the offshore wind auction for licenses in the German North Sea. TotalEnergies won its concession as a shareholder of Offshore Wind One. The other partner in Offshore Wind One was RWE which decided to withdraw at the last minute. RWE claimed that the 1.5GW offshore wind lease that it secured alongside TotalEnergies did not meet the company’s criteria for economically viable investments. As a result, TotalEnergies will develop the project on its own while RWE does not have to make any payments to the German Federal Network Agency (Bundesnetzagentur) for the lease. The lease won by TotalEnergies was awarded the contract for the area at a bid value of €1.3m ($1.4m) per MW, totalling almost €2bn ($2.14bn). Located in the North Sea, some 120 km northwest of the German island of Heligoland, the concession covers an area of around 156 sq km. This will enable TotalEnergies to build a 3.5GW offshore wind hub in the German North Sea since it won a 2GW concession off Germany last year. Under the terms of this award, the company will pay the German Federal government €196m in June 2025 at the latest, which will be allocated to marine conservation and the promotion of environmentally friendly fishing. An annual contribution of €88m will also be paid to the electricity transmission system operator in charge of connecting the project for a term of 20 years starting from the commissioning of the site. The concession will run for a term of 25 years, extendable to 35 years. “This marks a new step for the deployment of TotalEnergies integrated power strategy in Germany after the acquisition of Quadra Energy, one of the top three aggregators of renewable electricity production and Kyon Energy, a prominent developer of battery storage solutions,” said Stéphane Michel, president of gas, renewables, and power at TotalEnergies. The second concession went to EnBW which will develop a 1GW offshore wind farm some 120 km northwest of Heligoland in 2031 and will cover the electricity needs of 1.35m households. The German utility will pay a total of €1.1bn ($1.18bn) for the lease rights. EnBW plans to sell much of the electricity produced by the offshore wind farm to industrial customers in the future through power purchase agreements. “Winning the auction represents another important milestone in the restructuring of our generation portfolio. We want to expand renewable energy capacity to between 10 and 11.5GW by 2030 and be a climate-neutral company by 2035. To this end, we are investing a total of €40bn in the energy transition by 2030, around a third of our total investment alone in the construction of wind farms and solar parks as well as flexibly controllable and hydrogen-ready gas power plants,” said EnBW CEO Georg Stamatelopoulos. The company already operates four offshore wind farms off the German coast. It is also building the ‘He Dreiht’ project in the North Sea which will be Germany’s largest offshore wind farm to be built without state funding. googletag.cmd.push(function() { googletag.display('div-gpt-ad-1_95_0_1_2'); }); TagsFrance Germany Offshore Wind